May 2019

CP/M, a very old operating system for very old computers, used drive letters to distinguish between each drive on a computer. the first drive would be drive A, then drive B, and so on. CP/M computers typically had two floppy disk drives (drive A and B). when a CP/M machine… Read More »Lynne Teaches Tech: Why does Windows install to drive C by default? Why not A?

images like PNG and JPEG files get blurry when zoomed in beyond 100% of their size. this is true of video files, too, and many other methods of representing graphics. this is because these files contain an exact description of what to show. they tell the computer what colour each… Read More »Lynne Teaches Tech: Why does text on a webpage stay sharp when you zoom in, even though images get blurry?

keybase is a website that allows you to prove that a given account or website is owned by you. to explain how this works, we’ll need to briefly cover public key cryptography. there are many ways to encrypt a file. one such way involves using a password to encrypt the… Read More »Lynne Teaches Tech: What’s Keybase?

most people count using a decimal system. the lowest digit is 0, followed by 1, 2, and so on, through to 9. when you’re counting up and you reach nine, you need to add another digit. there’s no way to express ten with only one digit, so you use two… Read More »Lynne Teaches Tech: What’s an integer overflow?

when you access a website in your browser, its URL (Universal Resource Location) will almost always start with either https:// or http://. this is known as the schema, and tells the browser what type of connection it’s going to be using, and how it needs to talk to the server.… Read More »Lynne Teaches Tech: What do all the parts of a URL or hyperlink mean?