Happy Earth Day from Sierra w/o Wires!

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A great way to keep our Earth clean is to recycle or even donate your technology. This can include CDs, cell phones, computers, inkjet cartridges, batteries, and more. By recycling or donating your electronics you can prevent lead, mercury, cadmium, and other toxic materials that are present in electronics to leak from landfills and then go into the ground and water. This can cause health and environmental hazards. According to the EPA, in 2010, 1,790,000 tons or 310,000,000 units were trashed and put into our landfills. There are a couple of ways to prevent this and here are some ways:

1) Find a recycler in your area.
Check out Earth911 and on the left hand side, type what material you want to recycle and your zip code. When you search that item, a list of recycling companies with the material you want to recycle will come up. Additionally, you can do a quick search, and you can select even more items you want to recycle based on different categories.

 2) Donate your electronics.
If your product can be reused think about donating it to a reputable reuse organization. Make sure the product is still fully functional and include any manuals, monitors, keyboards, connection cables, software, etc. Some great places to donate would be World Computer Exchange, Reconnect, StRut, Komputers 4 Kids, eBay Giving Works, and much more.

Before you donate or recycle your electronics make sure you clean it by clearing any data or clearing out the hard drive. Try KillDisk to destroy all data on hard disks, USB drives and floppy disks. Here is a link for cleaning out your Mac http://www.wikihow.com/Wipe-a-Mac-Clean.

By recycling or donating your electronic devices you are making a positive impact on the environment. Share these tips and make the Earth a cleaner place. 
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World Wide Web Easter Eggs

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With Easter just passing can you think of a symbol that kids recognize during Easter? How about Easter Eggs? Easter Eggs aren’t just something children recognize or have fun with but programmers and developers have fun with them as well. Easter eggs however, have a different meaning to developers and programmers, they are unexpected hidden secrets that they imbed into a website for users to find and make them smile. The web is full of these little hidden “Easter eggs” and here are some that we have taken notice of.

1) The Konami Code
The Konami code was used as a cheat code in many Konami video games. Developers and Programmers have now put them into some websites as a joke. Don’t know the code, we do! Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A. Try it on these websites below: http://www.vogue.co.uk/
http://soundclick.com 

2) Google
It’s no surprise Googles programmers and developers add hidden Easter eggs. Here are some that we found:
- Search for “do a barrel roll” and “zerg rush”
- Go to Google Images and search “Arari Breakout”
- Google Earth flight simulator. Download Google Earth and press Ctrl + Alt + A to activate the flight simulator and fly your F-16 across the world. 

3) Youtube
- Search “Beam me up, Scotty,” “Do the Harlem shake,” and “doge meme”
- If your video is taking forever to load, you will notice the buffering symbol in the middle (a whirring circle), if you press the left arrow on your key board it will turn into the game of Snake
- Right-click on a video and you’ll see the option “Stats for Nerd.” It will give you a rundown of statistics of the video you’re watching.

4) Go to http://producten.hema.nl/ and hover over the cup item. 

Tell us about any “Easter eggs” you have come across on the web!

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Security Update for Windows 8.1 & RT 8.1

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Since Microsoft wants to ensure that customers benefit from the best support and servicing experience and to coordinate and simplify servicing across both Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows 8.1 RT and Windows 8.1, this update will be considered a new servicing/support baseline.

What this means is those users who have elected to install updates manually will have 30 days to install Windows 8.1 Update on Windows 8.1 devices. After this 30-day window and beginning with the May Patch Tuesday (Microsoft releases security patches on the second Tuesday of each month), Windows 8.1 user's devices without the update installed will no longer receive security updates.

 This means that Windows 8.1 users - starting patch Tuesday in May 2014 and beyond - will require this update to be installed.  If the Windows 8.1 Update is not installed, those newer updates will be considered “not applicable.”

 Open up the link below to learn more about the Windows update.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/whats-new
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Heartbleed Scare

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I’m sure you all have heard now about the ‘Heartbleed’ security bug, however, many of you might not know what it means or what it is. The Heartbleed security bug makes individuals all across the web vulnerable to having their passwords, credit card information, and other sensitive data stolen. According to Netcraft, an Internet research firm, the bug has affected about 500,000 servers.

Here are a couple of tips you should use to make sure your information is safe:
  1. Don’t log into accounts from afflicted sites. Be sure to check before you log in that the company has fixed the problem. You can check individual sites here to see if they are vulnerable to the bug. If you’re still not sure if the company is safe, contact them. Here is a list of sites that are not vulnerable and have been patched.
  2. Change Passwords to your Accounts. Once you get word that the company’s site is no longer vulnerable create a new password for that site. Additionally it’s a good idea to change your passwords for sites that weren’t affected as well.
To protect yourself even more, you should always change your passwords every 90 days and your passwords should be different across sites for extra security.

Sierra swiftly verified its internal systems on April 9th and initiated scans on customer systems at the same time, well before most vendors ever realized that a vulnerability was published.
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