guardian

If you frequently use Notepad to jot down things, use F5 to get the current timestamp. And even better, to automatically generate a timestamp whenever you open the file, add .LOG to the top of the file.

The spacebar in your smartphone (both Android and iOS) actually can help you move the cursor left and right. Touch the spacebar and slide it to the left or right while typing to move the cursor. Found this one by accident and it has now changed the way I type! 🤯

Today I learned that typing cmd in the windows file explorer address bar will spawn a command prompt with the path set to the current open directory. Instead of navigating from a different directory or using Shift + Right click this is quick!

RAM is a volatile memory. This statement is almost true but there is an exceptional case where it may not be. RAM sticks do not lose their memory instantly when you power down the computer. Residual memory takes some time to degrade. When the RAM is cooled down, it even takes a longer time; enough for an attacker to plug it to a live OS and dump the contents from the stick to a harddisk. This is a well known exploit called as the cold boot attack.

Just found that you can hold Alt and highlight the text of a link without worrying about accidentally clicking the link or selecting everything on the page.

Are you pressing the up arrow key or doing history|grep in a Linux terminal to get that long command you typed last week? Don’t do that. Use Ctrl + R to do a reverse search and it will show the matching command with an autocomplete. It’s efficient. You can also cycle through the search results by pressing Ctrl + R again.

If you are developing a website you are likely using   in your HTML for spacing characters. Just learned that it actually stands for ‘Non-breaking space’. In addition to this, there are &sp;,  ,  ,  . Why didn’t I know these when I started? :/

Photo, music and video archival are fairly safe to be in digital formats for short time storage, but surprisingly not for long time archival. Today I learned that normal storage devices are susceptible to data degradation much like the old cassettes and tapes.

As flash storage devices store data as electrical charges, they gradually leak away and lose their state unless powered on often. Their approximate retention age is five years. They are not suited for long time archival. Magnetic disks pose a similar vulnerability too. Just by flipping one bit, your data can be corrupted.