(Wed Dec 23 2015 00:00:00 GMT+0200 (Eastern European Standard Time)) It's known the U.S. Government spy agencies have demanded "cooperation" from computer and networking equipment vendors in ensuring spy agencies can unlawfully tap into communications traffic. The effect is that anybody learning the secret keys used by government spies to wiretap communications can also listen in on communications.
(Wed Dec 16 2015 00:00:00 GMT+0200 (Eastern European Standard Time)) Headless Wordpress is becoming a thing, now that Wordpress 4.4 has been released and has some core support for a REST API. The Drupal world has seen Headless Drupal work for a couple years now, and the Wordpress community has seen the light as well. The advantages of decoupling the website rendering from content management are many, the biggest perhaps being the rapidly changing best practices landscape for delivering content to the display device. The capabilities at the client end are rapidly morphing, much more quickly than the release cycles of the content management systems.
(Wed Dec 16 2015 00:00:00 GMT+0200 (Eastern European Standard Time)) We're in a silly season of U.S. presidential electioneering - of all people, Donald Trump is the leading Republican candidate for President, for example. Last night, civil liberties and the right to privacy was gravely threatened in the latest Republican Presidential candidates debate. Most of the candidates demonstrated they care nothing for our personal freedoms, and are willing to destroy American's freedom's in the name of "Fighting Terrorism". Donald Trump wants to shut down parts of the Internet, vaguely lacking in details. Sen. Ted Cruz says the recent San Bernardino happened because the FBI (et al) didn't do enough surveillance of online discussions. Carly Fiorina says that Silicon Valley needs to cooperate with Federal Officials to make sure they can tap into any conversation they want, and therefore spy on anything we say online.
(Wed Dec 09 2015 00:00:00 GMT+0200 (Eastern European Standard Time)) The adblockocalypse was supposed to make it impossible for website owners to make a living, because everyone is going to run ad blockers and we'd get no advertising revenue. Those of us who write on our websites have for years lived under the belief/hope that running advertising would give us a livable income letting us get on with the business of writing. While website advertising no longer works that well, it's an important component of the full monetization strategy every blogger or website author uses.
(Fri Oct 16 2015 00:00:00 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)) Old laptop screens have bright backlights. It's fairly easy to remove the LCD panel from the laptop display, and then take off the LCD portion, allowing the backlight to shine fully. This video shows how to construct a "light panel".
(Sun Jul 19 2015 00:00:00 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)) Gmail has done us all a great service by developing an excellent spam filter. I used to get hundreds of spam emails a day, and switching to Gmail reduced the spam rate to a few per week. No longer am I buried by spam. Of course the cost for this is to regularly visit the spam folder and see if Gmail accidentally marked any as spam (a.k.a. false positive for spam). Usually there's only a few and it's easy to click the "Not Spam" button to retrieve those emails back into the regular inbox.
(Fri Jun 05 2015 00:00:00 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)) I'm now primarily using a Chromebook for all my work - which includes software development on Linux, thanks to having installed Crouton. Since the Chromebook has only 4GB of main memory, things are a little constrained. I'm accustomed to running dozens of open tabs and on the Chromebook what happens is tabs are killed off when memory runs low, and if you revisit the tab it might cause a complete reload. That'd been bugging me until I found a new tool that completely tames open browser tabs.
(Fri Feb 27 2015 00:00:00 GMT+0200 (Eastern European Standard Time)) Backing-up your data is extremely important. Say you've been carefully storing your pictures and videos, your personal memories, your family history, on a laptop computer, and you've carefully moved the picture/video archive from laptop to laptop as you upgrade. What happens if the laptop is stolen, if you drop it and the drive breaks, or any of the other mishaps that can happen. If that single laptop is the sole solitary place that data is stored, you're screwed. This video goes over a few data backup options, and strongly recommends storing backups not just at your home, but somewhere else as well. The price for data storage units are falling rapidly, and thanks to powerful/compact computation their capabilities are growing.
