This is part 1 of my application network connection monitoring series, a group of articles that explain how to analyze the network traffic of any Windows or macOS app. The communication targets of the Windows OS and of many popular apps are listed in dedicated posts.

It’s a little-known fact that Windows comes with per-user services, background processes that complement the well-known per-machine system services. This article explains what per-user services are, how to create your own, and which configuration options there are.

Lint is a static code analysis tool that is used to identify various kinds of problems, with the goal of making source code more consistent and avoiding bugs. There are two popular linters for JavaScript: ESLint and JSHint.

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 Studio Code a go and found note-taking heaven.

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 note that this post is about lightweight JavaScript without any frameworks.

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 the audio codec used by the Bluetooth A2DP profile, but there is a way. This post shows how to check if your connection makes use of aptX, LDAC, or some other more advanced codec, or if it falls back to SBC.

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, and shortcodes are kept in check. As always, automation is key. This post shows how to search and replace in WordPress posts with the help of regular expressions.

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 consistent format.

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. My Twitter History I have been on Twitter for more than 11 years. If I remember correctly, Brian Madden - whose website was extremely popular in the Citrix community at the time - had urged people to join Twitter a little earlier. I responded to Brian’s call and quickly realized that Twitter was a great platform that allows people with a common interest to identify each other and communicate. In my case, that interest was end-user computing, of course, the products and technologies from companies like Citrix or Microsoft. After joining Twitter, at conferences, many of the names were known to me, and sometimes I to them. Getting into contact was so much easier. The major difficulty was recognizing someone from their Twitter profile picture (something we often joked about).

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 compliance. The only thing you need to do is to embed the Google Analytics tracking script in a different way, which should be possible with most web publishing platforms. Please bear in mind that my background is technical, not legal.

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 on a Git-based configuration backup solution for Linux. In such a case, you want the Git credentials you are storing per machine to grant access to that machine’s repository only. As useful as such a setup is from a security point of view, it is currently difficult to implement in Azure DevOps.

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 service, yet with the ability to override settings for individual sites, and with nice dashboards thrown in for good measure.

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 was conceived by the Linux community, there is surprisingly little integration. As a developer, I am used to managing everything with Git. Depending on my current degree of paranoia, I may put nearly or literally everything into version control. So where’s Git for Linux config 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 file and shows how to move it to any directory of your choice.

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 time.

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 the matching lines. In other words: I need to know what is in the lines above and/or below the results. None of the text editors and IDEs I am using regularly seem to be able to do display search results with context lines. Enter AstroGrep.

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 insecure TLS versions yourself.

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. My History of Changing Browsers Netscape to Internet Explorer I think I started out with Netscape Navigator on Windows 95. My first change of browsers happened with Windows NT 4 and Internet Explorer 4. That was a great browser! Everybody switched to IE in the following years. Microsoft’s domination of the browser market (yes, that was a reality for many years) started right there with IE4. Internet Explorer was successful not only because it was bundled with the operating system, but also because it was a good application.

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 it possible to log in to a website with multiple different accounts at the same time. This is accomplished through data segmentation: cookies and other site data stay within the boundaries of a container.

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 not show up in the BIOS’ list of boot devices. Here is a simple solution that often works.

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 you how to change that.

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 installation media to download. This article lists the necessary steps to get Office 2019 on your machine(s) without assigning Office 365 licenses.

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 moving your existing configuration to a different location.

I am a mechanical keyboard aficionado. I guess this started in the late ’90s when I typed on a Cherry G80-3000-LSMDE for the first time. The low force required to press a key combined with the tiny click when a keystroke registered created a typing experience that was both easy and precise. I have not owned many keyboards that managed to recreate this typing experience (actually none). Here is a little account of my decade-long journey across keyboard land.