Category Archives: Technology

BCC is your contacts’ best friend

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So much of our modern communications technology gets dumped in our laps without instructions other than USE ME! Oh, there’s usually a “help” button on it somewhere – but honestly, how many of you click that, or if you did quickly gave up because it wanted you to  view a bunch of slides/verbiage and your eyes quickly glazed over?

Thus it’s no wonder that you may be accidentally annoying your friends, as well as exposing them and many strangers to spam address collectors and hackers if you don’t know about using BCC.

BCC = “Blind Carbon Copy” (forget that anyone under ~25 may never have seen carbon paper used!). BCC is one of the fields available in the header when you are composing an email (in some applications you may need to expand the header to find it). Any addresses you put into the BCC field will be delivered normally… BUT… unlke using the TO or CC fields,  the recipient will not see any other addresses you put into BCC – hence “blind.”

When sending email to many people, if they do not already know each other (e.g., people who subscribe to your newsletter or who want to be kept informed about your band’s gigs) you do NOT want to send your message in such a way that they all can see each others’ addresses, for several reasons:

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125 technology quick tips (via The Journal of Accountancy)

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Sometimes others do my work for me… This is a great page of handy tips & tricks for lots of common computer applications: Word, Outlook, Excel, Powerpoint, handy websites, iPad, etc. There are even some things I didn’t know, so it’s definitely worth a look!

125 technology quick tips.

Is your password “password”?

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After arriving at my timeshare resort on Saturday afternoon, unloading, shopping, and making coffee jello >;-0 Joann and I sat down with our MacBooks to catch up with the world. The venue provides free wifi, though signal strength depends on how far one’s unit is from the router located in the clubhouse. So I was happy to find our unit was practically on top of it, and I was getting a strong signal on my iPhone…

Until I discovered that while I had an equally strong signal on my MacBook, I was NOT getting out to the internet :( Joann was fine with hers, so I suspected something about my somewhat newer OS (Snow Lion) was different. I found that unlike her I wasn’t getting a domain name server IP in my DHCP config from the router, though it was assigning me an IP (translation – my Mac wasn’t being told where to look in order to translate a web address like “Google.com” into the numeric IP address the guts of the web uses to shuttle data around).

I looked to see what Joann’s Mac was using for a name server IP – it was something I wasn’t expecting – 192.168.1.1, which is the usual address of the wireless router itself. Because I’m a geek, my next thought was to learn more about what was happening on the router. And because I figure it’s always worth a try, I pointed my browser at the router’s address.

This brought up a login window – which was good, because it at least confirmed that I was connected to the router. What was bad (for the resort) was I tried the most simple login combination one would expect for it: username = admin, password = password… and I got in!

Because I wasn’t trying to be evil, I just looked at the settings and logged out. Further tweaking on my Mac eventually resolved the issue. I will stop at the office and attempt to communicate to the staff why they should change the password, so that some less scrupulous person (e.g., a bored teen visitor) won’t mess it up for everyone else.

Moral for you: if any internet-connecting device you buy has a non-unique password that allows it to be configured (e.g., modem/router, smartphone, mifi, game console) change it to prevent losing control of it to a stranger…