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This past month we covered topics such as how to troubleshoot internet connection problems, whether or not dust can actually damage your computer, 7 ways to free up hard disk space on Windows, and more. Join us as we look back at the best articles for October. The Best Articles of October Note: Articles are listed as #10 through #1. HTG Explains: How Antivirus Software Works Antivirus programs are powerful pieces of software that are essential on Windows computers....

If you leave your computer on when you are not using it, there are ways you can put your computer to use when it’s sitting idle. It can do scientific research, backup your data, and even look for signs of extraterrestrial life. Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) If you want to help with the advancement of scientific research, the BOINC project allows you to use your idle computer to help cure diseases, study global warming, discover pulsars, among other types of research....

Every week we bring you interesting facts from the annals of Geekdom. This week in Geek History saw the birth of HAL, the first landing on an alien moon, and the first real-world test of a fighter jet ejection seat. HAL Goes Online HAL, the sentient computer aboard the fictional Discovery spacecraft in Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, is one of the best known fictional representations of artificial intelligent in the literary and cinematic world....

Open source workflows facilitate easy collaboration and rapid iteration. Publicly accessible issues and merge requests on platforms like GitHub let anyone contribute to a project. Bugs are discovered and patched quickly, safely, and transparently in an environment that fosters regular discussion between maintainers and users. This model can contrast starkly with how software’s developed inside large organizations. In these environments, tools are developed in an ad-hoc fashion by individual teams....

If you’re familiar with app stores on iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows, Mac, Chromebook, and beyond, you’ll encounter the concept of in-app purchases. What are they, and what do they do? We’ll explain. What Is an In-App Purchase? In-app purchases are a way to add features to an app or program you’ve already downloaded or purchased. They can be things like new levels in a game, additional options in an app, or a subscription to a service....

Grafana is an open-source observability platform for visualizing metrics, logs, and traces collected from your applications. It’s a cloud-native solution for quickly assembling data dashboards that let you inspect and analyze your stack. Grafana connects to a variety of data sources such as Prometheus, InfluxDB, ElasticSearch, and traditional relational database engines. Complex dashboards are created by using these sources to select relevant fields from your data. Dashboards can incorporate a varied range of visualization components such as graphs, heat maps, and histograms....

In this article, we’ll explain what JSON is, how it expresses different data types, and the ways you can produce and consume it in popular programming languages. We’ll also cover some of JSON’s limitations and the alternatives that have emerged. JSON Basics JSON was originally devised by Douglas Crockford as a stateless format for communicating data between browsers and servers. Back in the early 2000s, websites were beginning to asynchronously fetch extra data from their server, after the initial page load....

Logical Volume Management (LVM) is a disk management option that every major Linux distribution includes. Whether you need to set up storage pools or just need to dynamically create partitions, LVM is probably what you are looking for. What is LVM? Logical Volume Manager allows for a layer of abstraction between your operating system and the disks/partitions it uses. In traditional disk management your operating system looks for what disks are available (/dev/sda, /dev/sdb, etc....

What Is Zoombombing? “Zoombombing” is when an uninvited person joins a Zoom meeting. This is usually done in an attempt to gain a few cheap laughs at the expense of the participants. Zoombombers often hurl racial slurs or profanity, or share pornography and other offensive imagery. This issue isn’t necessarily a security flaw. The problem is how people handle public Zoom meeting links. These links are shared thousands of times between clients, friends, colleagues, classmates, and so on....

Deno 1.19 was released in February 2022 as the latest incremental update for the secure-by-design JavaScript runtime. Among the changes are a streamlined permissions management experience, first-class support for vendored dependencies, and new native web streams for files, network sockets, and standard input and output. In this article we’ll look at the major additions and improvements that will alter how you use Deno. You can get the full low-down on the release from the changelog on the Deno blog....

PHP 8.1 was released in November 2021 as the latest minor version of the PHP language. It adds several new language features alongside some smaller improvements and performance enhancements. There are a few breaking changes to be aware of but most upgrades from PHP 8.0 should be straightforward. New Features This year’s PHP update adds several new features to enhance developer productivity. Here’s what you’ll be able to use after you upgrade....

The Windows Task Manager is often used for troubleshooting — perhaps closing an application that isn’t working properly or monitoring system resource usage. However, there’s a lot more you can do with Windows 7’s Task Manager. To quickly open the Task Manager, right-click your taskbar and select Start Task Manager. You can also press Ctrl+Shift+Esc to quickly launch the Task Manager with a keyboard shortcut. Windows 8 may have a great new task manager, but Windows 7’s is still useful....

AWS bills everything by the meter, so if you experience unexpected usage, you’re going to have to pay for it. AWS has alarms that can trigger if your bill gets too high. Preventing Cloud Overflow It’s not unusual to experience unexpectedly high resource usage, and you should plan for it in advance. This can happen for lots of reasons: Tons of extra traffic on a small site, usually from “going viral” and being linked somewhere....

Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader Nic finds the run-dialog shortcuts to be handy and wants to expand upon them: If you’re a keyboard ninja, having super speedy access to your favorite apps in this fashion would be handy. How do you go about it? The Answer SuperUser contributor John T offers a quick and simply way to accomplish the shortcut addition:...

Manually Opening Windows Defender The first way to scan your files is to use the Windows Defender GUI, to do so navigate to: Then launch: When the GUI opens, choose to do a custom scan, then click the Scan now button. Now choose the folder you want to scan, and then click OK. That’s all there it to it. Scan Using the Context Menu If you don’t fancy opening the GUI, you could always add an option to the context menu....

Want to play videos from your computer on your Android, without the hassle of copying them to your device’s internal storage? Share a folder over the network with Windows. You can copy files back and forth over Wi-Fi, too. Android doesn’t include built-in functionality for connecting to Windows shared folders or HomeGroups, but it’s pretty easy to set up. We’ve also covered using Plex, a dedicated streaming solution, but this is even simpler....

You might copy and paste data often in your spreadsheets. But did you know that you can use Excel’s paste feature to perform simple calculations? You can add, subtract, multiply, or divide in a few clicks with paste special in Excel. Maybe you have prices that you want to increase or costs that you want to decrease by dollar amounts. Or, perhaps you have inventory that you want to increase or decrease by unit amounts....

Static IP addresses don’t change when containers or services are stopped and started, making them useful for permanent networking. Assigning Docker containers static IP addresses is an easy way to make them more accessible. Why Use a Static IP? There are two kinds of “static IP”; private IP addresses used for internal networking inside a server, and public IP addresses used to connect outside the server, often over the internet....

There are plenty of alternative web browsers on iOS – Opera Mini, Atomic, and Skyfire, to name a few. Without being able to change the default browser none of them feel “at home,” but there’s a fix if you’re jailbroken. Browser Changer Browser Changer is a great little utility available for jailbroken iOS devices. It’s simple and fills in the missing functionality you want: to be able to choose which browser is your default for opening links....

Zip files can be password-protected, but the standard Zip encryption scheme is extremely weak. If your operating system has a built-in way to encrypt zip files, you probably shouldn’t use it. To gain the actual benefits of encryption, you should use AES-256 encryption. 7z archives support this natively, but you can also encrypt Zip files with AES-256 encryption. Zip 2.0 Legacy Encryption vs. AES Encryption There are actually two types of Zip file encryption....