Check AT&T Upgrade Eligibility Via Text

howchoo   (467)

August 18, 2023

2 minutes

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I’ve been eying a coworker’s Galaxy Note 3 as a replacement for my aging iPhone 4s. However, I couldn’t justify spending $700 so I wanted to check my AT&T upgrade eligibility. I found out you can do this without logging into your AT&T account or talking to an account rep.

You can check other things too, like checking your AT&T data usage via text and checking your AT&T bill amount and due date via text.

1 – Dial *639# and press the Call button

A confirmation message will appear.

2 – Check your text messages

After a few seconds, ATT will send you a text containing your upgrade eligibility.

How to Enable Verizon Call Forwarding

howchoo   (467)

December 1, 2023

How to Reset an ASUS Router or Modem

howchoo   (467)

August 18, 2023

5 minutes

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• 
  Reset ASUS Router
• 
  ASUS Router Login
• 
  Change ASUS WiFi Password

If you need to reset your ASUS router or modem, you’ve got a couple of options. While most devices rely on a factory reset button, ASUS provides an addition web-based option. You can factory reset your router from the comfort of your desk chair!

I’ll cover both methods, as the factory reset button can be an excellent failsafe if the web portal isn’t working as expected.

Note: Factory resetting your device will wipe out existing network settings. You will need to reconfigure all of your settings after the reset—this includes things like your WiFi network name and password.

1 – Reset ASUS device using a browser

ASUS routers and modems can be reset to factory default settings using a web browser. You will need a device connected to the ASUS network. A computer or tablet will work fine.

1. Open a web browser of your choice (Chrome, Firefox, etc.)
2. Navigate to http://router.asus.com or use the IP address of your router in the address bar. The default IP address for ASUS devices is 192.168.1.1.
3. Log into your ASUS device. For help with this step, visit our guide on how to log in to an ASUS router
4. Click Administration under the Advanced Settings panel.
5. Go to the Restore/Save/Upload Setting tab.
6. Choose Restore next to Factory default.
7. Clicking OK will confirm the changes.

How to Log in to an ASUS Router

2 – Reset ASUS device using the reset button

You can reset your ASUS router or modem with the factory reset button.

1. Locate the button on the back of your ASUS device. If you’re not sure which button to use, search online for a diagram of your ASUS device model. The official ASUS support page is a great place to start.
2. While the router/modem is powered on, press and hold the Reset button for at least 5 seconds.
3. When the LED starts to flash, let go of the button. The factory reset has been initiated.

How to Change Your Frontier WiFi Password

howchoo   (467)

November 25, 2023

How to Set the Timezone on Your Raspberry Pi

howchoo   (467)

August 18, 2023

2 minutes

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At some point in your Raspberry Pi hacking career, you’ll need to know what time it is…in your own timezone. This guide will show you how to set the timezone in your Pi.

1 – Open the Raspberry Pi Software Configuration Tool

Connect to your Pi to get to the command line. Then, open the Raspberry Pi configuration tool, better known as raspi-config, with the following command:

How to Connect to a Raspberry Pi Remotely via SSH
The preferred (and most common) method of connecting to your Pi to run commands.

sudo raspi-config

2 – Open “Localisation Options”

With Localisation Options open you’ll be able to choose Change Timezone and select your local timezone.

3 – Confirm the changes were successful

From the command line, you can simply type date and confirm the date is displayed in your desired timezone.

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ date
Wed 28 Nov 11:10:33 PST 2018

How to Run a Minecraft Server on the Raspberry Pi

howchoo   (467)

December 7, 2023

How to Reset a Fitbit Charge 3 & Charge 4

howchoo   (467)

August 17, 2023

5 minutes

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Because of the Fitbit Charge 3 and Charge 4’s compact nature, Fitbit has crammed as much as they could into the small amount screen space available on the Charge, making it tricky to do simple tasks like changing the time. This includes the reset feature. I’ve had a Fitbit Charge 3 and now a Fitbit Charge 4, and I still make discoveries from time to time about a new app or feature I never knew existed.

So let us help guide you through the metaphorical maze that is the Fitbit Charge 3 and Charge 4, and get you to that reset button pronto!

1 – Press the left button to show screen

Press the left button to show the screen on your Fitbit Charge 3 or 4.

2 – Swipe to the left until “Settings”

• Swipe left on your Fitbit Charge 3 or 4 screen, until you reach the “Settings” button.
• Press Settings.

3 – Swipe up until “About”

• Swipe up to scroll down and find the button labeled “About.”
• Press About.

4 – Swipe up until “Clear User Data” and “Reboot Device”

Now, you’ll swipe up until you see the two buttons labeled “Clear User Data” and “Reboot Device.” Each of these buttons can reset your Fitbit Charge 3 or 4 in a different way.

Clear User Data

Selecting this will essentially factory reset your device. It will remove

• Apps
• Stored data
• Personal information
• Credit and debit cards (for Fitbit Pay-enabled devices)
• Saved settings

On some other Fitbit devices, this is called “Factory Reset.” You’ll want to do this if you get a new Fitbit and sync it to your phone, for example.

Reboot Device

Selecting this will reboot the device itself. It will not reset or remove any user data. Rebooting the device troubleshoots many issues that Fitbit wearers might experience, such as when:

• The device stops responding.
• The device will not sync.
• It stops tracking your stats and steps.
• The buttons stop responding.

Your Fitbit Charge may need to plug in for the device to restart after being shut down.

How to Clean Vibram Five Finger Toe Shoes Without Ruining Them

howchoo   (467)

November 22, 2023

Learn the slow (and fast) way to append elements to the DOM

howchoo   (467)

August 17, 2023

13 minutes

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jQuery is a powerful tool for front-end developers, but it does not alleviate the responsibility of ensuring your code is efficient. One common pitfall for developers is the method used to append elements to the DOM. This guide will examine the handful of different ways of doing this and point you to the most efficient way.

This subject matters most at a large scale. So for this guide, we will assume that our task is to append 10,000 divs to the body of a webpage.

1 – A naive approach

Early on I would’ve done this:

for (var i=0; i<10000; i++) {
  $("BODY").append($("
").addClass("test-div"));
}

This code produced an average running time of 779.463ms. This means it took over three quarters of a second to append these elements to the DOM.

So what is the problem here?

Well, there are a few – too many reflows and too many jQuery objects. We’ll address the latter in the next step, so let’s look at reflow here.

Simply put, reflow is when the browser needs to process and draw the webpage, and it is one of the most expensive browser processes. One of the easiest ways to improve the performance of your application is to minimize the number of reflows, and that’s what we’re going to do.

Many different operations can cause a reflow, and it isn’t the same for every browser. But rest assured, appending an element to the DOM will cause a reflow. So the obvious problem with our code snippet is that we are generating 10,000 reflows. Some browsers may handle this intelligently and reduce some of the cost, but we can do better.

2 – Fix the reflow problem

Let’s fix our reflow problem by creating a node that has not yet been added to the DOM. Then we will append our divs to this node. And finally, we will append this single node to the DOM which should trigger a single reflow.

var $c = $("
").addClass("container");
for (var i=0; i<10000; i++) {
    $c.append($("
").addClass("test-div"));
}
$("BODY").append($c);

This is a little bit better but still not great. Our running time is now 432.524ms. This is still pretty bad, and there is a lot we can do to improve.

The problem here is that we’re still creating too many jQuery objects. Even though we’ve solved the reflow problem, there is a lot of overhead to create a jQuery object. Of course, for a single object the convenience of jQuery far outweighs the minimal performance hit. But if we’re dealing with 10,000 elements the inefficiency is more than noticeable.

Let’s see what happens when we skip using jQuery altogether and write this in plain JavaScript.

var c = document.createDocumentFragment();
for (var i=0; i<10000; i++) {
    var e = document.createElement("div");
    e.className = "test-div";
    c.appendChild(e);
}
document.body.appendChild(c);

Incredibly, this change reduced our total running time from 432.524ms to 16.237ms. And this makes sense because it actually takes jQuery some time to create the object. Let’s see just how long it takes to create a single jQuery object vs. creating the element using vanilla JavaScript.

console.time("jquery div");
var jqDiv = $("
");
console.timeEnd("jquery div");
// jquery div: 0.272ms

console.time("js div");
var jsDiv = document.createElement("div");
console.timeEnd("js div");
// js div: 0.006ms

This is a significant difference – 0.006ms vs. 0.272ms. The point of this comparison isn’t to say that jQuery is bad but rather that as a developer you should know when to use it and when not to. jQuery provides a lot of functionality that isn’t necessary for our purpose so it doesn’t make sense to create 10,000 jQuery objects at such a high cost.

3 – Using strings instead of nodes

We don’t actually have to create 10,000 nodes. Instead we can see what happens when we use one long string of HTML.

var s = "";
for (var i=0; i<10000; i++) {
    s += "
";
}
$("BODY").append(s);

At 69.874ms this performs much better than our original, but not quite as well as the pure JavaScript version. However, there is one small improvement we can make. String concatenation is expensive, especially at this scale. Let’s use an array of strings and join them in the end.

var a = [];
for (var i=0; i<10000; i++) {
    a.push("
");
}
$("BODY").append(a.join(""));

This runs in 63.885ms. This probably isn’t enough of an improvement to stress out about, but since it’s faster we’ll keep it.

Let’s measure the cost of using jQuery to append the string. As we learned in the previous step, using pure JavaScript may be faster.

var a = [];
for (var i=0; i<10000; i++) {
    a.push("
");
}
document.body.innerHTML = a.join("");

The main difference here is that we’re not using jQuery.append. Instead we’re setting the innerHTML attribute on the body to our string of HTML. This runs in 22.908ms so the improvement is obvious. But we’re still not as fast as the pure JavaScript version from the last step.

4 – Conclusion

In summary, the fastest code was the pure JavaScript version:

var c = document.createDocumentFragment();
for (var i=0; i<10000; i++) {
    var e = document.createElement("div");
    e.className = "test-div";
    c.appendChild(e);
}
document.body.appendChild(c);

Based on these experiments there are two major takeaways.

First, be aware of which operations will cause a reflow. This is an expensive process, and it should be reduced as much as possible.

Second, be aware of the cost of using jQuery. For operations at a low scale, the convenience of jQuery will often outweigh the performance cost. But at a large scale, jQuery should be avoided unless it is actually needed.

Secure Your Sensitive Data with Kubernetes Secrets

howchoo   (467)

November 26, 2023

How to commit and push in Git

howchoo   (467)

August 17, 2023

3 minutes

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This guide will show you how to properly commit and push your work in Git. It is assumed that you have Git installed and that you’re currently in a clean master branch.

1 – Create a task branch

With a clean master branch checked out, you can create a task branch by typing:

git checkout -b task_branch

where the task_branch is the name of the branch you want to create. By using the -b option it will both create a new branch and check it out.

2 – Do your work and commit

As your are doing work you can commit regularly, and you must also commit when you are finished with your task. You can commit by typing:

git commit -am "commit message"

and you should leave a detailed commit message describing the changes you made.

3 – Merge your work into master

Now that you’ve finished your task you need to checkout master and merge your work. To checkout master simply type:

git checkout master

and to merge your task branch type:

git merge task_branch

where task_branch is the name of your branch.

4 – Push the master branch

Now that your work is merged, go ahead and push the master branch by typing:

git push origin master

How to Set up Git Tab Completion

howchoo   (467)

November 26, 2023

How to Change Your Leader Key in Vim

howchoo   (467)

August 17, 2023

4 minutes

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One of the strengths of Vim is that it’s highly customizable. And while remapping keys is possible, we often want to create shortcuts without changing the default key bindings. The leader key allows us to do this elegantly.

The leader key, which is basically a command prefix, allows us to create shortcuts to some of our most commonly used commands. Sadly, though, the default leader key is . So if you’re concerned with efficiency,  might cost you a few seconds a day, in contrast with something a little closer to home row.

1 – Use the mapleader variable in your .vimrc file

First, open your .vimrc file. This is typically found in your home directory:

vim ~/.vimrc

Now use the following to set the leader key.

let mapleader = ","

In the above example, I mapped the leader to ,. This is much easier to access than , but you can map the leader to whatever key you’d like!

For this change to take effect, you’ll have to re-launch Vim.

2 – An example shortcut using the leader key

Even though it isn’t the main purpose of this guide, I figured it would be useful to provide an example shortcut using the leader key.

One of the commands I use frequently is :buffdo e!. Sometimes the files in my current project have been changed by another program (like changing branches in git). This command force reloads the files in each of my buffers.

As you can imagine, typing this is a pain. Typing ,e is much easier. Add the following to your .vimrc file to create shortcuts like this one:

map e :bufdo e!

So whenever ,e is typed, it will be as if I typed :buffdo e! ( means return).

How to Change or Switch the Case of Characters in Vim

howchoo   (467)

September 18, 2023

How to Look Up Raspberry Pi Display Resolution

howchoo   (467)

August 17, 2023

3 minutes

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This short guide will show you how to find your Raspberry Pi’s screen or display resolution.

1 – Connect to the Pi

Open Terminal or Command Prompt and connect to your Pi via SSH to get to the command line.

How to Connect to a Raspberry Pi Remotely via SSH
The preferred (and most common) method of connecting to your Pi to run commands.

If you don’t want to log into the Pi remotely, you can alternatively connect a USB keyboard and plug your Pi into a monitor or TV.

If you’re running a system such as RetroPie, you’ll need to press F4 to exit to the command line.

2 – Run the following command

Once on the command line, run the fbset command:

fbset

You will now see your Pi’s display resolution represented in terms of pixels and the overall geometry. For example, the RetroFlag GPi resolution is 320×240 (WxH):

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Finally, a plug-and-play Game Boy Zero!

mode "320x240"
    geometry 320 240 320 240 32
    timings 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
    rgba 8/16,8/8,8/0,8/24
endmode

How to Run a Minecraft Server on the Raspberry Pi

howchoo   (467)

December 7, 2023

How to Turn Off “Safe Mode” on Tumblr: An In-depth Look

howchoo (467)

August 17, 2023

18 minutes

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• Tumblr “Safe Mode” for PC, Mac, and Linux users
• Tumblr “Safe Mode” for Android users
• Tumblr “Safe Mode” for iOS users
• Bonus: Tumbex for truly free browsing

A brief history of Tumblr’s content filter

How to view Tumblr’s explicit content

Turn off “Safe Mode” with PC, Mac, or Linux

Tumblr “Safe Mode” for Android users

Tumblr “Safe Mode” for iOS users

Bonus: Tumbex (the only way to fully bypass Tumblr’s content filter)

How to Change Your Frontier WiFi Password

howchoo (467)

November 25, 2023

How To Browse Privately on the Oculus Quest 2

howchoo (467)

August 16, 2023

4 minutes

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1 – Open the browser

2 – Open the menu

3 – Enter private mode

4 – Enjoy browsing privately!

• Browsing and search history
• Cookies, site data, or temporary files
• Information entered into forms

The Best Smartwatches for Privacy and Security

howchoo (467)

September 20, 2023