To Make the World a Bit Better

Not just for IT people

To make the world a bit better

Three ways to put technical knowledge to use not for money, but for concrete good close to home: not losing money to scammers, not losing family photos and documents, not throwing out hardware that still has life in it. Everything here is interactive — not just reading, but trying it right here.

Six realistic situations — a call “from the bank,” a “grandchild in trouble,” a phishing email, a fake delivery text, a “call from the police,” and one genuine call for contrast (not everything suspicious is a scam). Pick an answer and see what happens next.

📄 Download the cheat sheet (PDF) — a short version of the rules you can print and keep by the phone. (Currently only available in Russian.)

If someone close to you suddenly loses access to their phone or accounts — from illness, a lost device, or worse — the family often has no way to get to important photos, documents, or even pay the bills. None of this is stored on this site: just a checklist you fill in yourself, and a downloadable template.

A list of accounts exists — email, banking, government portal, social media. Not the passwords — just a list of “what actually exists.” You know where the two-factor authentication backup codes physically are — on paper, in a safe. Not in the cloud, not in a chat. A trusted contact is set up — in Google it’s “Inactive Account Manager,” in Apple it’s “Legacy Contact.” Official features, nothing improvised. Someone close to you has actually been shown where this information is — not sent it, shown the physical or digital location. Important photos and documents are saved in at least two places — for example, the cloud and a separate external drive. A simple paper instruction sheet exists and sits somewhere physically secure — not in email, not in a messaging app.

💡 Password managers can do this too

Bitwarden and 1Password both have a built-in “Emergency Access” feature — a trusted person can request access to your passwords after a waiting period that you set yourself. This is safer than just writing passwords down on paper.

📄 Download the blank template (PDF) — fill it in by hand and keep it physically, without sending it anywhere. (Currently only available in Russian.)

Windows 10 support ended back in October 2025 — and plenty of perfectly working computers don’t meet the requirements for Windows 11 (a TPM 2.0 module is required). The result: piles of working hardware get thrown out simply because it “can’t” run a current OS. It can — just not Windows.

How much RAM does the computer you want to save have?

Three more things that matter more than RAM:

Replace the hard drive with an SSD, if it isn’t one already. This gives a bigger speed boost than any amount of extra RAM — the system boots in seconds, not minutes.

Install a lightweight browser with an ad blocker (uBlock Origin, for example) — ads and trackers slow down a weak computer more than the operating system itself does.

LibreOffice instead of Microsoft Office — free, and it reads and saves the familiar .docx/.xlsx formats.

🎁 Where to send a finished computer

A rescued computer can go to someone who needs it — a school, neighbors, a local library. If you don’t know who specifically, IT volunteer platforms like TechSoup coordinate exactly this kind of matching between nonprofits and volunteers.