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World password day is upon us again and entering its eight year! I want to take some time not just to talk about passwords but also the information that sits behind. During the first half of 2021 I’ve been called to numerous users struggling to access their email accounts. The issue was no fault of their own and stemmed from email and online services providers becoming more sensitive to perceived suspicious activity. The resolution should be simple, validate the account and confirm their identity through one of their recovery methods. This will normally involve a reset link to their email or a secure code sent via text message. At this point I realise that the user has had their account for some time and failed to keep their account recovery information current!

Two Factor Authentication

Online security is the key to keeping your accounts protected and it is now clear that passwords are just not enough to keep your data safe. This fact highlighted by my clients plight, they had their password but yet they were still denied access to their data.

As more of our important data is kept online and with password leaks and website hacks becoming more common, additional means are needed to keep hackers out. In response, almost all major online service providers now require or implement something called two factor authentication (2FA). Two factor authentication is essentially a way to double check who you are and confirm that you are the genuine owner of your account. The most common method is to require both a password and verification by text message or email. Some larger technology firms require even more secure methods such as Microsoft’s Authenticator App that can be downloaded on to your mobile and utilise your fingerprint or phone pin number. In March 2020 the EU introduced legislation that required banks and finance institutions to implement two factor authentication to reduce fraud and data breaches. Google themselves recently improved their two factor authentication system requiring it by default on all new user accounts.

Update your recovery information

Banking and Utility accounts can normally be updated easily through a quick call to the provider, but with free services like most email accounts and online only services this may not possible. Your recovery information is the only means to get you back in and access your data. With a couple of my customers we were lucky and still had access to their emails, this provided enough information to recover their accounts. Two users still had their home telephone listed as a recovery number, these were allowed in the distant past but no longer work with Microsoft’s password recovery system. In both cases we were able to update them but both had to wait the 30-day recovery period and were unable to send or receive messages for nearly a month. One final user was in a real bind and without any method to recover their account, I personally thought all was lost but by some miracle they were able to visit a Microsoft store in person and they restored everything.

So what can be done to help? I’ve included our list of tips to keep your account up to date and make sure you can get back in should things go wrong.

Turn on two factor authentication – Most services require it but turning it on now can help you get ahead and keep your account secure. This guide by Wired can be very helpful to give you some more information and point you in the right direction.

Check your account reset information fairly regularly – This is fairly easy to do and I have included the help links for a few of the most common account types below;

• Apple Accounts – Click here
• Google Accounts – Click here
• Yahoo Accounts – Click here
• Microsoft Accounts – Click here

Update account recovery information when necessary – Changing your mobile number or email address? It is critical that you visit each of your other accounts and update the recovery information as quickly as possible. Once you have your new number or email, log into each account and add your new information.

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The Videos

If you are keen to just see the camera recordings then please checkout and follow our YouTube channel, linked below. Hedgehog Camera

Background

We are very fortunate that our home backs on to a fabulous little nature reserve. With our latest garden renovation, I was keen to make sure our garden is not only accessible to wildlife but is also the perfect habitat for them to thrive. I was especially keen to build in some form of hedgehog friendly area for our cute snuffling friends. Coupled with this I wanted to make sure that any changes we made would still allow hedgehogs to easily navigate our garden, so building 6ft high fences and concrete barriers were definitely off the list!

The internet is a rich mine of information for those wanting to look after hedgehogs in their garden – the brilliantly named Hedgehog Street and The Hedgehog Preservation Society to name a couple. As a starting point, we decided to build a hedgehog box and, with my techy head firmly on my shoulders, a box that could integrate some form of camera inside.

The Build

The box itself was built using the instructions from The Wildlife Trust – Build a hedgehog house. The guide is easy to follow and could be part of a fun project with the kids too! For the wood, we found an 18mm hardwood plywood sheet in our local hardware shop that did the trick. With our materials assembled, we set about making our very own jigsaw puzzle.

The construction was straightforward – a few screws here and there and we were built! The only slightly tricky bit was attaching the hinged lid to the box itself, so a few extra helping hands would have been good! Having had the box for a little while now, I feel that this could better be described as a feeding station, as it is quite big for a small hedgehog. Come Autumn the hedgehog would have to collate a whole tree’s worth of leaves to make our box a cosy hibernation spot, but I live in hope this may still happen!

Where does it go?

Our next dilemma was where to locate our hedgehog residence. Nature had already fortunately helped us here with the prevailing westerly winds having kindly destroyed a small part of the fence, which coincidentally was big enough for one of our spiky friends to fit through. The gap in the fence sat next to a quiet spot in the back left corner of the garden so our decision was made. Not wanting our box to stick out like a sore thumb, I also spent a little time covering it with the various garden debris as camouflage.

At this point our wildlife camera had been placed on order and not wanting to keep our hedgehogs waiting, we decided to put the box out anyway. As a little encouragement (bribery), we prepped it with a small feeding dish loaded with some tasty hedgehog food, placed a water bowl just outside the box and waited….

I’m going to cover the technical side of the camera box in the next article, including the equipment we used and how we set it up for recording and streaming to YouTube.

The post Fun with Tech – Hedgehog Box appeared first on Pikemere Web Services.

Our initial checks in the event logs revealed a disappointingly generic error with no real insight. We attempted the usual re installation steps but with no success. After chatting with our client again they mentioned that the whole issue coincided with the upload of files to their Personal Vault, a specially encrypted secure portion of their OneDrive storage.

This presented a big head-ache as the program crashed so quickly, while we could unlock the vault, it crashed as quickly as we could load it up. But my suspicions were raised, was it possible a corrupt or malformed file had been included in the upload?

Not really seeing any easy way forward I turned to Microsoft Chat support to make sure we hadn’t missed something simple. This was fruitless and left us in despair as their only recommendation, to recreate the users Windows account and profile entirely, would incur a huge amount of effort. We battled on and continued to dig deeper. The following log file gave us a number of errors that suggested an issue with a file name, steeling my thoughts that a bad file was causing our issue.

C:\Users\**User Profile Name**\AppData\Local\Microsoft\OneDrive\logs

A breakthrough! Eventually we discovered that while you could not operate the Personal Vault while offline, you could unlock the vault and very quickly disable or unplug the Internet. This left us with the vault open for 15 minutes and without the program crashing. We quickly moved the files out of the Vault to a safe location and tried again. Sadly this initial attempt failed but we persevered and after reinstalling once more our Vault issue was resolved! We concluded that OneDrive must maintain a list of files to be uploaded and only once we’d uninstalled it and cleared that list would the program operate correctly. To recap, to resolve the issue we did the following

1. Restart OneDrive from the start menu icon
2. Immediately click on the tray icon and click to unlock the vault
3. Enter the pin code form your mobile phone to complete the unlock
4. Immediately after the unlock has completed, disconnect your internet connection
5. Move the suspected bad files or move all of them for certainty. Its very important to move than and not simply copy them.
6. Reconnect your Internet connection
7. Uninstall and reinstall OneDrive

The post Microsoft One Drive Personal Vault Problems appeared first on Pikemere Web Services.

Apart from in very rare circumstances, we are sadly unable to offer home call outs during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Our website services are unaffected. Customers looking for website changes can send them over as normal.

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32GB hard disk drives. We are mainly concerned here with Windows 10’s ability to operate and update on such a small drive and offer a note of caution on their purchase. We have experienced a number of issues with these machines and if you are short of time we would simply recommend you choose a model with 64GB or more. For those who are looking into one of these machines, it would be wise to consider our pointers below;

For this article we are focusing on those laptops using Windows 10, specifically those with

Issue 1 – Definition

Almost all manufacturers of hard disk drives today define a gigabyte (GB) as 1000 megabytes and not, as it should be, 1024 megabytes. Once this is taken into account, your 32GB hard disk drive will only be 30.5GB. While this does apply to all hard disk drives, it becomes more of an issue when space is tight.

Issue 2 – System Requirements

Microsoft’s system requirements for Windows 10 64-bit suggest 20GB of available space to install and operate the operating system. Using this 20GB figure as a rough guide (many Windows folders will be much larger), you still need to factor in space on top for any applications, files or updates that you may require. For example, if you simply want to install Microsoft Office, for the authoring of letters, spreadsheets, etc, Microsoft’s requirements state that the installation needs 3GB. Adding to that your printer software, anti-virus, additional web browsers, the 30GB of space available starts to become very squeezed. Just simply turning the machine on and adding your favourite programs could leave you with only 5GB of storage space for your files.

Issue 3 – Windows Updates

The real elephant in the room and what is becoming a major sticking point for most users is the Windows Update process. Microsoft releases Windows updates on a monthly basis and, as of Windows 10, they provide larger feature updates on a 6-12 month basis. While the smaller monthly updates can mount up and consume a fair amount of disk space alone, these larger feature updates prove to be the real issue.

There are two main problems with these feature updates. Primarily, they are usually huge. The most recent feature update, the Fall Creators Update, was over 4GB to download. In addition to this, to allow users to roll back these larger updates, the process copies the older Windows directory and a number of other files to a temporary location in case of problems. Due to this, the updates will often require more than 8GB of space before they will even start. Bearing in mind what we discussed before, Windows and our programs could, at a minimum, consume about 25GB of our 30.5 GB and the tiny drive is really going to struggle. Laptops can become really irksome when they load to a screen requesting you to update, only to be told there isn’t enough space!

The inability to update to these newer releases become a major issue the longer they are left. Microsoft’s primary support cycle for each release of Windows 10 is only around three years. If you are stuck without the space to upgrade, after three years the version of Windows will become less secure and you’ll miss out on any new features and fixes.

Issue 4 – Upgradeability

In short, the majority of 32GB machines will usually have their hard drives physically soldered onto the motherboard, upgrading them is not an option. To combat this issue, the manufacturers often add memory card and USB slots that will allow you to add additional storage space for files, but these will not help to upgrade the size of the primary hard disk.

In summary, we would recommend that anyone seriously looking at a machine in this range to seriously look to buy a 64GB variant and steer clear of any of the machines limited to 32GB.

Special thanks to Photo by Picsaf Com from Pexels

The post Windows 10 Laptops – Is 32 GB Enough Space? appeared first on Pikemere Web Services.

For this example I’m using some very simple code;

$pdfcontent = '
<pre>
<h1>This, believe it or not, is content</h1>
</pre>
';
$pdfname = 'PikemereTest.pdf';

$snappy = App::make('snappy.pdf');
$snappy->setOption('page-width', 200);
$snappy->setOption('page-height', 287);
$snappy->generateFromHtml($pdfcontent , 'C:\xampp\htdocs\pikemere\public\\' . $pdfname);

The code above loads a bite sized chunk of HTML into our $pdfcontent variable and starts the creation of the PDF file and outputs the file to our laravel public folder. To this we need to add the code to put our header into place, shown by the code below, which can easily be added to the existing SetOptions.
$snappy->setOption('header-html', 'http://www.pikemere.co.uk/testerpdf.html');

That option will then add your HTML header in place. One very important note here is that the HTML file that you stipulate must have its DOCTYPE set at the start of the file.
To add a footer you can simply add the following code to your setOptions
$snappy->setOption('footer-html', 'http://www.pikemere.co.uk/testerpdf.html');

That really is it! Just make sure you have your DOCTYPE in place and all should work perfectly.
The post Adding Headers and Footers to Snappy PDF in Laravel appeared first on Pikemere Web Services.
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		https://www.pikemere.co.uk/microsoft-ending-support-for-outlook-email-in-windows-live-mail/
		
		
		Mon, 06 Jun 2016 19:49:15 +0000
				
		
		http://design.pikemere.co.uk/pikemere/?p=337

					A number of people have contacted me recently to ask about a recent email from Microsoft, suggesting that their outlook/hotmail/msn/live email would soon stop working with Windows Live Mail. After having only just finished updating a number of PC’s with a recent patch I was a little perplexed. Suspecting a phishing

The post Microsoft ending support for Outlook email in Windows Live Mail appeared first on Pikemere Web Services.
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										A number of people have contacted me recently to ask about a recent email from Microsoft, suggesting that their outlook/hotmail/msn/live email would soon stop working with Windows Live Mail. After having only just finished updating a number of PC’s with a recent patch I was a little perplexed. Suspecting a phishing email was doing the rounds I had a quick look at the email and it is … sadly…. genuine. As of the 30th June 2016 users will no longer be able to access their outlook email account (any account ending in @outlook.com, @msn.com @msn.co.uk @hotmail.com, @hotmail.co.uk, @live.co.uk and @live.com) through windows live mail.

This is a real pain, as I feel Windows Live Mail is a far superior program to that of the bundled Mail app in Windows 8/8.1 and Windows 10. On the plus side, people will still be able to access their other email accounts that are not hosted by Microsoft through Windows Live Mail. If you have a company or personal email through another firm you are fine to continue using Live Mail.
For those with Microsoft accounts who are still using Windows Live Mail you have four options (the first three suggested by Microsoft and an alternative of ours);

To follow their suggestion and access your email through the Microsoft website. Go to www.outlook.com and sign in using your normal username and password
If you have Windows 8 or 10 you can fire up the Mail App, which can be found on the tiles screen of Windows 8 or the Start Menu of Windows 10. As I mentioned before, the App is quite feature lacking and can be frustrating to use at times if you want to use it for anything but the very basic of functions. It is also plagued by quiet a few bugs and quirks, which we can hope will be sorted out in time.
Microsoft’s final suggestion and only the second option available to Windows 7 users, is to take up the offer of a free, year long subscription to Office 365 personal. The offer can be obtained via this link and is available until 15th October 2016. This would then provide the full fat version of Outlook which can then be used similarly to Windows Live Mail from your desktop. However, once the year long subscription is over you would then be billed £59.99 per year there after.
The final option available is to move on to using another desktop based email package such as Mozilla Thunderbird. This can be downloaded through the following link and can be used in a very similar way to your existing Windows Live Mail program. The user interface is sadly not quite as polished, but it still performs all the usual functions that you have come to expect. However, Microsoft are slowly removing every possible way to access your free email accounts without having to either pay Microsoft money up front or generate some advertising revenue for them, so it may well be that Microsoft stops supporting this at some point soon too.

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