Helge Klein • Tools & knowledge for IT pros

Installing Office 2019 from Microsoft Partner Center with Deployment Tool

Installing Office 2019 as a Microsoft MPN silver or gold partner is a little more complicated than it used to be. Partner Center has keys but does not directly offer […]

Changing the Location of Notepad++ Configuration Files

Depending on what you selected during the installation, Notepad++ stores its configuration files either in the installation directory or in your user profile. This article describes a simple way of […]

Looking for the Perfect Mechanical Keyboard (Office & Software Development)

I am a mechanical keyboard aficionado. I guess this started in the early ’90s when I typed on a Cherry G80-3000 for the first time (it also could have been […]

Blocking Office Macros, Managing Windows & macOS via Intune

How to completely block the execution Office macros on macOS and Windows. The configuration is centrally managed in Intune & extensible through PowerShell.

Total Commander: Getting Started

Total Commander is one of those few magical tools that can boost your productivity as an IT pro significantly. It not only replaces File Explorer; it does so in a […]

Migrating WordPress from Multisite to Single With MU-Migration

In addition to various commercial plugins, there is one free tool that helps with WordPress migrations to or from multisite installations. MU-Migration is a WP-CLI plugin that worked flawlessly when […]

Windows Server 2019 on Hetzner’s EX62 & AX100 Dedicated Servers

This post is a follow-up to my 2016 article on how to install Windows Server on Hetzner’s EX51 hosted dedicated servers. Hetzner offers many types of dedicated servers at very […]

Searching for Keyword Strings in WordPress Posts

Surprisingly, there does not seem to be a plugin or some other “easy” way of searching your WordPress posts for certain keywords, shortcodes or HTML tags. However, if you have […]

Renaming Multiple Files With Regular Expressions in Total Commander

I prepend every document I save to disk with the year, month, and day. While I do that manually for individual files, sometimes I encounter larger numbers of files with […]

How to Configure SoftEther, a Free VPN Server for macOS & Windows

This post describes a real-world configuration of the free VPN server SoftEther. It shows how to set up a VPN for macOS and Windows clients on a Hyper-V Windows guest […]

Hardware-Encode Video in H.265 with Free Tools to Save Disk Space

Many web meeting services have a recording functionality. Most recordings are provided as MP4 files with the video encoded in H.264 because that offers the most universal compatibility. However, it […]

Free and Powerful Equalizer for Windows 10

Windows 10 does not come with an equalizer. That can be annoying when you have headphones that are too heavy on the bass, like the Sony WH-1000XM3. Enter the free […]

Modern Multi-Process Browser Architecture

An architecture overview of current browsers on Windows: Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Bluetooth Audio Quality & aptX on Windows 10

Bluetooth is a flexible standard. It defines various profiles that operate on top of the Bluetooth networking protocol stack and implement specific services, such as hands-free communications. Bluetooth devices each […]

Saving & Restoring Total Commander Tab Sets

Total Commander’s custom start menu is a great place to quickly launch all kinds of tools and programs that are otherwise hard to get to. However, TC’s start menu is […]

Upgrading Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04 & PHP 7.0 to 7.2 for WordPress

This post describes how I upgraded our webserver running WordPress on Apache from Ubuntu 16.04.5 LTS to 18.04.1 LTS. Please see this article for more information on the server’s installation […]

PowerShell Script: Test Chrome, Firefox & IE Browser Performance

There is more than one way to test the performance of web browsers like Chrome, Firefox, or IE, but regardless of how you do it, you need a consistent workload […]

Enabling HTTP/2 in Apache on Ubuntu 18.04

A number of requirements must be met before HTTP/2 can be enabled for a website. This is a compilation of steps I went through to get HTTP/2 working on our […]

How to Limit CPU & RAM via the Windows Boot Configuration

Testing the effects of different CPU and memory configurations is easiest when you run the tests on a powerful machine and restrict it to the required number of CPU cores […]

Laudation to E2EVC – Experts to Experts Virtualization Conference

On the eve of my departure for E2EVC Athens I feel it is time for a laudation. Let me explain why.

Splunking the Aspect Ratio Distribution of National Flags

When I tried to align the Union Jack and the flag of Germany on a presentation slide I noticed that I couldn’t – their aspect ratios are different. A quick […]

Creating an Application Crash Dump

How to Create User Mode Crash Dump Files If you experience application crashes you may be asked by support to create a crash dump file. Crash dumps are created automatically […]

Standard Notes: a Note-Taking App with Client-Side Encryption

Note-taking is one of those topics that appear to have been solved long ago, yet offer plenty of opportunity for new contestants. There are multiple reasons for that, but for […]

DiskLED is Now Open Source

DiskLED is a tool I wrote a while ago that displays performance counter data using an animated system tray icon. It comes with a graphical configuration dialog that lets you […]

Inexpensive GPU Virtualization Options for Testing

For a new chapter in my ongoing series of talks and articles about browser performance I wanted to examine how key user experience metrics like page load time are dependent […]

Is Blockchain the Right Technology for My Application?

This is an attempt at guidelines to help in technology decisions about when and where to use blockchain technology.

Building a Fast and Silent Workstation PC

This article describes how to build a fast workstation PC that is almost completely silent (actually the fastest possible in terms of single-thread performance). It is based on a PC […]

Hyper-V Backup – Products & Options

It’s 2018, and backing up Hyper-V hosts is solved, right? I certainly expected it to be when I took on the task of finding a simple and reliable way to […]

Browser Ad Blockers and Privacy

You have probably been in this situation: on some shopping site you put an article in your cart, but decide not to buy it after all. Later on, you notice […]

Browser Video: Codecs, Formats & Hardware Acceleration

Web video is ubiquitous. We take it for granted that browsers play video in high resolution, over any connection, on any device. Behind the scenes, a complex machinery of video […]