Tech Tips, Tricks, and Techniques
When Levi, our IT SysAdmin, notices a tech question or topic that is brought up frequently, he might choose to answer it here for everyone's benefit.
Password managers are good.
Without a password manager, you either end up using the same or similar passwords everywhere—making it easy to compromise multiple accounts once someone figures out a password—or storing passwords in an insecure manner.
Most web browsers now offer to remember passwords. This is a good start, but it brings about two challenges:
- What if you want your passwords somewhere else? Some systems will syncronise login info, but that requires you to use the same browser on all your devices.
- Often, there's nothing preventing someone from logging in with your saved password if they borrow your device, since the browser doesn't suggest using a master password to unlock the saved passwords. This also means nefarious software could get access to your saved passwords.
This is where a third-party password manager can save the day. They use plugins so that your passwords are accessible in every browser and on every device you might use.
I’ve used several over the years with a partial goal of knowing what's out there, and my personal favourite is Bitwarden.
- Free — with additional paid features, but I don’t use them and I doubt you’d need them either.
- Verifiably secure and trustworthy — their system both will not and cannot allow anyone/thing to see the saved passwords without unlocking with a master password, and they get things audited by an independent third party.
- Works on just about any platform you might be using.
- Passwords are synchronised with a central server (in encrypted form), so when you add/update a password on one device, it’s accessible everywhere else as well.
So if you were to give one a try, I’d start with that one!
The number one thing to remember in the process of buying technology is that you really get what you pay for. That doesn’t necessarily mean that a cheap computer is less powerful or less good, as different brands and product lines within those brands have different priorities.
An "alias" is what we call an email address that does not have an inbox associated with it, but it gets delivered to another email address. You could also call this a forwarder. We use aliases for, among other things, facilitators, so they can have first.last@edmonton.holyhouse.ca end up in their first.last@gilbertineinstitute.com inbox. Here's three things you can set up yourself to make things even better!
- Filtering and labelling incoming email
- Sending from an email alias
- Custom signatures for different "from" addresses
Do: Mark junk emails that arrive in your inbox as spam.
Don’t: Delete junk emails that arrive in your inbox.
Do: Regularly check your email’s spam folder (and if you primarily use a desktop app like Outlook or Mail, check at gmail.com as well) for false positives. Make sure to move anything that is not spam into the inbox, so the system can be taught that it was a false positive. I would say to do this at least once a week, due to the urgent nature of some emails sent to us.
Don’t: Delete emails from your spam folder. Removing an email from Spam, whether by deleting it or otherwise, tells the system that it’s not spam! Instead, mark the messages as read and leave them be. Google will remove them automatically after 30 days.
Do: If you’re unsure if an email is spam, as sometimes they can be tricky to tell just from the subject line, open it. It’s better to be sure than to miss out on correctly labelling something and training the system. (Emails in your spam folder on gmail.com will hide the images, for security reasons and so you don’t see something obscene. There’s no technical security risk in just opening an email.
Don’t: Click any links in an email you think is spam. Even if it’s something as innocent as an “unsubscribe” link. Any link-clicking can alert a system designed for sending spam (Yes, it’s a computer doing it, not just a stranger sending emails manually.) that the person checking your email — you! — is more prone to clicking a “bad” link, and thus tell them to direct more of their resources to spamming you. You also risk clicking something that ends up doing bad things to your computer.
Do: Feel free to ask me about specific spam emails or things you notice, as it could alert me to something I’m not aware of and then we can both learn something.
Don’t: Forward suspected spam emails to me or anyone else. Again, this could be seen by the spam-filtering system as a sign that something is not spam, but it also could flag your own account as sending spam.
Here are a few suggested apps for filling out and signing PDF documents while on the go!
iOS
- pdfFiller
- PDF Expert (a bit more advanced/complicated)