noted.do

A smart bulb doesn't feel like a computer. It's a light bulb. But inside it is a tiny computer with a network connection, running software that someone wrote, talking to servers somewhere on the internet. Multiply that by every plug, camera, doorbell, speaker, thermostat and robot vacuum in a house and you've got a lot of computers that nobody ever thinks about updating. That's the core of the smart home security problem. These devices are cheap, plentiful, and frequently made by companies whose main skill is hardware, not security. Some get updates for years. Some get a couple and then…

If someone asks me how to make an aging computer feel fast again, and it still has a spinning hard drive inside, my answer is almost always the same. Swap the hard drive for an SSD. Nothing else you can do for the money comes close. The reason is how the two kinds of drive work. A hard disk drive (HDD) stores data on spinning platters, and a little arm has to physically move to the right spot to read anything. For one big file read in a straight line, that's not terrible. But an operating system booting up or an app launching doesn't read one big file. It reads thousands of small ones…

I really enjoy a minimalist blog platform. I am in the process of migrating GaryArmstrong.blog over to Noted.do and if you are still writing on Listed.to ahead of its shutdown, making the switch is much easier than you might expect. Noted.do was built specifically as a drop-in replacement for Standard Notes bloggers, you can keep your exact writing habit without starting over. Getting your existing site across takes about a minute. Once everything is imported, you connect a plugin inside Standard Notes and go right back to writing, editing, and publishing the exact same way you always…

Every time you reach for the mouse to do something you do fifty times a day, you lose a second or two. That's nothing once. Across a year, it adds up to a lot of reaching. You don't need to memorize hundreds of shortcuts to get most of the benefit, though. A couple dozen covers most of it, and here's my list. Mac users: where it says Ctrl below, it's usually Cmd for you, unless I've noted something different. Text editing (works almost everywhere) Ctrl+Backspace deletes a whole word instead of one letter. On a Mac it's Option+Delete. Once you get used to this you'll never go…

Rain. Endlessly falling rain, thick mud, and a forgotten Hungarian collective farm quietly rotting from the inside out. I purchased a must read! For the next few days I am stepping into a dense, mesmerizing world of Sátántangó. This masterpiece by László Krasznahorkai, is a living great author in modern literature, whose uncompromising long complex paragraph prose eventually earned him the International Booker Prize and the 2025 Noble Prize in Literature. I am noticing there are no neat paragraphs here, no quick breaks to catch your breath. His sentences stretch out like fog over a deserted…

Somewhere on most computers there's a folder with files named "final.docx", "final2.docx", "final FINAL.docx" and "final-use-this-one.docx". We've all made that folder. The fix isn't some elaborate system. It's a handful of rules you apply every time, until you stop thinking about them. Here's what I'd use. Start with the date, written year-month-day. 2025-03-14, not 3-14-25 or 14.03.2025. Written this way (it's the ISO 8601 format), files sort into chronological order automatically, in any file browser on any operating system. No other date format does that. Put it at the front when the date…

There's a particular kind of tired that comes from having eleven apps that all do roughly the same thing. Three places your notes might be. Two to-do apps, one you abandoned and one you're about to. A photo backup service, plus the one that came with your phone, plus a folder on your laptop that's sort of a backup. Every new app promised to make life simpler. Together they made it more complicated. Digital minimalism, at least the way I think about it, isn't about owning a flip phone or deleting everything. It's about choosing a small number of tools on purpose and letting them do the work,…

Listed closes on December 31. If you have a blog there, this is how to move it to noted without losing anything, and without touching a single file. What you need A noted account. Start one at noted.do if you haven't; it takes a minute and asks for nothing but a username. Your Listed address, the one that looks like https://listed.to/@yourname. That's it. You don't need an export from Listed, and you don't need to re-publish anything from Standard Notes. The import Sign in to noted and open your Account page. Go to the Account tab and find Import posts. Paste your Listed address into the…

Ransomware is malware that locks up your files and demands money to get them back. You turn on your computer, your documents and photos all have strange new extensions and won't open, and there's a note explaining how to pay in cryptocurrency for the key. It's one of the nastiest things that can happen to a person or a small business, because it goes straight for the stuff you can't replace. The "locking" is just encryption. The same kind of strong encryption that protects your bank login is being used against you. The attackers encrypt your files with a key only they have, and without that…

If you've ever kept a spreadsheet of anything (customers, books you've read, expenses), you already understand most of what a database is. You've got rows, you've got columns, every row is one thing and every column is one fact about it. A relational database is that idea, made strict and fast and able to handle millions of rows without your laptop fan taking off. The strict part is the important difference. A spreadsheet lets you type "twelve" into a column that's supposed to hold numbers, leave half the cells blank, and spell the same customer's name three different ways. A database makes…

There's an old sticker that says "There is no cloud, it's just someone else's computer." It's a joke, but it's also the most useful way I know to think about where your stuff actually lives. When your photos "go to the cloud," they get copied over the internet to servers in a data center owned by Apple, Google, Microsoft, Dropbox or whoever. Real machines, real disks, in a real building somewhere. The company keeps several copies so a dead drive doesn't lose anything, and lets you reach them from any device. That's genuinely great. Most people's cloud copy is better protected against hardware…

SQL injection is one of the oldest web vulnerabilities around, and it still turns up constantly. The reason is simple. The vulnerable version of the code is the most obvious way to write it. Picture a search box that looks up a user by email. The natural first attempt in PHP looks like this: It works. Type in an email, get a user back. The problem is that you've taken text from a stranger and pasted it directly into a command your database will run. The database has no way to tell which parts you wrote and which parts the visitor wrote. It just sees one string of SQL. So if someone types…

Bluetooth has a reputation, and it earned it. Headphones that connect to the wrong device. A speaker that cuts out when you walk to the fridge. A mic that makes you sound like you're calling from a submarine. It's tempting to assume it's just bad technology, but it's more that Bluetooth has been asked to do a very hard job with very little to work with. Start with the radio. Bluetooth uses the 2.4 GHz band, the same one used by a lot of Wi-Fi, wireless mice and keyboards, baby monitors, and your microwave. It's an unlicensed band, so anyone can use it, and everyone does. Bluetooth copes by…

You download a video, double-click it, and get either an error, a black screen with sound, or sound-less moving pictures. The file isn't broken. Your player just doesn't speak its language. To understand why, you need two words that get mixed up constantly: container and codec. The container is the file format, the thing the extension tells you about. MP4, MKV, MOV, WebM. Think of it as a box. Inside the box are separate streams: usually one video track, one or more audio tracks, maybe some subtitles, plus information about how to keep them in sync. The codec is how each of those streams is…

A laptop that feels painfully slow is very often not actually broken. It's usually a few specific bottlenecks, and some of them cost very little to fix. Before it goes in a drawer or the recycling, it's worth an hour of poking at it. The single biggest fix, if the laptop still has a spinning hard drive, is swapping in an SSD. Old hard drives are the reason so many older machines take ages to boot and freeze when you open a browser. An SSD makes the whole thing feel like a different computer. Check what kind of drive slot it has first (most older laptops take a standard 2.5-inch SATA drive,…