Author: gec

I have a Virtual Machine running Ubuntu Linux that I use for testing purposes, but it recently started popping up this message saying “Pending Update of Snap-Store, Close the App to Avoid Disruption.”

No matter what I thought I closed correctly or how many times I rebooted the VM, the error message still came back.

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In my personal life, I regularly have people come up to me and ask “Why does my IT guy always tell me to reboot before calling him?” My reply, often times, is simply: because it works.

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These days, many phones, in particular iPhones, will shoot photographs in raw or in High Efficiency Image File formats. But when those files are emailed to Windows computers, sometimes they just can’t be easily opened.

Installing this free extension from Microsoft should allow your computer to open these files natively in the Windows “Photos” app.

This goes hand-in-hand with the Free HEVC extension for playing videos.

Microsoft offers the HEVC Video Extension necessary to play videos from iPhone users on their store, but they often try to charge a dollar for it. Just $0.99, in fact! In many cases, I don’t mind spending a dollar, and I encourage others to do the same. But sometimes you’re just in a pinch and you don’t have your credit card on file, or you aren’t logged in to your normal Microsoft account and it’s just a pain.

Have no fear! Microsoft also provides a link in the Microsoft store where you can download the HEVC Video Extension completely free of charge.

Why are there two, and why does this link exist?

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Seemingly out of nowhere after literally over a decade of using Spamhaus with no issues, people were having issues sending to us. Their emails were getting flagged as spam – or at least so it would appear to them – they were receiving rejection notices saying that our email server rejected their message as spam. When I combed through our server logs, I noticed the error message actually seemed to indicate that the spamhaus service was unavailable and that’s why it was rejecting mail:

Remote Server returned '550 5.7.350 Remote server returned message detected as spam -> 554 5.7.1 Service unavailable; Client host [40.92.21.67] blocked using sbl.spamhaus.org'

You’ll notice it says “detected as spam” but it also does specifically say: “service unavailable.” So what gives?

Well, thankfully, the geniuses over at MXRoute.com recently posted an article and have asked for help spreading awareness of an issue, so that’s precisely what I’m here to do. Spamhaus has made the horrible decision to no longer accept DNS requests from the most common DNS servers. In other words, if your mail server is configured to use something like Google’s 8.8.8.8, or Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1, there’s a good chance that your request is simply going to get rejected. This, in turn, will cause your server to receive a “service unavailable” message like the one above, which will force it to send a rejection notice to the original sender.

Why was I impacted by this “seemingly out of nowhere?” Because I had recently switched my DNS settings to use 1.1.1.1. Surprise!

You can fix this quickly by switching, painful as it may seem, to your local ISP’s normal DNS entries, or there are ways you can see if you can have your server’s IP address added to a sort of approved list for low volume senders.

I’ve never been much of an Apple guy. The only Apple product I’ve personally owned was a used Mac Mini that I bought just so I could be a little more knowledgeable about helping people troubleshoot Mac problems. But when the European Union said that Apple had to ditch their custom charging port and make it “Common Charger” USB-C port, I feel like Apple missed a golden opportunity.

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I recently ran in to a VERY frustrating issue trying to get a Windows 10 computer to boot in to safe mode when the main OS kept freezing up. Modern Windows will “fall back” to safe mode if it detects problems booting, otherwise you’re supposed to enter a hidden boot menu from inside the operating system. But if the OS boots normally and then locks up, it can be difficult to boot to safe mode.

Unlike the olden days of Windows 95 you can’t press F5, or Windows XP just press F8 – so I decided to bring a more thorough boot menu BACK to modern Windows on all my personal computers. This can be done through the Boot Configuration Data editor tool, BCDEdit.

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Reddit user “winitgc” asked the question “Why do people hate Windows 10?” And it struck me as an interesting prompt. Mostly because I don’t think of Windows 10 as being so hated. But the more I thought it through, I realized they were right. And I think I realized why. So, I answered:

Let’s ignore the “pre-NT” days (Windows 9x/Me) and just consider Windows XP as the birth of home computing for the masses. XP was ‘basically’ the primary operating system from 2001 to 2007.

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Being “the tech guy” in my circle of friends and acquaintances, I’m often approached whenever someone is searching for a laptop or desktop. While everyone’s needs are different, it’s become easier than ever to help someone by giving just a few pointers of what to look for when shopping for a computer.

The QUICKEST SINGLE piece of advice I can give someone is: shop around your CPU of choice. Most of the other stuff will fall in to place. Selecting a good CPU, the manufacturer is likely to build around it with similarly good parts. You could basically build a computer in your mind by searching for just the bolded words in the article below. That being said, here’s what all of those little bits and pieces might mean…

CPU

The CPU is the most important part of a computer. The brain of it all, the Central Processing Unit. Everything else could be top of the line, but if you skimp on the CPU, you’re GOING to notice the bottle neck and frustrating slowness. Luckily, with 2021 naming conventions, it’s fairly easy to find a CPU that will be alright.

Intel’s i3/i5/i7/i9 Processors are excellent choices, as is anything in AMD’s “Ryzen” series. The higher the number, the more performance you can expect out of it, but even in the case of the lowest tier Intel i3’s, for 95% of people’s use cases, any of these processors are going to handle the workload you’re going to throw at it.

The ones to avoid are Intel Celeron and Pentium processors, or AMD APU’s. In fairness, mid-tier products like the “Pentium Gold” series are head and shoulders above their earlier models, but I definitely think it was sneaky of Intel to play on the good-will and fond memories of the “Pentium” name from the late 90’s and sell a crappy processor to unsuspecting consumers based on name-recognition.

Storage

Do you need a lot of storage space? Are you editing videos? Archiving DECADES worth of photos? Storage is often measured in a high number of “Gigabytes” (GB) or sometimes even Terabytes (TB) these days. You might see a computer with 750GB, or 1, or 2 TB of space on a Hard Disk Drive, or an HDD.

But, for a similar price, you may find a smaller but much, much faster Solid State Drive, or SSD. These are still often 120, 250, or even 500GB in size in 2021, but as mentioned, you will find them to be FAR faster than a traditional HDD. I also find that they give me peace of mind because that’s one less moving part (there’s no “spinning magnetic platter” inside of a Solid State drive).

If you aren’t planning on storing or handling a lot of data at any given time, a smaller but faster SSD is undoubtedly the way to go.

Memory

Random Access Memory, RAM, or these days just “Memory” is the temporary storage used that allows your computer to multi-task more efficiently. This is also measured in Gigabytes, but is often just a one or two-digit number. More is always better, but anything over 32GB is complete overkill for 99% of people.

Some people will look at the amount of memory that their computer uses and cry out that they need more. But modern computers are designed to specifically take advantage of as much memory as you can give them, they’re also very well optimized to function with limited resources. I currently have computers with anywhere from 2GB to 32GB of memory. I recommend about 8 GB for contemporary computing in 2021, but if you can get a good deal on 16 GB, then take advantage of it! If a computer only has 4GB of memory, you MIGHT feel the pinch, but if it fits your budget, I wouldn’t be too terribly worried.

Geek note: because memory is measured in base 2, it doubles symmetrically and is usually available at size intervals such as 2GB, 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB. Though other sizes, like 6GB, 12GB, etc… are sometimes available.

Discrete Graphics

Okay, maybe you plan on doing some gaming on this laptop? If that’s the case, you’re going to want a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). The trouble is, a good GPU can literally DOUBLE the price of a computer. You probably won’t find a computer with a discrete GPU for under $600, and even those will be on the very low end of the spectrum. These will typically be Radeon or GeForce series GPUs, mentioned in the specs of the computer, and coming from companies such as AMD and Nvidia.

But the good news is, integrated graphics like those from Intel, have come a long way. In other words, if you aren’t planning on gaming or rendering lots of long videos, you basically don’t need to worry about “graphics.” Even if the “gaming” is more geared toward a young child who will be playing Roblox or Minecraft, they might be okay for now. Intel has promised a refresh in the near future making their Integrated graphics closer to the level of the discrete graphics chips (with their “Evo” and “Xe Graphics” badging), but I’ll believe that when I see the results.

Operating System

Windows? Chrome OS? Mac OS? Linux?

Windows is up to version 10, these days, and Windows 10 gets revised about twice a year. It is designed to feel familiar if you’re coming from an older computer, and is far and away the most common computer operating system for desktops and laptops.

People often look at Chromebooks because they are generally made to be more affordable. The disadvantage is that they are designed to do a lot of things in “the cloud.” While those offerings get more and more powerful every day, they can be a little abstract for some people. You’re not going to buy a Chromebook and install Microsoft Office on it. Or Quickbooks. Or many other programs you might be used to using. But if you primarily spend your time on the web and use Google Docs, YouTube, and Facebook and not much else, you might be fine with a Chromebook!

Linux laptops are few and far between, so you don’t need to worry much about that, and Mac OS is, of course, only available on Apple hardware, so it will come with a price tag (I believe their lowest priced laptop begins at $999), but if you’re a Mac user, you already know what you want! ?

Brands

In 2021, laptop manufacturing has come a long way. It’s all about finding the features you want and like. High enough quality screen, thin and light, aluminum body or plastic body, keyboards that light up, etc… find what you like and go for it!

So I was debating whether or not I should write a post similar to this for a while, now… it’s a funny story, and not too long, but it doesn’t exactly paint me in my best light. But, then again, I have already admitted to pulling one over on a cellular carrier, so why not cop to some of the other silly shenanigans I pulled in my younger years?

Also reaffirming my decision to do this, the owner of this particular studio who developed the game I’m about to talk about has recently outed himself on Twitter with some blatantly racist and bigoted remarks, so I don’t feel as bad for what I did. More importantly, as you’re about to learn, I didn’t really DO anything nefarious!

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What kind of I.T. person are you? Sometimes where you work defines a lot of the characteristics of what you do in your job. Sometimes the type of person you are decides those factors for you, as well. Today I’m going to walk down memory lane throughout my career, and in this essay-length blog post, I’ll highlight a few lessons I’ve learned along the way.

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Look. On this blog, I do what I want. And what I want is to follow up on my 2018 post: “Is Facebook listening to you?”

Part 1: is it possible?

Yes. Definitively, unequivocally, absolutely, positively, it IS entirely technically possible for Facebook to listen in on your conversations.

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If you don’t like using the Media Creation Tool, there is a way that you can actually download the ISO files straight from Microsoft’s servers.

If you want to download the Windows 10 ISO file DIRECTLY from Microsoft’s servers, you can do so by getting the URL from a mobile device: I simply used the Microsoft Edge browser on Android (any mobile browser on any platform will work) to visit https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10ISO and request links to an ISO in my language. If you download the ISO files from anywhere else, be sure to verify the their SHA-256 checksums!

Zoom has grown exponentially in a short amount of time. And although it’s not my favorite app, due to its share of issues, it is admittedly already getting better. But some users are running into errors the first time they try to join a meeting. What’s going on?

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Your current public IP address is:

[show_ip]

This page is quickly and easily accessible via https://nuangel.net/ip or https://nuserv.net/ip

This page simply detects and shows your public facing IP address (the IP address of your internet connection). It does not show the local network IP address of your computer, for instance, if your computer is on a corporate network.

In most cases, the IP address you’re seeing above is actually the IP address of your Modem/Router provided by your ISP (Verizon, Comcast, Spectrum, etc…).

A Look Back at the Last Decade

In December, I didn’t end up writing an article of any kind. I thought I knew what I wanted to write, I hinted at it, but then I found other blogs discussing it (and I feel getting it wrong) and I figured my little fan theory mentioned in a previous post wasn’t even worth writing about. It’s just not my style or anything I’ve ever been invested in. What I AM invested in is me! I’ve been focusing on myself since my motorcycle accident and not worrying about fictional deadlines for videos that will get 5 views, and blog posts 3 people will read. I reminded myself that this website is an outlet for me, not a “job” of any kind. It’s a hobby. And it should remain that way. But I digress.

After all of that, I just wanted to call out this ZDNet article about “The End of Windows 7” being “the end of the PC era.

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