Disk speed is an important part of measuring a server’s performance. AWS has many different types of EBS volumes, and it uses a burst-bucket model—similar to T2 instances—to determine your disk’s overall speed. Most server workloads probably include some sort of memory-caching, so if you have plenty of RAM, your disk speed might not matter that much; once a file is read, it can stay in memory for a while....

The Difference Between Personal Comfort and Safety For this discussion, we’re not focused on optimal comfort. If you’re headed out of town, you won’t be there to be unhappy it’s 10 degrees colder than normal. And if you’re staying home, we’re assuming you’re braced for the coolness and have a cozy blanket ready. Further, matters such as preferred temperature during the winter are subjective, and opinions vary wildly. While my immediate family loves keeping the house chilly in the winter, our relatives from semi-tropical climates think we’re out of our minds for setting our thermostat so cold....

Elasticsearch is an open source search engine. It’s commonly used in conjunction with log aggregation to make analyzing server logs easy. AWS offers it as a managed service along with Kibana, a visualization dashboard for Elasticsearch. Why Bother with Log Files? Everything in Linux is logged. System actions are logged to /var/log/syslog, and most applications create log files. Most notably, web servers create log entries for every request, making log analytics a very powerful tool....

Ready to start delegating? Google implemented the checklist feature in Google Docs as an easy way to manage tasks in your document. To go with it, you now have the ability to assign items on your checklist. When you collaborate with others in Google Docs, you can make sure that everyone does their part. Create a checklist of tasks or duties, assign them to the appropriate team members, and even include due dates....

Set a Clear Goal The first step in planning our holiday is to create a clear goal on what we would like to get out of our holiday. Our holiday goals should be concise, clear, and result oriented. A goal should include a verb that contains all your vacation choices. Ask ourselves the following questions to understand what do we really need and hoping to get from our holiday: Where do we want to go ?...

Note: Works with Firefox, Flock, SeaMonkey, and Songbird. Before Before adding the extension to our browser we tested the user agent string at UserAgentString.com and got a positive I.D. result for Firefox. After Once you add the extension to Firefox you can access the alternate user agent string in two ways. The first is through the tools menu… Note: The user agent string will automatically reset back to the default each time you restart Firefox....

AMIs are similar to operating system ISOs but are more than a simple OS. They are base templates that you can build on top of; they contain the OS, preinstalled software, and configuration files that the server needs to function. AMIs Are More Than an Operating System However, there are many AMIs that contain extra software suited for different tasks. AWS has a whole community browser for these, where a quick scroll will find you many AMIs like this:...

If you have a huge tar backup file and you need to grab some files out of it, wouldn’t it be easier if you can look inside first? Luckily there’s an easy option to do so. Simply use the -t option to list the contents of the archive because that letter says “list” to everybody and it’s so easy to remember. Yeah. Combine with the -f option to specify the tarfile that you’re getting the list from....

First go to the Start \ All Programs and right-click Windows Update and while holding down the right mouse button drag it over to the desktop. When you release the right mouse button click on Create shortcuts here. Now right-click the Windows Update shortcut and select Properties. This opens Window Update Properties and under the Shortcut tab type in or copy the following into the Target box. If you don’t want to see the command window open up briefly when you launch it, change the Run dropdown menu to Minimized, then click Apply and Ok....

Typically, Windows 11 plays audio through one device at a time—whether that be USB speakers or wireless headphones. What if you want to hear sound from multiple devices at the same time? With a little tinkering, it can be done. We’ll be using a feature called “Stereo Mix” (which has other purposes as well) to play audio through two devices at once. For example, you could have two pairs of speakers connected to create surround sound, or hear audio from speakers and headphones at the same time....

Dictionary Attacks User accounts on computer systems, web sites, and hosted services need to be protected from unauthorized access. User authentication is the most common way to do this. Users are given a unique user ID—for online accounts, this is usually their email address—and a password. These two bits of information must be provided, checked, and verified before the user can access the account. Dictionary attacks are a family of cyberattacks that share a common attack technique....

And to make matters worse, if you’re using Skitch to capture screenshots of various terminal commands, it captures the full path from Terminal and uses that as the file name, which is just absurdly long. The much simpler solution is to simply add a couple of lines of code to change all uploaded images to a simple randomized file name, and then trim it down to the first 8 characters to make sure that image paths in the HTML aren’t too crazy....

Simply type in the following command at the prompt: And then you’ll see a big long list of all the processor in the system, along with all the information about them, which should look something like this: You’ll see in this example that we’re running on an Intel Xeon L5520 running at 2.27GHz… and if we had shown the full example you’d see that there are actually 4 cores on the machine....

Installing Dependencies First, we’ll need to install NGINX. Update apt and install it: If you have a firewall enabled, like UFW, you’ll need to open it up: We’ll configure NGINX once WordPress is installed. In the meantime, we’ll need to create a MySQL database for WordPress to use. If you don’t have MySQL installed, you can get it from apt. Make sure to run mysql_secure_installation once it’s installed to lock it down....

Speech transcription is a problem that’s commonly solved with expensive human workers. With machine learning though, computers have caught up, and AWS’s AI-powered Speech Recognition Toolkit is now available as a service for your application to use. AWS Transcribe Converts Audio Files in S3 Transcribe is simple—give it an audio file (stored in S3), and it can churn through it and give you an output. You are charged based on the length of audio, at a rate of $0....

Refs are a React feature which let you directly access DOM nodes created by a component’s render() method. They provide a way to break out of React’s declarative rendering so you can call browser APIs. When working with React, you usually declare what a component’s DOM should look like using JSX: Internally, React transpiles the JSX to work out how to manipulate the DOM. It’ll use browser functions such as document....

Have you ever needed to hit the pause button while watching Live TV in Windows Media Center? Maybe you had to take an important call only to come back and find that your paused show has started playing again on it’s own? Windows Media Center has built in pause buffer of 40 minutes. If that just isn’t enough time for you, let’s take a look at how to edit the registry to increase the Live TV pause buffer so you don’t end up missing those important TV moments....

Google Wave is an online web app, and unlike many Google services, it’s not easily integrated with standard desktop applications. Instead, you’ll have to keep it open in a browser tab, and since it is one of the most intensive HTML5 webapps available today, you may notice slowdowns in many popular browsers. Plus, it can be hard to stay on top of your Wave conversations and collaborations by just switching back and forth between the website and whatever else you’re working on....

Dragging With a Context Menu Windows users are very used to dragging with the right mouse button, as it gives them a very convenient menu to decide what they’d like to do with the dragged files. Play Video In GNOME, however, you’ll notice that right-clicking immediately yields a context menu. To get the same behavior, you actually need to use the middle mouse button. You get a menu that allows you to move, copy, or link files to your destination....

Windows Media Player If you want to keep music management simple, and not having to install extra software, using Window Media Player (WMP) will work just fine. In windows 7 it’s version 12 which is laid out differently, and has more options than previous versions you might be used to. It is a full-featured media player that will let you play music, rip and burn CD’s, copy, tag, rate, organize, and manage most of your media files....