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.

How to centrally manage essential security settings of self-managed devices This is a guest post by Martin Kretzschmar, customer success engineer at vast limits, the uberAgent company. One thing I especially like about my everyday working life is the flexibility it offers. I appreciate the freedom of choice in terms of location, time and device. We want to avoid getting into micro-management but, being an IT company, we also need to provide the necessary security where needed.

This article explains how to get started with Total Commander, 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 way that makes you wonder how you suffered Explorer for such a long time. It has keyboard shortcuts for everything and is super-configurable, fast and efficient. On top of that, it can probably replace half a dozen tools in addition to File Explorer.

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 I wanted to convert helgeklein.com from a multisite into a single site installation. Here are the steps I took.

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 attractive prices and - astonishingly - good support. This article lists some issues we encountered while installing Windows Server 2019 on the EX62 and AX100 servers and how we worked around them. Reading the earlier article is highly recommended.

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 ever been through a theme migration, you know that standardizing on HTML tags and shortcodes makes the process a lot less painful. If you know what you are looking for, this solution to search your posts’ content might be just what you need.

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 an “incorrect” naming scheme. Here is how to quickly rename many files with the help of the versatile Total Commander.

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 VM.

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 also needs a lot of disk space. H.264 has a successor, H.265, which only requires half the space for the same visual quality. This post shows how to use StaxRip, a free tool, to re-encode H.264 video into H.265 quickly by making use of GPU hardware encoding.

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 Equalizer APO with Peace, its UI.