Microsoft published a blog post on the Windows Insider Blog in late August with a vague statement saying that “Windows system components“ were to begin respecting the default web browser setting. Windows 10 and 11 regularly bypass this setting and force-open links in Microsoft Ed … | Continue reading
Five years ago, I wrote about adopting security keys — small second-factor authentication token devices — to secure some of my most precious online accounts. In that article, I foresaw a future problem and detailed how I planned to mitigate it. The future is now, and I did not he … | Continue reading
I’ve finally begun using the Abbott FreeStyle Libre 3 continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) system a year after I first wrote about it. The newer sensor has been a significant upgrade except for a few issues. One of those issues could be damaging to your hearing. Read more … | Continue reading
The Microsoft Phone Link (formerly known as “Your Phone”) app for Windows, Android, and iOS lets you access parts of your smartphone from within Windows. However, Microsoft has not built the service with your privacy in mind. Instead, the software behemoth relays your personal da … | Continue reading
Imagine a privatized nationwide authentication system used to access government services, confirm contracts and online payments, and everything else. Now, imagine that the system was designed to be extra friendly to imitation and credential theft (“phishing”). Here’s everything w … | Continue reading
On November 1st, I joined familiar faces from my days at Opera Software and new colleges at Vivaldi Technologies. I joined as a Quality Assurance Tester working on the Vivaldi web browser product for mobile and desktop. Read more … | Continue reading
My note-taking app of choice for the last three years has been Joplin, an open-source note-taker for Android, Linux, MacOS, and Windows. As I discussed in my app review, the desktop app is good, but the Android app has some issues. In the last year, updates to the app have brough … | Continue reading
Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB) is an alternative, self-governed, distributed social network without gatekeepers. You only see updates and mentions from people you follow, so moderation isn’t as much of an issue as on Twitter. However, the technology that powers the platform is ill-suit … | Continue reading
Microsoft is testing a new app to compete with the many dubious “PC cleaner” software available on the market (like CCleaner and CleanMyMac). However, Microsoft’s new app looks out for the company’s interests before its customers’. Read more … | Continue reading
I’ve wanted to move my home virtual private network (VPN) server from a virtual machine onto my physical MikroTik router. I use the VPN to connect back to my home network to reach internal devices and services when I’m out and about. The router runs the RouterOS operating system, … | Continue reading
No one remembers the IP address of their favorite websites. Why should you remember your router’s IP address? TP-Link hijacks DNS to give itself a domain name. | Continue reading
TP-Link network products — including Wi-Fi routers, repeaters, and access points (AP) — use deep packet inspection (DPI) to intercept specific domain name system (DNS) requests. Each product looks for one or two domain names and will hijack the request to issue a local response c … | Continue reading
Delicious (stylized after its domain del.icio.us) was a social bookmarking website. It might not sound all that interesting, but it was one of the best websites in the early 2000s. Here’s why I miss this defunct website so much. Read more … | Continue reading
I recently bought a pair of Sony WH-1000XM4 wireless headphones (available on Amazon). Many of the headphone’s capabilities are unlocked using the Sony Headphones Connect (SHC) companion app. Unfortunately, the SHC app slashes hours off my phone’s battery life. Here’s what the ap … | Continue reading
There’s no need to waste family game-night time waiting for the same Steam game to download over the internet! All you need is a local caching proxy server. Repeated downloads from a local cache are faster, and you free up your internet bandwidth for other things (like downloadin … | Continue reading
My home IP ended up on Cloudflare’s naughty list for six days. Most websites and many apps loaded slowly, partially, or not at all. Just had to wait it out. | Continue reading
I don’t know what I did wrong, but I’ve angered one of the titans of the internet! For the last six days, my home internet connection has been partially broken. Some apps and many websites either load slowly, partially, or not at all. Everywhere I go, I’m greeted by the same bloc … | Continue reading
The Aqara Temperature and Humidity sensor by Xiaomi (available on Amazon) is a popular option to capture indoor climate data for home-automation systems. The sensors are small, plainly designed, cheap, promise 2-year battery life, and run on the Zigbee mesh-network protocol. Howe … | Continue reading
TP-Link Wi-Fi access points mindlessly band-steer clients off 2,4 GHz to the 5 GHz radio; even during periods when the 5 GHz radio is powered off. | Continue reading
My TP-Link EAP653 (available on Amazon) Wi-Fi access point (AP) has some features that don’t work well together. Who would have thought that its proprietary extensions to the Wi-Fi standard would cause compatibility issues with clients? Read more … | Continue reading
I’ve set up my gaming computer with dual booting between Fedora Linux and Windows 11. The Windows 11 installation doesn’t see much use these days since PlanetSide 2 became available on Linux. For the last two months, the system has suffered from stuttering issues during regular u … | Continue reading
MATE Desktop installs a Dictionary app (a fork of the retired GNOME Dictionary app). The apps don’t protect your pricacy, and you might want to stop using them. | Continue reading
The MATE Desktop for Linux installs a Dictionary app by default (a fork of the retired GNOME Dictionary app). The apps don’t protect your privacy, and you might want to stop using them. Read more … | Continue reading
Most manufacturers of consumer-grade network routers (both Ethernet and Wi-Fi) brand their products as “Gigabit Routers”. At the very least, it’ll say “Gigabit Ethernet”. However, neither term necessarily means the router can fully exploit your gigabit internet connection. Read m … | Continue reading
A weird almost unreadable font file bundled with TeamViewer for Windows software lets website detect if you’ve installed the software. Raises privacy concerns. | Continue reading
So, here’s a bit of a mystery: Why does TeamViewer – the popular remote desktop program – install a font it doesn’t use on your computer? The abstract font (shown in the above image) doesn’t seem to serve any purpose in the software. Intentional or not, it enables websites to det … | Continue reading
Firefox can now do offline and privacy-preserving translation of eight languages with more on the way. Powered by open-source and machine-learning. | Continue reading
The Mozilla Firefox web browser is finally beginning to catch up in a market where every competitor has an online language translation service feature. Firefox recently debuted its long-awaited privacy-preserving on-device translation service. Read more … | Continue reading
You can find hundreds of browser extensions that let you fine-tune the playback speed for all YouTube videos. I’m happy with the default speed of 1× for most videos (and music). However, I want to speed up some channels without having to tweak the speed dial every time. Enter Sam … | Continue reading
The Dygma Raise is a splittable 60 % mechanical keyboard; meaning it has no function key row, navigation keys, arrow keys, or numpad. It’s squarely targeted at keyboard enthusiasts willing to pay 350 USD for a keyboard with fewer standard keys plus a unique two-rowed eight-key sp … | Continue reading
Protect your contact, comment, or other forms from spam submissions by evaluating minute details about how it got submitted. Privacy-preserving. No CAPTCHAs. | Continue reading
Millions of (poorly coded) bots relentlessly crawl the web to detect and spew junk content into any form they find. The go-to countermeasure is to force everyone to complete a Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA). CAPTCHAs are those … | Continue reading
Need an API to get the current version numbers for the stable and extended support releases of Firefox, Google Chrome, and Safari? Wikidata got your back. | Continue reading
Is your robotic vacuum cleaner getting stuck on the laundry drying rack? Just raise the rack slightly off the floor and it becomes a natural robot barrier. | Continue reading
The font-size CSS property sets the majuscule (“uppercase”) text size. The (font-)size-adjust property can set the minuscule (“lowercase”) size independently. | Continue reading
I’ve been an SELinux complexity apologist for years. Lately, I’ve concluded that every implementation with difficult-to-configure policies is just unmanageable. | Continue reading
Do you still need to maintain webpage thumbnails/link previews in legacy image formats, or have apps caught up with the WebP revolution? It’s a bit complicated. | Continue reading
The new BIMI email standard give companies a branding opportunity in your email inbox in exchange for adopting stricter email sender-verification standards. | Continue reading
The title song to the James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing (2004) videogame by Mýa was once given away as a promo isn’t part of any digital music catalog. | Continue reading
Six percentage of each music files you’ve bought from Apple Music (iTunes Store) contain, literally, nothing. Why is Apple padding their music with zero-bytes? | Continue reading
OpenCore lets you run the latest MacOS on unsupported Apple legacy hardware (and PCs). But software that bypasses security restrictions requires a lot of trust. | Continue reading
I asked 124 services to delete my user account. The results were mixed. 21 never responded, and 16 responded by created even more accounts. Some outright lied. | Continue reading
An in-depth privacy and security review of Tribler, a more private BitTorrent client backed by an onion/layered encryption proxy relay network. Is it anonymous? | Continue reading
Russia to test disconnecting from the global Internet. Peer-to-peer distributed internet alternatives won’t survive after the Runet cutoff. | Continue reading
You can store links on your file system in .URL, .LNK, .WebLoc, .Desktop, and .HTML files. But which is the best format fr your bookmark files? | Continue reading
You can now expect every website to inundate you with pop-ups for email lists, promotions, and privacy theater. (No, the GDPR isn’t to blame.) Enough is enough. | Continue reading
After the initial learning curve, I found that Cardboard WM help me stay focused on one task and it greatly reduced how much time I spent rearranging my windows. | Continue reading
An overview of which operating and file systems support sparse files, how to identify such files, program support, and sparse files versus file system compression. | Continue reading