The Household Chronicle

Practical guidance, without the sales pitch.

A corner of the house

Technology

Practical guidance, without the sales pitch.

5 pieces gathered here

  1. A ring of keys and a magnetic access fob lying on a shop counter beside an empty plastic tool tray
    The Accounts That Outlive an Employee: Closing Out Access Without Missing AnythingThe obvious accounts get closed on the last day. The ones that cause trouble are the shared logins and the access that never looked like a login at all.
  2. An open desk drawer holding two external hard drives and a coiled USB cable
    Sync, an External Drive, or an Off-Site Copy: What Each One Saves You FromThe three common arrangements protect against three different failures, and most households run the one that protects against the failure least likely to happen.
  3. An external hard drive on a desk with its cable coiled beside a closed laptop and a small notebook
    Copied, Stored, and Never Restored: Turning an Assumed Backup Into a Tested OneA backup that has never been restored from is a belief about a set of files, and the belief is wrong often enough that testing it is the whole exercise.
  4. A stack of unopened mail on a hall table with one plain envelope pulled slightly out from the middle of the pile
    A Breach Notification Letter Tells You Less Than It Seems and Still Requires ActionThe letter arrives weeks after the event, in careful language, and is required by law rather than written to inform. Reading it properly takes about ten minutes.
  5. A closed laptop on a kitchen table with a small hardware security key resting on the lid beside a set of house keys
    Which Password Rules Were Quietly Retired, and What Replaced Them in Practice?Several rules that everybody learned about passwords are no longer recommended by the people who originally recommended them, and the reversals were not announced.