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.

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.