Ctrl blog

Opening a pull request is all it takes to get a GitHub patch URL that’s indistinguishable from patches/commits that are a part of an open-source GitHub project.

My patches remove some unnecessary syscalls that keep the Rake task and build system needlessly waste time waiting for I/O. Spend less time waiting for Rake.

Web browsers don’t yet support (text-wrap: balance). Adobe and the NYTimes have offer free JavaScript alternatives. I improved the latter to suit my needs.

A new promo message for Microsoft Teams broke the Windows desktop shell and the taskbar for Windows 11 Insider users. Why can cloud services break Windows PCs?

I find the Windows 10 sound notifications loud and stressful. Microsoft has made the new sound themes for Windows 11 calmer and less overwhelming than Win10.

An in-depth privacy and security review of Tribler, a more private BitTorrent client backed by an onion/layered encryption proxy relay network. Is it anonymous?

Always use the ‘.home.arpa’ top-level domain (RFC 8375), and don’t use the special-purpose ‘.local,’ or made-up undelegated domain names like ‘.lan’ or ‘.home.’

The RB750Gr3 is an inexpensive Gigabit router with advanced network management capabilities for just €50/$60. It’s highly configurable with a steep learning curve.

How to get Windows Delivery Optimization to download updates from PCs on your LAN network (or the internet). Reduce internet data/bandwidth usage with LAN P2P.

Is Bedtime mode on Android using Do Not Disturb mode to silence alerts and notifications? That’s unclear, if you’ve got the Samsung Digital Wellbeing app.

Microsoft to include Windows Terminal by default in Windows 10 and 11. The Terminal app bundles new Cascadia Code and Cascadia Mono fonts as new system fonts.

The preorder purchase experience at PacktPub was confusing. Packt never notified me when the book was made available to download. The ePub was also unformatted.

The tale of my bad experiences with consumer-grade Realtek networking equipment over the last decade. Intel has always had to come in to save the day.

Google Chrome for Android gives Google Search (when set as the default search engine) a network performance-boost over competing search engines.

How the default web browser fonts vary, why they are what they are, and how to make your webdesign look the same on different operating systems.

The compression format war of the last decade was won by Gzip. Why do web browsers still support the legacy HTTP Deflate (Zlib) format? It’s time to deprecate it.

The Logitech K835 TKL is a low-latency and well-built budget keyboard. Mechanical keyboards aren’t just for gamers with too much disposable income!

A comparison of the many different methods for embedding SVG into HTML webpages. Which work best with light/dark-mode, client caching, interactive mode, and more.

Google hasn’t turned Chrome into a feed reader, but it does use Atom and RSS feeds to let visitors follow any website. Here are more details on how it works.

A brief history of where news/syndication feeds (“RSS“) went wrong, and how Google Chrome might just have found the right place for it in the Chrome web browser.

The Australian “link tax” levied on digital platforms linking to news is overly broad. Here’s an idea for how to better target it and narrow its scope.

The Wi-Fi on my MacBook Pro has intermittently stopped working. (Likely a Broadcom driver issue). Here’s how I turned a simple workaround into a more permanent fix.