Making the Windows 10 Nag Icon Go Away
A step-by-step guide to killing the Windows 10 upgrade nag icon and stopping the forced reservation download, after watching it hijack a relative's laptop overnight.
Tutorials
Tutorials
Getting Ready for the Windows 10 Upgrade (Before That Tray Icon Wins)
Windows 10 ships in eight days. Heres what Im actually doing to get my machines ready before I let that little tray icon anywhere near them.
Ten Minutes to Stop Flash From Running Itself
The Hacking Team breach dumped fresh Flash zero-days on the internet this week. Here's how to switch Chrome, Firefox, and Safari to click-to-play in about ten minutes.
I Dumped Ten Years of Photos Into Google Photos This Weekend
Google announced free unlimited photo storage at I/O last week, so I spent Saturday moving a decade of photos over. Here's what the "unlimited" actually means and where it gets you.
The Viewport Tag I Forgot For Four Years
Google's mobile-friendly ranking update goes live today, and running techpad through the test tool turned up a viewport tag I somehow never added in years of running this blog.
The One-Port MacBook: A Dongle Survival Guide
Apple's new single-port 12-inch MacBook means a lot of people are about to discover dongle life. Here's what you'll actually need to buy before it ships.
Superfish Scared Me Into Finally Setting Up 2FA
The Lenovo Superfish mess finally scared me into setting up two-factor authentication on everything. Here's the order I did it in and why it matters.
Checking For The Superfish Certificate
A step by step look at checking your Windows machine for the Superfish root certificate that shipped on Lenovo laptops, plus what happened when I checked my dad's.
Fine, I'm Setting Up a Password Manager This Weekend
After the Anthem breach, the Stanford cybersecurity summit, and Kaspersky's hard-drive-firmware bombshell, I finally sat down and set up a real password manager. Here's what that Saturday actually looked like.
How I Made My Own Left Shark GIFs With ffmpeg
How I turned Sunday's Left Shark moment into a clean GIF using ffmpeg instead of Photoshop, plus my actual opinion on which shark was funnier.
Patching GHOST on My Tiny Droplet
A walkthrough of patching the GHOST glibc vulnerability on a self-hosted VPS, plus some grumbling about rebooting a server with 400 days of uptime.
Running the Windows 10 Preview Without Touching Your Real Machine
A walkthrough of running the Windows 10 Technical Preview in a VirtualBox VM without risking your main machine, plus some honest notes on where build 9879 still falls short.