Dicio is the on-device voice assistant Google should have shipped
Google is shutting down Google Assistant on Android in September, and the replacement the company wants you to use is Gemini. That is fine for a lot of people. It is not…
#privacy
74 articles
Fixing Windows Cross Device Service CPU usage on Windows 11
A laptop I set up for a relative started spinning its fan the moment the screen unlocked. Task Manager showed a process called Microsoft Cross Device Service sitting at 30 to 40…
A quieter Windows 11 Start menu in fifteen minutes of clicking
I open the Start menu roughly forty times a day. Click, three letters, Enter, done. That loop took about a second on Windows 10. On Windows 11 it stretched toward two and…
Four self-hosted categories and the hours they really cost
Per-seat pricing is one of the few lines on a software invoice you can delete without asking anyone’s permission. Drop a seat, and the charge drops the same billing cycle. That is…
Three reliable ways to find your Windows version, build, and edition
I have lost count of how many times I have had to ask myself what Windows version I was running. The answer lives three keystrokes away, but the question gets asked for…
head, tail, and cat cover more Linux file work than you think
I have watched sysadmins open a 200 MB log in nano, scroll for ten minutes, then give up and grep for the line they wanted. The same job takes two seconds with…
nc, nmap, ss, and bash are the four port-test tools you actually need
You SSH into a fresh server, type telnet 443 out of muscle memory, and the shell replies that the command is not installed. There is a moment where you almost install telnet…
Selling a used laptop? The recycle bin is not secure erase
You wiped the drive, reinstalled Windows, and shipped the laptop to its new owner. The new owner booted a recovery tool and pulled your tax returns, your kid’s baby photos, and the…
SlopScan puts a letter grade on every github repo you visit
The first time I noticed the pattern was a colleague’s side project. A repo with a tidy README, a clean commit history, and an oddly empty src/ directory. The code looked fine,…
Top and side taskbar placement lands in Windows 11 testing
For most of the Windows 11 era, the taskbar has had exactly one legal home: the bottom edge of the screen. That is changing. Windows Central reports that the latest Insider Preview…