Welcome to News from trif.com! First time readers, I am glad you're here! Returning readers, welcome back!

Greetings and welcome to our Newsletter! I want to share the many photos I have taken of places, people and things throughout the country and beyond. Each month our headline photo will be something new and different. The caption will present a small explanation. We hope you enjoy. Keep in mind, we don't want to waste your time. Articles will contain generally less than 250 words. Please have a look and give us your feedback. By all means, forward to a friend using the link at the bottom of the Newsletter. Thanks. Questions? Send me an email!

Six Years and Going Strong

We are celebrating the 72nd issue of the trif.com newsletter this month. We started sending out this monthly newsletter in March of 2009. It is quite the challenging comittment producing a regular newsletter. On top of the constant eyes and ears open for worthy material, It takes 4 to 6 hours to prepare, write, edit and transmit. When we began, we used Constant Contact templates and their image library. It was limiting. So in 2011, we created our own HTML template in Adobe Dreamweaver - the same application we often use for web site development and web applications. It allows us the flexibility to shape the Newsletter the way we want.

For those of you that do not produce a periodical, let me attest to the fact that it helps. Our Newsletter is sent to a mailing list of about 680 recipients. It is read by about 24% of you. Surprisingly, that is a good number.

Sending out the Newsletter helps for a few reasons. First, we don't visit all clients all the time, so it helps clients know we are still around. It also alerts clients to new ideas that may have some application to their needs. Lastly, it serves as a reminder of the many services we provide, how to contact us and where to find us on social media.

Please, if you haven't in the past, let us know you appreciate our Newsletter simply by clicking here. It will register your vote, nothing more. Thanks!

Finally, a Drive Sync Program that Works!

I have looked for a simple disk drive sync program for a long time. I finally found it. SyncBack Free or SyncBackSE or SyncBack Pro. For anywhere from $0 to $54.95 you get a simple, functional application that does exactly what you want. Copy folders of files from one disk to a 2nd disk every night, but don't recopy files that have already been copied, just copy the new and changed files; and give me a report of any problems that ocurred; and don't give me some compressed file containing all the individual files, I want an exact copy that I could swap out if I wanted; and whatever you do, don't give me a full-backup followed by a dozen differential backups. Ugh! Please, keep it Simple!

Well I use SyncBack Free on my laptop and it copies all my image files from one USB Drive to a 2nd USB Drive - every night. I have about 700GB of images going back to 1997. They are irreplaceable. And it grows at about 10GB per month. I need to save all images in at least three different places plus the cloud. Well I do better than that! I have three 2TB (terabyte - 1,000GB) USB drives. I use one as my main drive and I swap out the other two drives.

Just so you know, I also have all my current year pictures on SD Cards. I do not delete pictures from SD Cards, I buy new SD Cards. And lastly, I backup all my personal computers (about 7TB of data) to the cloud with Crashplan and developed pictures also get backed up to the cloud using Dropbox..

Yes, I believe in redundancy. At the office, I have at least 4 copies of every file on disk drives or in the cloud. I never-ever want to lose a file. And if I touch a clients computer, I do the same thing.

I learned my lesson long ago, I mean long ago! It was 1984 and I wrote a program that controled a Tandy personal pen plotter. Before we had drivers that allowed you to just print to a pen plotter, we had to write a program that addressed the pen and directed it to move around in the x and y coordinates. I worked tirelessly for days fine tuning this program to type words in different sizes at different locations, centered or justified left or right, draw lines and boxes and grab different colored pens. It was, at the time, awesome and great fun to watch. And then I accidentally over wrote the program. It was gone forever, never to be replaced.... ever. For thirty years, the agony of that loss has remained engrained in my mind. I remember the physical ache in the pit of my stomach, that Oh S&!%$ moment when I pushed the enter key. It is something I never want to repeat. Ever.

End Robot Telemarketing Calls

Bruce Horowitz from TechRoadmap Inc. shared this valuable tidbit. Nomorobo.com can help end those incessant robotic telemarketing calls that we all get constantly.

It was the winner of the FTC anti-robocall challenge as the best over-all solution. Popular Science reports that Aaron Foss came up with the Nomorobo system, which intercepts incoming calls before they reach people's phones, then determines whether the caller is an illegal robot before deciding whether to let the call through.

The system compares incoming numbers with whitelists and blacklists the Federal Trade Commission maintains. The determination even works when a blacklisted robocaller uses caller ID spoofing to make it appear as if the call is coming from a non-blacklisted number.

If you have VoIP and your provider allows you to do simultaneous ring then you add NoMoRobo’s number to your simultaneous ring list and their computer answers after the first ring and hangs up on the robocall if the calling number is in their database of spam callers.

Bruce says that it works like a charm. It does still ring once on your own phone but it’s a lot better than you or your voice-mail answering. Bruce has tested it on FiOS and a Vonage line.

Bruce Horowitz is a PhD and founder of TechRoadmap created to address the time pressures on research and product development managers. With TechRoadmap you can outsource strategic and tactical Intellectual Property Services to focus yourself on growing your company.