Backup everything.. twice, even!

By Joshua Flail

Everybody knows that backing up your stuff is important. But how you backup files, and where you store them is equally as important. Accidents happen. Backups fail. It’s an inevitability, even for the bright minds at Pixar Animation Studios.

Yep, it can happen to anyone, and at anytime… usually a pretty critical time. That’s why we backup everything twice, on both an image and file level, using two different systems. This ensures that if one backup service crashes or bugs out, the other is still making sure your files are safely and securely stored offsite.

You can’t predict when something is gonna go wrong, but you can be prepared for it. Ripple can help you be ready for when the you know what hits the fan.

Comments 0

(Not so) Stupid Siri Trick

By Homer Bartlett

So you found an iPhone 4S and being the honest responsible adult you are you want to get it back to its owner, but the owner has (smartly) enabled the lock screen and you can’t get into it to find out who owns it. What to do?

Siri to the rescue! Hold down the home button until Siri asks what she can help you with, then say “who am I?” Siri will respond with something like what you see here, and if the owner’s contact record contains a phone number or email address, voila!

Comments 0

Twitter Passwords Leaked #dontpanic

By Joshua Flail

Hey all you users of that popular social media application that begins with a ‘T’ and ends with ‘witter’, we suggest you take the time today to make a password change. As mentioned in here, over 50,000 Twitter accounts were compromised earlier this week when corresponding email addresses and passwords were posted to Pastebin. Fortunately, further investigation showed 20,000 of those accounts to be duplicates, spam bots, or inactive users. But that’s not to say that your email address and password isn’t one of the 30,000 active accounts on the list.

So, for safety’s sake, we highly recommend you log in and change that password. Oh, and while you’re at it, you might wanna take the time to think about the best method for password creation (and storage). We recommend using phrases (sentences complete with capitalization, spaces, and punctuation) instead of any letter and number combinations. Using phrases makes it a lot harder for someone to hack your account, and at the same time they’re easier for you to remember. Just make sure you don’t use that phrase for every site or application, and change it every once in awhile.

In case you’re wondering, my Twitter password phrase is Please, hack my account!

Comments 0

Ripple Improvement Pairings

By Joshua Flail

For a little over a two months now, Ripplers have been pairing off each week and brainstorming about ways to improve the efficiency of our processes. In addition, each pairing is assigned a particular client and asked to come up with at least one way to better their IT systems. It could be something as simple as labeling a wiring closet, or as complex as retiring a seldom used in-house server and migrating them to cloud storage to save some cash. But no matter the complexity of the solution, things get done. We know, because we’ve been using LessMeeting to keep track.

Comments 1

Helping People, Not Computers

By Chris Moody

Being responsible for someone’s technical needs changes you. And it can be for the good or ill, depending on your temperament, threshold for stress, troubleshooting skills and, above all else, how you feel about people.

Some IT folks become jaded after years of doing technical support. It could be because they’ve seen and heard the same things for years and feel like they’re just spinning their wheels. Or it might come from an inability to relate to the people they’re helping. Over the years, I’ve found that what works for me is taking a moment to evaluate the experience after each case. I’ll often get off of a call and wonder: Did I just sound like a horse’s bum asking you to reboot? Did I sound jaded? continue reading

Comments 0

Social Networking for Business

By Joshua Flail

Being in a Results-Only Work Environment company means that the lines of communication between coworkers must always be open, particularly when people are working both in and outside the office. Ripplers not only have to stay in communication with each other, but we’re always aiming to improve our processes for finding information and solving problems.

Part of how we do that is by using applications that inform other Ripplers of where we are, what we’re working on, and when we’re done for the day. One tool we’ve really taken to is the social networking application Yammer.

Comments 0

Adobe Improves Software Subscription Model

By Homer Bartlett

We mentioned Adobe’s push into the subscription pricing model when they released Creative Suite 5.5. At the time they also announced that they were going to be releasing new full releases every 18 months and half releases every 9 months, and true to their word this month they announced Creative Suite 6. With CS 6 they have also announced Adobe Creative Cloud, which I think is one of the best developments to come out of Adobe since they added transparency to Illustrator.

Comments 0

Personal SEO

By Mike Landman

Most companies are aware by now that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) exists and that they should probably try to do something about getting their companies as well-ranked as possible. For business, there are plenty of SEO firms and inbound marketing tools to chose from.

But what about for people? Do you see what you want to see when people search for you personally? Does your LinkedIn profile show up? Your website? Or do people find some other person or worse yet, inaccurate information? continue reading

Comments 0

WiFi for Business

By Homer Bartlett

Eight to ten years ago many businesses added WiFi networks to their offices using what was ubiquitous at the time. Namely, inexpensive access points like the Linksys WAP54G (don’t take that the wrong way, it’s a great WAP and we still have love for this venerable old workhorse). Many people had similar devices installed at home, and since they worked fine there, well why not the office too? And for most folks they did work fine at the office. If you had 30 people in the office but only 3 of them had laptops, an inexpensive consumer-grade wireless access point could keep up just fine.

Fast forward to 2012 and these days most small businesses (well the majority of small businesses we service anyway) run predominantly on laptops. Some are 100% laptops, with no desktop computers in sight. Heck some of our clients don’t have assigned desks, they just have work spaces that employees float into and out of, and in places like that everyone is all wireless, all the time.

Comments 0

Using LastPass To Manage Passwords

By Joshua Flail

A few months ago, I realized that being a marketing coordinator for Ripple requires signing up for a ton of sites and web apps. And all of those require user names and passwords. Passwords which should be unique to each site. Before my days in IT, I was blissfully ignorant of the dangers of repeating passwords, and had no clue as to how one should go about creating the best password. Luckily, despite my ignorance, I was never the victim of a hacked account or, much worse, identity fraud. Still, I changed my ways once I got the lowdown on password creation from my fellow Ripplers. But now I had to manage all of these long, somewhat forgettable passwords and phrases I use on a daily basis.

Comments 0

Subscribe to our mailing list