Tech Archives - Mike McBride Online

Worth Reading – WordPress debuts a private workspace that runs in your browser via a new service, my.WordPress.net

Mike McBride — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 15:28:39 +0000

It's all stored in the browser, which carries some risk of computer crashes, but they claim to have backup and transfer mechanisms. It could provide a playground or personal knowledge base, complete with some AI, without worrying about it being stored in the cloud, because you can't share it. It can be a place to play with WordPress design and experimentation without the need for hosting or for it to be available on the public internet.

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Let’s make it more difficult to keep up with changing technology

Mike McBride — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 03:09:26 +0000

As if the struggle to keep up with technological change wasn’t hard enough for those of us in the industry, now we’ve got to deal with reports that are made up by GenAI? No, Windows 12 Isn’t Replacing Windows 11 Anytime Soon A now retracted PCWorld article published on March 2, 2026, claimed that Windows 12 was...

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Worth Reading – If your external drive is always plugged in, it isn’t a backup

Mike McBride — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 21:47:28 +0000

Having a good backup strategy involves being slightly paranoid. What are the risks? What happens if...? You need to look at the worst-case scenarios and consider if there's a copy of your important data that would still exist if it happened. It's not a fun exercise, and if you suffer from anxiety, it can be a bit exhausting to invite that in, but in this case, it could save you from a data disaster.

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Worth Reading – “Pizza Parties Don’t Fix Burnout”: The State of Librarian Mental Health

Mike McBride — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 03:51:00 +0000

It's exhausting to go to work every day for people who refuse to stand behind you as a human being and treat you like an expense they would do anything to be rid of.

Sadly, that is the state of the workplace for many people. It's not just at the library, and it won't be fixed by pizza, yoga, or any other lunchtime activity.

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Gmail Users Losing POP and Getting AI Whether We Like It or Not

Mike McBride — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 21:24:47 +0000

Personally, I've moved away from using the POP feature in Gmail to import mail from other email accounts into Gmail to take advantage of the spam protection. Since I host my own sites and my own M365 tenant, much of that spam protection lives elsewhere for me, but I can understand why others have continued to use it.

But it's going away.

Never fear, though. In 2026, Google wouldn't dare let you have a product that doesn't feature AI. So, we're all getting the AI Inbox, and you will have to opt out if you do not want an AI-generated list of to-dos and summaries instead of just reading your email.

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Linked – CIOs recalibrate IT agendas to make room for rising AI spend

Mike McBride — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 02:10:23 +0000

I probably haven't been thinking enough about how the budget for AI might come at the cost of several other IT projects and what that might mean in terms of old, insecure, and inefficient technology not being replaced.

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Linked – AI Cloud Adoption Is Rife With Cyber Mistakes

Mike McBride — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 20:07:26 +0000

I also understand why this happens, though. Even out-of-the-box AI tools like Copilot or ChatGPT require some level of data access and security. That's a complicated task that, in normal times, would require a months-long project, at minimum.

Custom AI projects that require sharing data across your environment and allowing the model access to all that data in a way that shuts everyone up about what they can't do with AI will lead to mistakes. We're seeing them, just like when people rush other IT projects under fire to implement technology they don't have time to understand.

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Linked – Microsoft Reduces Office’s Functionality to Push You Towards Copilot

Mike McBride — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 02:57:53 +0000

Hey, look, Microsoft isn't just putting Copilot everywhere and forcing personal users to opt in and pay more for it; they're also turning off features that Copilot can perform instead for anyone who opts out, like Smart Lookup.

This is all part of the "Copilot everywhere" strategy that we are all part of, whether we want it or not

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Never Assume Searches Are Accurate Without Verifying

Mike McBride — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 13:28:33 +0000

Technology, especially M365 technology, changes all the time. It's vast and complicated, and things get broken when new versions are rolled out. When dealing with eDiscovery, security, privacy, etc., we have to stay on top of those changes to understand new features and ensure the old ones still work the same way.

Don't assume the old ones will always work the same way. I can tell you from this and plenty of other experiences they often don't.

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Linked – AI data readiness: C-suite fantasy, big IT problem

Mike McBride — Fri, 27 Dec 2024 23:20:01 +0000

This might seem like a new problem, but it's an old problem that shows up when trying to do something new.

There is a lack of a strategy for data security and data rot. Too many organizations have punted when deciding what data to keep versus delete and haven't made the hard decisions about implementing data security internally. Now, they want to use AI, but the AI is accessing all that outdated data and exposing the places where security wasn't correctly implemented. So, it becomes an IT problem to fix.

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