Tech Essentials

Looking Back at A Year of Optimizing 2020 has been a year nobody will forget any time soon, and it presented every one of us with unprecedented challenges in our personal and professional lives. At RPost, we sought to adapt to these new realities by offering solutions designed specifically to help you, the user or […]

OOO No! Was Gmail Brought Down by Overworked Vacation Seekers? Google suffered not one, but two outages this week, with its Gmail (among other Google services) going dark for several hours at a time. Many Gmail users reported emails bouncing back and other error messages. At their peak, these outages affected a vast number of […]

When is Maradona’s New Album Coming Out? The Importance of Clear Communications in the WFH Era On a recent all-company call, one of our American colleagues (who is not very soccer-futbol-football-knowledgeable) was shocked to learn of the passing of Maradona, exclaiming “But she was just working on a new album!” Maybe the sound quality wasn’t […]

How to Use the Force in Your Next Video Conference We at Tech Essentials were all saddened to learn of the death of David Prowse this week. He was the actor who played Darth Vader in the original Star Wars movies—though the character was actually voiced by James Earl Jones. Funny aside: you can watch the scenes where Prowse’s […]

Are We Still in an Interconnected World? Apple’s Big Sur Sure Made Us Aware Are we still living in an interconnected world? There is now talk of more isolation — that is unless you have your COVID immunity passport (as we discussed in our article “The “New” Haves and Have Nots”). While travel may become […]

The Advantages of Live (Without-a-Net) Virtual Conferences One of the biggest news items of the past week in the US was the Democratic party’s virtual convention held (mostly) in Milwaukee. Let me just get this out of the way: there will be no political commentary here—only observations about the format of the convention and how […]

RMail: The N95 Mask of Email Encryption Software Earlier this week, a house party in Beverly Hills, California made national headlines, as hundreds of revelers went maskless and practiced virtually zero social distancing. Worse still was that gunfire erupted later on in the party, and three people were shot. Parties like this are hardly limited […]

The People Have Spoken: Americans (TE Readers) Prefer to Relive Live Events In one of the biggest election upsets since 1948 when Harry Truman defeated Thomas Dewey, Tech Essentials readers delivered a resounding vote of support (85%!) to relive the full moments of our Optimize!2020 Virtual Conference as opposed to the ‘crib-note’ highlight reels. In the spirit of full discourse, […]

What Sports Center “Top 10” Highlight Reels Mean to E-Learning As Remember the good old days when there was an abundance of live sporting events on television? The time slots for those big games may have been elusive. What to do? Set your DVR to record it. Settle down with a bag of chips later […]

Pig Latin Will Remain a Legal form of Encryption As today’s technological and political environments are becoming ever more polarized, it is useful once again the think about these trends in the context of America’s foundation—i.e. the reason for celebrating Independence Day in America.