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 Is the food industry trying to ride the wave of tech popularity? Restaurant marketing material over the last few years has increasingly been using terms like “apps” and “handhelds.” They appear in television advertisements, email campaigns, and menus. Over the past 30 years, technology has gotten so pervasive that terminology used in this space was bound to make it into everyday life. English vernacular, at least in the US, is full of borrowed terms that have taken on a meaning that has drifted from their use in industry. Think, stat (medical), boots on the ground (military), loaded question (legal), and AI (computer science). We may be experiencing two more that have crept into the food industry. In the case of software, a common term is “program.” Programs are also known as applications, since a general purpose computer can be applied to various applications based on the software running for a given task. For example, the computer is being applied for billing now, but will be r...

Chrome may indicate that it's being managed by a user's organization. This warning is provided by the Chrome Policies feature of the browser. To know if an instance of Chrome is managed by an organization, there will be an entry at the bottom of the browser’s hamburger menu (three dot menu), on the right side of the browser window that reads, "Managed by your organization." This is likely due to an entry in the Chrome Policies listing, which can be found by loading this page in the browser: chrome://policy The policies listed in this section are stored in the computer's file system in one of the following locations as JSON files. /usr/share/chromium/policies/managed /usr/share/chromium/policies/recommended Remove the offending JSON files, and click the Reload policies button. The Managed by your organization entry in the browser menu should be gone. A notice like this on instances of Chrome for work, school, library, or other devices that belong to an organizati...

The printers.conf file can be edited to change the network address a printer uses.  This can be useful to fix situations in which the printer in question has a new IP address, but the local system is trying to use the previous address. Shutdown the CUPS server Change the network address Restart the CUPS server sudo systemctl stop cups sudo nano /etc/cups/printers.conf sudo systemctl start cups NOTE The editor used in the example is nano for the sake of those who may be less comfortable in the command-line.  With nano, once the change has been made, use Control + O to save the changes, and then Control + X to quit the editor. Ideally, this process would not be necessary.  Instead, once a printer is added, it will always be reachable at the address it was assigned when it was added to the system.  In practice, things like power outages, or breaks in network connectivity, may be enough for the DHCP server to issue a new IP address. A tip when making the address cha...

With the latest round of updates to Skype , it was noticed today that the instant messaging and VoIP phone service now supports emergency calling in the United States. The release notes for the most recent update to the Android version of Skype indicated that the service now allows calls to be made to US emergency calling systems via 911.  Telephony services like Skype, Google Voice , and Vonage typically don't offer this emergency calling ability without some sort of intermediate step like deferring to the phone's default dialer, as is the case with Voice, or setting up a physical address location ahead of time which is how Vonage handles it. The indication is that Skype will handle the 911 calls natively, but when verifying with an account that does not have a Skype phone number assigned to it, it was found that the instructions in the FAQ explaining how to turn on emergency calling are not accurate. Emergency calling support in Skype for the United States Interestingly, th...

In an apparent acknowledgment of the Christmas season, the makers of DBeaver have added a little Easter egg (no conflation of holidays intended) to the check boxes in the user interface.  At least for the time being check boxes are rendered as presents in the macOS and Windows versions of the database client.  (It's not obvious why the Linux variant doesn't support the icons.) DBeaver is a cross platform, open source database manager client, with versions available for each of macOS, linux-based systems, and Windows.  The developer offers a commercial version that supports features like NoSQL databases, Office integration, and execution plan diagrams. Comparison chart UPDATE (01/27/2022):  It was originally stated that the Linux version of the application doesn't support the styled check boxes.  Since the original publishing it was recalled that there is a setting to indicate the manner in which boolean values (check boxes) are represented.  (Preference...

Internet search provider DuckDuckGo , can minify JavaScript and CSS code through its Instant Answers feature.  Simply search for " minify javascript " or " minify css ." If the form isn't visible, click on the Answer control at the top of the page. DuckDuckGo is a search engine that has differentiated itself from brobdingnagian search outfits Google and Bing , by promising not to track users, and record their search histories.  Though the company does track search results , it does display advertisements , and it sources its search results from a plethora of places like Bing and Wikipedia , it stresses that it does not store details that can be used to tie a history back to a user, and ads are based on search terms. Users have flocked to the service in recent years due to privacy concerns, and because the search results avoid placing users into a filter bubble . The company's privacy page tips a nod to Startpage for being another privacy focu...