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Tales Of A Tech has recently undergone some major restructuring and changes.

You may notice that we are now https; https is a great thing for everyone involved here.  This is a Comodo PostiveSSL certificate that I will have for at least a year.  We are also no longer getting our DNS from GoDaddy – we have switched to Namecheap following the nastyness after the N Twitter fiasco.

You may also notice, that https://talesofatech.com no longer brings you directly to the blog.  That is by design!  I plan on doing a lot more than blogging with this website.  To go to the blog, you simply go to https://talesofatech.com/blog.  There are a few other things too!

The Tales Of A Tech store will be up soon (I mean, it’s up now; but there’s very little there at the moment) and you’ll be able to request services such as hardware repairs, troubleshooting, diagnostics, photography, etc along with payment processing for the above.

The Tales Of A Tech project management system is up now, but you won’t see it unless you request a service that requires it (such as web development or what not).

Things are moving forward! 😀

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Things are going to be a little bit wonky for a little while folks. I apologize. Please let me know if you find anything that isn’t working properly.

The switch from talesofatech.com being the blog to blog.talesofatech.com to talesofatech.com/blog has been very messy and I’m 100% certain SOMETHING is broken I just don’t know what it is.

talesofatech.com will be the main page and this blog will be linked to it from there. I also enabled SSL thanks to StartSSL providing me a free certificate until I get a 100% legit one from Comodo through Namecheap when I transition away from GoDaddy next week.

So it’s been a day.  It’s time for afternoon coffee.

Awwwwyis.

Tonight: more cleaning for this weekend as well as some last minute shopping.  Very annoyed that my W2’s aren’t here yet and may not be here until mid-February thanks to the wonderfulness that is multiple payroll systems causing problems.  Deeeeeeeep breaths.

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In case you’re interested in leaving GoDaddy, as I am, following the great debacle of the @N Twitter fiasco, here’s some great information from NameCheap.

Join us for MoveYourDomain Day on February 5th!
On our third annual MoveYourDomain Day, you can transfer your .com, .net, .biz, .org or .info domain for only $3.98*. Special hosting packages will be 75% off!Click here for details.
Guess I’ll be switching to NameCheap then.
They also have a great article on making the transition easy which is available here.

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How I lost my $50,000 Twitter username – The Next Web.

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Today we bring you a story from the ‘holy-shit-this-is-terrifying’ department.  Naoki Hiroshima is the creator of Cocoyon & is also a developer for Echofon. The original story appears here.

All I can say to this, as a GoDaddy customer, is WOW.  Just WOW WOW WOW.

GoDaddy transferred the ownership details to a 3rd Party without confirming the changes with the original account owner, and then refused to transfer them back to the original owner, even after filing a dispute, because they were no longer the owner (because the now-owner/attacker denied the request apparently).

I also hold PayPal highly accountable for this, as that’s how the attacker apparently gained access to the personal information that started the whole chain reaction.  I no longer maintain a Paypal account (at least not one linked to any cards or bank accounts) but I DO use GoDaddy and I am VERY worried about this now.

My domain isn’t worth squat, but the idea that someone could take it away from me is thoroughly depressing.

Good grief.

I entered a support ticket with GoDaddy asking for clarification and a response and I’ll let you know if I get one.

Good luck Naoki.

 

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Changes to LogMeIn Free.

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Coming to us today from the “Let’s-Kill-Off-Our-Brand” department, we bring you horrible, sad news about what was once a killer product.

LogMeIn Free is being turned into a paid-for-only product.  LogMeIn is a service that lets you remote access into machines from a central location.

I guess if you think you’re the only game in town, then this is a great idea.

But since you’re not due to these wonderful things (a short list of LogMeIn Alternatives):

  • TeamViewer (Free for Personal Use)
  • Microsoft Remote Desktop (Free for any use on any machine with Windows Professional or Higher)
  • Mikogo (free for Personal Use)
  • imPcRemote (free for Personal and Business Use, Based on # of machines)

So I guess the question is, why the hell would you do this to yourself?

I love the answers to the FAQ though, typical corporate speak.

1. Q: Why are you making this change?
A: In order to address the evolving needs of our customers, we will be unifying our portfolio of free and premium remote access products into a paid-only offering. We believe this offering to be the best premium desktop, cloud and mobile access experience available in the market today

The real answer: because we can.  Some of you will pay, and some of you will go.  We don’t care.  The bottom line is now, as it always was: Money.

Good grief.  $50 a year for 2 computers when it was free for as many computers as you wanted.

Guess I’m nuking my account.

Time to research the alternates.

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Google bans Chrome extensions purchased to deliver adware | The Verge.

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This is some pretty good news overall.  Google banning extensions that start generating ads and hijacking the browser.  I hope they start doing extensive testing though, because there are other problems to be addressed too.

For example, Chrome Extensions automatically update to the latest version in the background.  NORMALLY, this would be good, as it creates a seamless experience for the end user.  However, this isn’t always the best thing.

A while back, I started using Window Resizer (which has since gone away following the scandal — more) for application and website development testing.  About 3 weeks ago I noticed that my Google searches were redirecting to Ecosia.org and timing out.   A cursory Bing search took me to the developer page saying that they had updated Window Resizer to automatically opt everyone into using EcoLinks.  Ecosia couldn’t handle the load, and began timing out.  This effectively broke Google searching for a LOT of people.

All because the developer thought they knew better than the end user (“Hey this is a great idea and helps everyone so I’m going to make it opt-out instead of opt-in!”).

Needless to say I quickly uninstalled that extension and found another one to use.