Lowell Heddings
Contributing since September, 2006
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1336articles
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About Lowell Heddings
Lowell Heddings is the founder of How-To Geek. Over the last decade, Lowell has personally written more than 1000 articles which have been viewed by over 250 million people.
Prior to starting How-To Geek, Lowell spent 15 years working in the IT field doing consulting, cybersecurity, database management, and programming. The last decade of his previous career, however, was largely spent doing business automation for large corporations. The e-commerce integrations he created are still being used to automate billions of dollars worth of transactions today.
Latest Articles
How to Make Outlook for Mac Show Pictures by Default
For reasons I cannot fully understand, I decided to use Outlook on my Mac.
Get Rid of the Annoying Microsoft OneDrive Sign In Popup
Every time you reboot your Windows 10 PC, Microsoft OneDrive bugs you to login or create an account.
How to See Which Groups Your Linux User Account Belongs To
Groups make managing a Linux system much simpler.
How to Open the System Information Panel on Windows 10 or 8
The System Information provides a quick way get information about your system, but how you open it depends on what version of Windows you're using.
How to Stop Identity Thieves from Opening Accounts in Your Name
Everybody is getting hacked left and right.
How to List or Search for Files in a .tar / .tar.gz Archive
If you have a huge tar backup file and you need to grab some files out of it, wouldn't it be easier if you can look inside first? Luckily there's an easy option to do so.
How to Extract a Single File from a .tar / .tar.gz Archive
If you've ever run into a scenario where you have a huge tar backup file but you only need to extract a single file, you're reading the right article today.
How to Randomize Uploaded Filenames in WordPress
WordPress file upload capabilities have really improved over the years, but there's one problem we keep running into -- the filenames are perfectly preserved when you upload, which leaves to inconsistent and really long image file paths.
PHP: How to Get the First 10 Characters from a String
Lets face it, we're not the best PHP programmers, or else we'd probably remember how to do this without having to look it up all the time, right? I mean, I've looked this one up so many times that I'm actually writing about it in the hopes that I'll remember next time.
How to Turn on Line Numbers in vim
Vim is an extremely powerful editor, but only if you know how to use it.
How to Backup a Live MySQL DB Without Locking Tables Using mysqldump
Backing up MySQL is not very hard -- you just run mysqldump and output to a file -- but it's also not really designed for production environments either.
How to Exclude Tables from MySQL Exports Using mysqldump
While setting up a new testing environment to help development make slightly less bugs, I was looking at how to transfer the database without restoring a bunch of archive tables that we really didn't need on QA.
How to Backup / Export a Single Table from a MySQL Database
The other day I was testing a feature on my development box when I realized my local data was really out of date, and if I was going to get anywhere with my testing, I needed some recent data from production.
How to See Which MySQL Tables are Taking the Most Space
Database backups are one of those things that just keep getting bigger and bigger until they consume all the matter in the world.
How to Test Your Nginx Config File (and Why You Should)
If you're making changes to your nginx configuration files, you are running a huge risk if you restart nginx and you made a mistake, a typo, or copied and pasted from Stackoverflow wrong.
How to Find or Delete Files Less Than X Minutes Old on Linux
Say you just ran some script that was supposed to move files around or download stuff, or anything else that involves files, and then you realize that you need to figure out what files just got created and where.
How to Time a How Long a Terminal Command Takes
If you have a long running script that you are working on improving, it can be useful to figure out exactly how long the script or command takes to run so you'll know for sure whether the next run was faster or slower than the first one.
How to Run a Cron Job Only on Sunday (or Any Other Day)
I needed to setup a cron job to perform some maintenance which I wanted to automatically run on Sunday night since that's usually a low traffic period.
Change Your Computer Name in Windows 7, 8, or 10
If you've ever bought a new computer with Windows already installed, you might be annoyed by the default name of your PC.
How to See What Configure Options PHP Was Compiled With
PHP in the repositories comes with tons of modules that aren't needed, and we've always custom-compiled our own version with only the things that we need.