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Technology

Lynne Teaches Tech: What do all the components of a computer mean?

This is a revised version of this post.

If you’re buying a computer or laptop or even a phone, there’s a lot of jargon that might confuse you to look out for. It ranges from straightforward statistics to obscure facts to annoying “gotcha”s. This post aims to break them down.

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A simple glitch-soc tweak

Mastodon recently added a cool feature that blurs images when they’re marked as sensitive and while they’re loading. I noticed that it automatically hides this blur when the image loads, but it’s trivial to put it back. Combined with the glitch-soc setting to display full images rather than cropping them, we can use two little CSS rules to change those ugly letterboxes and pillarboxes to a nice-looking blurred background!

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Lynne Teaches Tech: Why does Windows need to restart to install updates so often?

There are many different system files that Windows needs in order to function. These files are often updated using Windows Update to add new features, fix bugs, patch security issues, and more.

Windows is unable to replace these files while they’re in use. This is for numerous reasons, both technical and practical.

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Lynne Teaches Tech: What are all the different types and versions of USB about?

Describing something like an Ethernet port is easy. You have one number to worry about: the speed rating. 100Mbps, 1Gbps, 10Gbps… It’s very simple.

USB, on the other hand, has two defining attributes: the type, and the version. Calling a USB port “USB 3.1” or “USB-C” doesn’t tell you the whole story.

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