An architecture overview of current browsers on Windows: Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer. In case you are wondering: I did not include Edge because it is currently being transitioned to the Chromium rendering engine, which might change a few things. I did include Internet Explorer because it is still the default browser in many enterprises.

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 support a small subset of profiles, typically only one or two, according to their designated function.

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 not limited to external tools. It can be used to run internal TC commands, too. In this article, I am using that capability to build a simple solution for saving and restoring sets of Total Commander tabs to and from files.

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 and configuration.

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 that makes the browsers comparable. Unless you are testing with synthetic benchmarks (which come with a plethora of problems of their own) you need a way to automate browsers opening tabs and loading URLs. This article presents a simple solution to do just that.

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 Apache web server hosting WordPress sites.

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 and amount of RAM. Microsoft’s documentation of the relevant command is missing an essential parameter. Here are the commands you need.

On the eve of my departure for E2EVC Athens I feel it is time for a laudation. Let me explain why. Athens will be my 22nd E2EVC out of 40 events total. In the past eight years, I attended every single E2EVC event in Europe and the US. There is a reason for that, of course. It is certainly not an overabundance of time on my part or even wanderlust. It is simply the fact that E2EVC’s creator, Alex Cooper, has done the most remarkable thing. He single-handedly established the Citrix community in Europe (and helped along the greater end-user community quite a bit). That is a - very - significant achievement.

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 search led me to this list of aspect ratios of national flags on Wikipedia. Apparently, national flags are far from standardized. A broad range of aspect ratios is being used. I decided to start a little fun project finding out which aspect ratios are most common.

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.

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 me the number one is encryption. The major players, Microsoft OneNote, Evernote, and Google Keep, store your thoughts and ideas in plain text on any synchronized device as well as their cloud servers. In the age of hacks, leaks, and exploits it does not take much to conjure up scenarios where those thoughts become public knowledge all of a sudden.

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 choose from all performance counters available on the local system – you can monitor network throughput just as easily as hard disk activity or memory usage.

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 on available hardware resources. I prepared a VM and started my tests with a single CPU core and 2 GB of RAM, planning to gradually add more cores, more RAM and, eventually, a GPU. As it turned out, the latter is harder than anticipated.

This is an attempt at guidelines to help in technology decisions about when and where to use blockchain technology. Blockchain in a Nutshell A blockchain is a distributed list more than one entity can add new elements to. Each list element cryptographically validates its predecessor. Combined with the fact that adding new elements is computationally expensive, this protects the list’s integrity.

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 build published by German c’t magazine.

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 back up three hosts colocated in a large datacenter. This article summarizes my journey and the findings resulting from it.

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 that you are getting targeted ads for the exact same product on totally unrelated sites - or so you think. There is, however, a common denominator: the ad network. It tracks you quite effectively as you move from site to site. Many people are not exactly happy about that and turn to ad blockers to guard their privacy. This article looks at one way to measure the ad blockers’ effectiveness in terms of keeping their users’ privacy.

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 formats, codecs, and GPU acceleration techniques is at work to make it all happen. This post explains what is what.

When Splunk displays an orange warning triangle instead of a chart or table it is time to investigate. Start by clicking the triangle to bring up a dialog with the error message. In my case that looked like this:

Podio is a superb tool for team collaboration, structured information handling and even business process management. However, it is not perfect. There are some astonishing gaps in functionality. One of those is the lack of support for checklists and recurring processes. Here is how to work around that.

A recent article on Microsoft’s Ask the Directory Services Team blog piqued my interest. It talks about how leaked access tokens prevent logon sessions to be freed when the user logs off. This wastes system resources that can only be reclaimed by rebooting. A symptom of this happening is that RDS session IDs are not reused.

I have been watching streaming video for a very long time. It always worked beautifully, in high resolutions and from any site: YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, you name it. Then suddenly I started to notice lip sync issues, probably around autumn/winter 2016. The longer a video played, the more the audio would get out of sync with the video, making watching and listening increasingly awkward. Recently I finally found the time to analyze these audio/video sync problems. Read on for a playback troubleshooting methodology followed by a workaround for the issue at hand.

This post describes how I upgraded our webserver running WordPress on Apache from Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS to 16.04.1 LTS. Please see this article for more information on the server’s installation and configuration.

Update: KB4022723 seems to fix the black lock screen issue described in this article. The Spotlight feature of Windows 10 shows beautiful images on the lock screen. Annoyingly, it appears to be broken on many machines, showing a black screen instead of a pretty photograph. Read on for the cause and a workaround.