Helge Klein • Tools & knowledge for IT pros

VS Code as Markdown Note-Taking App

In the last few years, I have tried many note-taking applications. They all shared a common UX flaw: lack of keyboard accessibility. Finally, I had the idea to give Visual […]

JavaScript Development with Type Checking in VS Code

This is a collection of things I found helpful for JavaScript development in Visual Studio Code, specifically the easy availability of TypeScript’s advanced type checking and error reporting functionality. Please […]

How to Check Which Bluetooth A2DP Audio Codec Is Used on Windows

This is a follow-up to my earlier article Bluetooth Audio Quality & aptX on Windows 10, based on a comment by reader eluxe. Windows makes it unnecessarily hard to identify […]

Regex Search & Replace in WordPress Posts With WP-CLI

Maintaining a WordPress site that goes back years or even decades (as in this case) can be a challenge. You want to ensure formatting is consistent, even for old posts, […]

Twitter Automation: Scheduled Tweets From Google Sheets

This article explains how to set up a Twitter bot in a Google Sheets spreadsheet. It provides an easy way to efficiently schedule a large number of tweets in a […]

Should I Have Separate Personal & Professional Twitter Accounts?

That was a question I was asking myself more and more recently. After a bit of deliberation, I answered it with yes. This article summarizes my reasoning.

Google Analytics: Cookieless Tracking Without GDPR Consent

This article presents a simple method to use Google Analytics without cookies. Going cookieless means there is no need for a cookie consent dialog. It also means much easier GDPR […]

Azure DevOps: Restricting Credentials to a Single Repository

You may find yourself in a situation where you need to limit a set of credentials to a single Git repository only – like I did when I was working […]

Improved Home Network Privacy With NextDNS

This article is for you if you want to improve privacy and block ads on all devices on your network without installing any software, simply by configuring a modern DNS […]

Linux Config File Version Control & Backup on GitHub

Linux famously stores all of its settings in files, making it easy to inspect, query, or backup the configuration with a plethora of tools, including Git. However, given that Git […]

Changing the Location of KeePass Configuration Files

Depending on your KeePass package (installer or portable), the default settings location may resolve to the installation directory or the user profile. This article explains how to locate the configuration […]

End-to-End-Encrypted Team Communication & Collaboration Tools

This post is a collection of my notes about my search for secure collaboration and communication tools for smaller organizations, specifically vast limits. I will update it from time to […]

Find in Files With Grep-Like Context (Lines Surrounding Matches)

I sometimes need all occurrences of a search string in the files of a directory. OK, that’s easy. Here’s the difficult part: I need search results displayed with context around […]

Disable TLS 1.0 and 1.1 in Firefox Now!

Mozilla had planned to disable the insecure versions 1.0 and 1.1 of the TLS protocol in Firefox 74. Unfortunately, they reverted that planned change. This post explains how to disable […]

Switching from Chrome to Firefox

After many years as a happy user, I switched from Chrome to Firefox. How did that go? Astonishingly well! Here are some notes I took in the process.

Firefox Containers: Multiple (Gmail) Logins Through Privacy Isolation

To monitor web app performance and usage on any site (or just on your business-critical SaaS apps), take a look at our uberAgent product. In a nutshell, Firefox Containers makes […]

Windows Setup USB Flash Drive Not Showing Up in BIOS List of Boot Devices

There are countless articles on how to install Windows 10 from a USB flash drive. Most of them, however, fail to mention a common problem: the USB flash drive does […]

Enabling Multi-Processor (Parallel) Builds in Visual Studio

Building larger solutions in Visual Studio can be tediously slow. Part of the reason is that the compiler does not make use of multiple CPU cores well. This article shows […]

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 […]