Most of us spend a lot of time inside a web browser. If you're a Chrome, Firefox, or Edge user, then you'll know these browsers come with a huge number of third-party extensions to augment the features already built into the software. But what if you need some kind of …
Read More »Back to BASIC—the Most Consequential Programming Language in the History of Computing
I was entering the miseries of seventh grade in the fall of 1980 when a friend dragged me into a dimly lit second-floor room. The school had recently installed a newfangled Commodore PET computer, a squat and angular box that glowed in the corner. “You gotta try this,” he told …
Read More »Cars Are Rolling Computers Now. So What Happens When They Stop Getting Updates?
In 2022, Jake Brown, a telecommunications professional living in Chattanooga, Tennessee, bought a used 2017 Volkswagen Passat from a local dealership. Brown describes himself as a techy guy, and was excited about the car’s newer, internet-enabled features, including the ability to start it up remotely from his phone. Brown had …
Read More »The Global IT Outage Sends Hospitals Reeling
It was half past midnight Eastern Time when Andrew Rosenberg, an anesthesiologist and critical care doctor who works as chief information officer at Michigan Medicine, suddenly noticed that a substantial number of computers across the health care center had ceased to function. In the hospital’s parlance, it counted as a …
Read More »The AI-Powered Future of Coding Is Near
I am by no means a skilled coder, but thanks to a free program called SWE-agent, I was just able to debug and fix a gnarly problem involving a misnamed file within different code repositories on the software-hosting site GitHub. I pointed SWE-agent at an issue on GitHub and watched …
Read More »How to Use an eSIM for International Travel
An international vacation is a nice opportunity to cut down on your excessive smartphone screen time and be present to soak up all those adventures. (Don’t let life pass you by!) But even if you’re spending less time doomscrolling and more time exploring a new city, you’ll probably still want …
Read More »How to Properly Archive Your Digital Files
The original proposal for the World Wide Web, written by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, is an important piece of internet history. It also can't be opened on modern computers. John Graham-Cumming, a British software engineer and writer, attempted to open the Word document containing the proposal. Modern versions of Microsoft …
Read More »How to Take a Long, Scrolling Screenshot on Android, iOS, and Desktop
When you quickly need to capture something on your phone’s display—a high score, a meme, an address—a screenshot is often the best way to do it. By default though, you'll only get what's showing on the display at that moment, so any part of a webpage or document that isn't …
Read More »Microsoft Faces EU Charges Over ‘Abusive’ Bundling
Brussels has accused Microsoft of illegally abusing its dominance in the business-software market at the expense of smaller rivals, following a complaint at the height of the pandemic by US competitor Slack. The European Commission said on Tuesday it found that Microsoft was restricting competition by selling its video-conferencing software …
Read More »The Eternal Truth of Markdown
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was in plaintext, and the Word was in plaintext because plaintext was the Way. It was good. On the sixth day—I’m skipping ahead here—the internet was born. The Word needed to be rewritten in HTML. Now there were two Words. It …
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