technology
One Person’s E-Trash is Another Person’s Treasure
Electronic waste is the fastest-growing segment in an already unsustainable waste stream. While it currently represents only 2% of the trash in landfills, it contributes 70% of overall toxic waste.
We know that we are all dependent on technology. When was the last time you went a day, even an hour, without checking your phone, email, or flicking on the TV?
We also know that hardware has an expiry date, or at least a perceived one. Think about all of the electronic equipment you have owned: what did you do with it when you upgraded?
Maybe you even still have it in a drawer somewhere—most people do. Only 20% of cell phones make it to a recycling facility, so where do the rest of them end up?
While we don’t have the answer, we do have a solution. The Electronic Recycling Association (ERA) specializes in taking unwanted electronics, fixing them up if we can and repurposing them for a surprisingly large secondary market. Much of what we recover is then provided to deserving local charities at no cost, allowing them to better allocate funding to program development as opposed to purchasing computers. We have convenient recycling depots across Canada where anyone can drop off their old cell phones, computers and other electronic items for free. We even have next-day pickup services for larger quantities or corporate donors.
What about data security? A reasonable concern; information security is one of the main reasons electronic equipment does not get recycled or reused. There are numerous solutions to this concern. When you provide equipment to the Electronic Recycling Association, you have the option to select a data destruction process to protect your intellectual property and sensitive information. This can be either data wiping through the use of industry leading data erasure software or physical data destruction using one of our AmeriShred harddrive shredders. We also provide a certificate of destruction that guarantees all data has been completely removed and/or destroyed and is now irretrievable.
You have options when it comes to disposing of your electronics. There are countless recyclers who offer electronic recycling services. Unfortunately, the majority of these organizations are mandated only to recycle electronics rather than consider the reuse potential, thereby eliminating the possibility of reuse by individuals and organizations unable to afford new items. The Electronic Recycling Association’s primary course of action is to evaluate every item we receive for remaining productive life. Once confirmed, items that can be reused are refurbished and prepared to be redeployed into the marketplace. In the event items do not exhibit any reuse potential, they are sent to one of our accredited recycling partners for final recycling.
An extra value-add is the ERA’s commitment to the community. Reusing computers means we have the ability to donate them to deserving organizations operating within our community. Since 2004 the ERA has donated thousands of computers and other electronics to people in need. This activity compels community goodwill and encourages the community at large to be more cognizant about the environmental impact of improperly disposed electronics. By giving the ERA your old equipment, you will be helping us support the community and protect the environment, all while freeing up space in your home or office.
The Electronic Recycling Association accepts nearly all electronics: old desktop and laptop computers, monitors and TVs, servers, cell phones, smart phones, printers and toner cartridges, cables and accessories, stereo equipment, mp3 and other handheld music devices. If you aren’t sure whether or not we accept an item please contact ERA for confirmation.
Our goal is to make it easy for people to get rid of their old computers and other unwanted items. Contact ERA today to arrange a convenient pick-up or drop-off at 1.877.9EWASTE (1.877.939.2783) or info@era.ca, or visit ERA’s website http://www.era.ca
Introducing “The Off Switch V2.15” by teccrab
We live in an age where technology is an important part of our lives. But by staying connected via Computers, Cell Phones, Smart Phones and other Gizmos we often disconnect ourselves from our real lives and sometimes turn into Technology Zombies.
As an Online Marketing Agency we use technology ourselves and understand how important it is to step away once in a while. This is why we would like to invite you to join us for an opportunity to turn off your devices and to talk about better ways to stay connected without disconnecting ourselves from family and friends.
The first thing we will do is to turn off our cell phones, laptops, tablets and other devices. We will even put them away and sit down with pen and paper while talking about our experiences.
To secure that everyone gets the most out of the event we would like to keep groups small. Included in the small $10.00 fee are snacks and drinks available to you during the event.
The first event is planed for Wednesday the 28th January 2015. Upcoming events can be found on our Event List.
We are looking forward to welcomeing you to “The Off Switch V2.15”
Your teccrab team
Online Security Awareness Seminar (OSAS) – May 2014
We would like to invite you to join our Online Security Awareness Seminar (OSAS) which we will offer in the last two weeks of May. Because of recent security problems such as Heartbleed and the issue with the InternetExplorer we dedicated some time to create this seminar for you. We decided to offer our seminar to everyone who is interested in this subject and to make it also as affordable as possible. During the seminar we will go over the following topics:
System at risk
When you are working with a computer and the internet you are probably aware about the risks. Let us talk about those systems.
What kind of risks
Heartbleed demonstrated that even big players can not give you any guarantee to be protected. You also need to protect yourself. Let us give you a little overview and talk about the “What kind of risks” each system is facing.
Security vs Convenience
There has to be a balance between security and usability. How much is to much and what is the minimum? Let us talk about it.
Options to secure your system
Let us give you some example how you can protect your systems. We will talk about technics as well as software that can help you accomplishing this goal.
Password creation
We all use passwords to protect our computer, website, social media network, Bank Account and Email. Let us show you how to generate a more secure password which you can also easy remember, hopefully without leaving a clou to others.
At the end of our presentation we will have of course some time to chat with you and to answer questions you may have.
We are looking forward to welcome you in our Consultation Location in the International Mall at 88 West Pender Street where we will offer the seminar every business day from the 20th until the 30th May 2014 from 6:00pm until 7:00pm. You can find the available dates for the seminar in our event calendar where you can also reserve a spot and pay the $10.00 administration fee. Please be informed that there is an additional fee charged by the event page provider as well as additional fees from your credit card provider.
Please be so kind and arrive 10 minutes before the event so we can start on time.
If you want to learn more about us please visit our website http://teccrab.com
If you like please follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/teccrab
And of course also on Facebook at http://facebook.com/teccrab
Highlights of the year – teccrab inc. 2013 review
It is the time of the year where we take a moment to review the events of the ending year and plan for the upcoming one. I do of course the same for teccrab inc. and would like to use this post to give you a little inside or behind the sense if you want.
In 2013 we manly tried to concentrate on building a solid foundation, to plan ahead and to continue growing. We partnered with incredible talented individuals as well as fantastic organizations around the world. Those partnerships helped us not just to increase the quality of our core business but also providing high class services in areas related to ours. From Hosting to Web Design, from Online Marketing to Public Relations Services to Video Productions and even Event Management, we are able to provide services that can help a business to promote themselves.
In June we opened our consultation location and moved into a part of the office space from INTERNeX. This new location allows us to offer seminars and can function as a studio for video production. It is easy accessible for our clients and has enough room to secure a healthy growth of teccrab inc.
We were very excited to support last year some fantastic app developers who created interesting applications and hope to continue working with them in the future. One of those applications is MyPoi, we posted about this interesting app a couple weeks ago.
Please Read: Introducing MyPoi (My Point of interest)
We also helped new clients such as Craig to establish and to grow an online community and to promote his Blog as well as his related hairstyle business. If you would like to learn more about him please read the following article:
Introducing tangledthoughts.ca
But also clients we started working with in 2012, where teccrab inc. was founded, continued trusting our services and can report a healthy growth. We are of course talking about MarioFit.ca and would like to mention our related Blogpost:
One of our closest partners is of course INTERNeX International Exchange Ltd. In 2013 we produced for and with them many interesting videos for their clients. This project was driven by the PR interns of INTERNeX and our role was mainly production and post production support. The PR interns picked the locations for the INTERNeX Explorer and wrote their own scripts. We filmed them in different locations and provided the footage back to the interns who did the editing in most cases. The video was uploaded to YouTube almost every week. Unfortunately, because of changes in the PR team as well as technical problems, we couldn’t continue producing those videos, but plan to do it again in 2014.
If you like to see some of those videos please check one of the episodes here:
teccrab presents INTERNeX HiGHLIGHTS of the week Ep. 8/2013
But the HiGHLIGHTS of the week and the INTERNeX Explorer are of course not the only projects planed for 2014. We have plans to offer seminars for small businesses as well as individuals who would like to learn more about the benefits and also risks of social media platforms.
A social media management package designed for small businesses and startups is another project on our list. Our plan is to include in this deal a lot of services to get a small business started as well as support to manage and build an audience. We will also make changes in out team, would like to get new people on board to increase our productivity and to secure our known quality. A career page will be available on our website shortly.
We would like to thank everyone who trusted us with their business, everyone who partnered with us and everyone who is considering using our service in the future. We hope you all can look back on 2013 and can at least say to yourself that the experience you gained will help you in the future. For 2014 we wish everyone a fantastic start and look forward to continue or start working with you.
Cheers
R. Simon Kaebe
Founder | CEO
http://facebook.com/teccrab – Facebook
Introducing Anahita a social networking platform
If you have thought about building your own online community for your business or hobby, then Anahita might be the platform you were looking for. Anahita is a minimalist, customizable, and extendable social networking platform. Features can be enabled based on the community you would like to create. You can even build and integrate your own applications and the best is, it is open source, which means you can download it for free.
Joining the Anahita tribe gives you the chance to exchange ideas and experience with other developers. If you want to learn more about Anahita please follow this link:
http://www.getanahita.com
ArcanEngine – Build & 3D Print One-Of-A-Kind Tabletop Minis
If you are a fan of Tabletop games then this is a Kickstarter project you don’t want to miss. What Zach Hill from ArcanEngine, a company located in Langley Canada, is offering is a platform that allows you to create your own miniature and get it 3D printed. You will be able to pick parts from a library that is constantly updated and create your own model. If you own a 3D printer you can download your creation and print it yourself. Of course if you do not have a 3D printer you can also get it shipped to your home.
The project started on November 15th, 2013 and will end at December 16th, 2013. The goal is to get CA$ 68,000 to get this project founded. To check out their rewards and to learn more about this project please go to their Kickstarter page at
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/330752914/arcanengine-build-and-3d-print-one-of-a-kind-table
We wish everyone a great start into the new week.
How much does a website cost?
This post will be a bit longer because it is a question that is not easy to answer. I once saw a very clever post from a website developer who explained creating a website with buying a car. He explained in his example that you can get a cheap car or a luxurious car with a lot of extras and depending on what car you need or want you will pay for it either a little or a lot. I think that this example was very true and to the point. In my post today I would like to help you to get a better understanding for website development, how much you can expect your project will cost and will try to mention some prices so that you can do your own calculation.
The first question you will need to ask yourself is what kind of website do you need? The second is how much can you do yourself?
If you have a business where most of your costumers will visit your real store and not buy your products online, you most likely will go with a very simple website and use one of those “Do it Yourself” tools, to have at least something like an online business card.
But as soon as your business is growing you will see the need to present yourself a bit more professional and this will be the moment where you will start looking into the available options more closely. You will also see the need to look into someone with SEO knowledge and experience with social media tools as well as someone who can help you with internet marketing solutions.
You as successful business owner will have your experience with the fact that finding a good partner can be a challenge and you will know how important it is to have good partners on your site. Knowing that your online presents is an ongoing project and not just a tool you buy and use until it is broken is also a very important fact, because this will make you aware of securing the right partner on your site. To get back to the car example, you most likely will go to the same mechanic every time your car is broken, if you like and can trust this person. The same rule applies for sure for a doctor or dentist. If you do not feel comfortable with your doctor or dentist, you most likely won’t get back to that person. Read the rest of this entry »
How to generate a more secure password?
You may have heard the news about Twitter and that many accounts got hacked. This may raises the question now, how YOU can protect your accounts and how to create a secure password? There are many tools available to generate a random password, but let’s be honest, who can remember those? It becomes even more complicated if you have a different random password for every single account. By the way, you most definitely should have different passwords for different accounts. So again the question, how to create a strong and secure password which you can also remember?
The answer isn’t as complicated as it may seems. One rule you should have is that each password should be at least 7 characters long, should include a number and should have one capital letter.
Before we now go and generate our passwords, sort your accounts into groups. Email, Bank, Social Media are some group examples, but you can also go with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or how about Business and Private?
The next step is to come up with a sentence you can remember. Like “My zip code as a child was 555”
Based on this sentence we generate now our basic password by using the first letters combined with the number. Our basic password looks now like this “Mzcaacw555” and now, to have slightly different passwords for our different accounts, we add the group to it. Here some examples:
Facebook = “Mzcaacw555-FB”
Twitter = “Mzcaacw555-TW”
Email = “Mzcaacw555-EM”
The new teccrab website
I am very happy to announce that we recently launched our new website and I would like to invite you to check it out. With the new design we also introduce some services we didn’t had online with the previous version. We went with the latest Joomla version, Joomla 3.0, to realize this project. The latest version of Joomla is great for those who would like to have a fantastic looking and functional website not just on a computer, but also on a tablet or smart phone. We checked our new website on an iPad and iPhone and were very pleased with the result.
Beside changing the website we as well redesigned our Logo a little bit. We will still have the crab as our symbol, but created now alos a text version, which you can find now on our Blog, Facebook Page, LinkedIn Page, Google Page as well as our website of course. For our social media platforms we added the icons of the services we offer and we think the new look is clean and fits our overall design.
Because we will celebrate in February 2013 our first anniversary we plan to have some special deals for new customers. We encourage therefore everyone to check out our Blog frequently to see what we will have for you. We already started the new year with one of our new packages, called the Google AdWords KeyWord-Broker Start. This package is especially for small business owner designed and in our opinion a great and very risk free way to check us out and start using our services.
Beside the Google AdWords KeyWord-Broker Starter Package we plan to offer IT Training. This is based on a few conversation we had during the holidays were we talked with various people about the IT Training landscape in general. Most people were not pleased with the available IT Training options, told me about their experience were the training was either very expensive or not practical. I had my share with so called IT Training Provider as well. I had the experience that classrooms were often way to big or that the teacher couldn’t reach the student because they were “hiding” behind a screen.
Our classes will be 10 students max and our first training will be very basic, but hopefully useful, practical, a little bit entertaining and not very expensive.
We are very excited to see how well this new service will perform and can not wait to welcome the first class.
I hope this short update made you interested in our services and please visit our website http://teccrab.com to see what we have to offer. Don’t forget to leave a comment to let us know how you like the new site.
Cheers for now 🙂
Simon
Mac OS X Mountain Lion is now available
If you are a Mac user you probably heard already that there is a new Cat in town. Since today you can download the new OS, which is called Mountain Lion, right from the Apple App Store. But is that an update you will need? Is it save to update now or should you wait? I will try to answer some of your questions here in this post.
Let me start with the price. I was already impressed when Apple announce last year the new OS Lion for just $29.99 and thought this is quite cheap for an OS. This year Apple dropped the price even further and therefore you can get the new cat for only $19,99 which is really cheap, if you think about the extra features you will get.
Twitter is fully integrated into Mountain Lion, the Reminder function, many of us like on the iPhone, is now an extra application. A notification centre is integrated as well as iMessage (which I use since the BETA and love very much). You have now a nice extra Note App like you have on your iDevice (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch) and even Game Centre is now on your Mac. So basically Mountain Lion is building finally the bridge to your iDevices, something we kinda hoped for with Lion, right?
I could start explaining how every single of those function works, but first of all there are already tons of reviews out there and second I think most of us know how to use them. So I would like to mention one concern I had when I started the download, which is Games.
I had my bad experiences in the past, when I upgraded my OS to soon. Had problems to run certain programs, because the game developer were maybe not paying enough attention or didn’t care for those of us who not only work with their Mac, but also enjoy to play with it. Maybe it was because a few years ago the Mac wasn’t really a computer you use to play with. But in the last two years this has changed in my opinion. Many games became available on the Mac and I liked especially Blizzards effort in securing that their programs (Star Craft II and Diablo III) were shipped for Windows as well as Mac OS at the same time.
So now the question for those who like to play games on their Mac… Is it save to upgrade or should you wait?
Well I upgraded to Mountain Lion this morning and tested a few games already. So far I wasn’t running in any problem, was able to open Diablo III, used my Steam account and the games I had there such as the Witcher, Dungeon Defenders and Splinter Cell (to name a few). All of them were running just fine, I even had the feeling the games loaded slightly faster than before.
Of course I had not the chance to try out every single game, but had the chance to run a few and tried to pick them based on their age difference. So far no problems, which is good news, if you ask me.
Beside the games I tried also the new features and think that Mountain Lion is a very stable and great upgrade which isn’t that expensive. Spending $19.99 on a new OS, which by the way has also a lot of security features I didn’t mention yet, is in my opinion a no question. Of course for those who are skeptical it doesn’t hurt to wait a few weeks and to read more reviews, but for those who want to get their hands on Mountain Lion I would say go for it. Just make sure you read the instructions first, not all Mac’s are able to handle the new cat. Also a good idea is to make a backup before you start the installation process. I did not loose any documents and had no problem at all with the installation, but it is always better to be save than sorry.
I hope this short review was useful for you and if you have any comments please feel free to post them.
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