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.
Read More »Lynne Teaches Tech: Why does Windows need to restart to install updates so often?
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.
Read More »Lynne Teaches Tech: What are all the different types and versions of USB about?Note: This story contains Homestuck spoilers. It contains graphical descriptions of violence, murder, a mention of suicide, and other upsetting content.
Read More »Streaks of CrimsonUpdated on 13/05/19 to reflect new closing date, and again to link to the results post. I decided to create a small survey to ask a few non-personal questions about Fediverse users, their opinions on its various platforms, and their thoughts on non-Fediverse networks, such as Facebook and Twitter. The… Read More »A Survey of the Fediverse
Mozilla, the company behind Firefox, have implemented a number of security checks in their browser related to extensions. One such check is a digital certificate that all add-ons must be signed with. This certificate is like a HTTPS certificate – the thing that gives you a green padlock in your browser’s URL bar.
You’ve probably seen a HTTPS error before. This happens when a site’s certificate is invalid for one reason or another. One such reason is that the certificate has expired.
Read More »Lynne Teaches Tech: Why did everyone’s Firefox add-ons get disabled around May 4th?Content warning: These images mention suicide and depression.
Read More »Depression in the Information Age – Part TwoI’ve noticed that Discord for Linux takes a very, very long time to start up – sometimes in the order of hours. During this time, my laptop gets very hot. I eventually decided to look into this and found that several instances of xdg-mime were taking up 100% CPU. Killing them caused Discord to open instantly.
Apparently this issue is present with Spotify too. This fix will work for both of them.
Read More »Discord and Spotify for Linux and xdg-mimewhen you see a website that’s HTTPS rather than HTTP, it means the connection is secure. most popular browsers will display a green padlock in the URL bar to symbolise that (and colour it yellow or red if something’s wrong). to verify that a connection is secure (and not just… Read More »Lynne Teaches Tech: What does HTTPS mean?
Update: A lot of people have left me comments telling me that OCRbot really has helped them, and that they wouldn’t have posted or boosted certain content without it. I didn’t realise that when I wrote this, and I’m really happy to hear that OCRbot does actually have a purpose.… Read More »The failure of OCRbot
Searx is a free and open source metasearch engine. It can be self-hosted (like I do!) or accessed at searx.me. Metasearch engine? A metasearch engine is a search engines that uses other search engines to get its results. For example, when you search metasearch engine A for “cat”, it would… Read More »Configuring Searx