technology

Funding has been announced for rural communities and areas in the Columbia Basin—encompassing 5,429 homes—to create access to high-speed Internet. This new multi-year, $82-million project is being funded by the federal and provincial governments, the regional districts of Central Kootenay, Columbia Shuswap, Kootenay Boundary, East Kootenay and Columbia Basin Trust.

Recently my sister’s Facebook account got hacked. This was an actual hack where she received a malicious link that appeared to come from a friend. The link was allegedly a coupon code. I’m distinguishing here between this type of hack and the duplicate account that alleges to be you. That type of social engineering doesn’t actually affect your account, it’s targeted at your Facebook friends.

Early in my programming career, when I started dealing with customers, a wise marketing fellow passed on this pearl of wisdom, “No one needs a drill. People need holes. Sell the ability to make the holes they need.”

This was in response to my feeble attempt to explain to a non-computer user, which was almost everyone in 1988, why this scheduling software was worth purchasing. I needed to sell the ability not to miss anything important, not the software.

I’m telling you this because web search is dead. It doesn’t know it yet, but it is.

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Event Date(s): 
Friday, June 9, 2023
Time: 
2:00pm - 2:30pm

Learn how to digitize your vinyl records or cassette tapes to have your whole music collection saved digitally. By taking this workshop you will be certified to book time in the Digitization Room to use the audio digitization equipment to digitize personal audio files.

Please bring a memory device (USB drive, memory card) to save any digitized audio files onto.

Visit the Fernie Heritage Library website for more details.

 

 

Event Date(s): 
Thursday, June 8, 2023
Time: 
6:30pm - 7:00pm

Learn how to digitize your old family videos from VHS tapes! By taking this workshop you will be certified to book time in the Digitization Room to use the video digitization equipment to digitize personal video files.

Please bring a memory device (USB drive, memory card) to save any digitized videos onto.

Visit the Fernie Heritage Library website for more details.

 

 

Event Date(s): 
Saturday, June 3, 2023
Time: 
2:00pm - 2:30pm

Learn how to use the new Epson V850 Pro photo scanner to bring your old photographs, slides or film into the the digital age. By taking this workshop you will be certified to book time in the Digitization Room to use the scanner to digitize your personal photographs.

Please bring a memory device (USB drive, memory card) to save any scanned photos onto.

Visit the Fernie Heritage Library website for more details.

 

Recently a friend asked me about managing online access in a house with young children. The internet is an astonishing and amazing thing filled with wonders to fuel your children’s imagination, but also contains stuff that parents will want to manage their access to.

I’ve done a few comparisons over the years in this column, but I don’t think I’ve ever looked at web browsers. When I wrote my first column for the Fernie Fix, Internet Explorer had 84% of the web browser market and Google Chrome wasn’t a thing yet.

Over the last 16 or so years, I’ve written a few columns about good password practices. Logging in to web services with an email address and password has become ubiquitous and good passwords are still key (please don’t reuse them) but I haven’t mentioned the email address side.

It’s November and after a long warm fall a cold winter will soon be upon us. With winter, there is invariably more time spent indoors. And these days indoors means using the internet. Whether you’re on NetFlix, MasterClass, Tik Tok, or the like, a fast internet makes your online experience better.