This week we shipped bilingual job search and scam protection for the jobs board, made Calallen its own city, and got the sell-the-slot board ranking by real outcomes instead of date. The biggest move was Spanish language support on /jobs, that's the single biggest thing that shipped. Spanish-speaking workers in the Bend can now search and apply in their language, and employers don't have to translate a thing.
Job posts stay in English. Search, filters, forms flip to Spanish.
NPCLocal is our local-services site that connects Coastal Bend folks with local pros, plus a jobs board.
By The Shop · Dispatch from Alice
If you speak Spanish and you're looking for work in the Coastal Bend, you can search the jobs board in Spanish. Hit the language toggle on /jobs and the whole board flips. You can read job titles, filter by category and city, and fill out your application all in Spanish.
English-speaking employers don't have to translate their posts. They stay as written. You're just getting a Spanish interface so you can navigate and apply without switching tabs or using a translator.
When someone posts a job, we run it through a scam classifier. If it smells wrong, fake urgency, upfront fees, promises that are too good to be true, the post goes into a hold queue instead of going live right away. I review it and either approve it or trash it.
Calallen used to show up as part of Corpus Christi on the job board. Now it's a standalone city. If you live in Calallen and you search for jobs in Calallen, you get Calallen jobs. If you want to expand your search to nearby cities, you can do that too.
Search for jobs in Alice and you'll see Alice jobs first. Below that, you'll see a section that says 'Also hiring nearby' with jobs from Robstown, Calallen, and other towns a short drive away. You don't have to run separate searches to find work in the surrounding area.
When you use one of our repair calculators, say you're figuring out what a roof costs or what you'd pay for a foundation fix, you can hit a share button and get a permalink. That link has your estimate saved in it. Send it to someone else and they see your exact numbers without running the calculator again.
If you're on the NPC Laser site and you notice the little laser dot in the corner, try triple-clicking it. Or if you remember the Konami code from old arcade games, try that too. Something unexpected happens.
This short video from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission breaks down exactly how a ransomware attack starts and what a small business owner can do right now to stop it before it wipes out their files. It comes straight from the feds, it is free, and it is plain enough that you can watch it with your whole staff in one sitting.
This free step-by-step guide walks you through fixing slow mesh Wi-Fi the right way, starting with node placement and reboot order before you spend a dime on new gear. We like it because it covers the stuff that actually trips up small shops, like weak backhaul, sticky clients that won't roam, and ping spikes on video calls.
This is a free workshop straight from Google that shows small business owners how to use AI tools like Gemini to knock out real everyday tasks, not just theory. We like it because it is built for folks with no tech background and walks you through actual things you can do this week.
We found this one real useful because it walks you through the right tools to have on hand and the safety steps to follow before you crack open any device yourself. If you have been paying a shop for fixes you could probably handle at home, this video is a solid place to start.
We like this one because it comes straight from the federal government and covers ransomware, phishing, and hacking in plain English with fact sheets, videos, and quizzes built for owners like us. No vendor upsell, no fine print, just solid free advice we can share with anyone on our team.
This free guide walks you through the 3-2-1 backup rule in plain English, tells you exactly what NAS does versus what cloud backup does, names the actual tools and what they cost, and calls out the mistakes most small businesses make when they think they are already covered. Down here on the Coastal Bend where a hurricane or a ransomware hit can wipe you out overnight, knowing your data is in three places on two different kinds of storage is worth an hour of your time right now.
