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
Add Sticky Notes to Any Page with Internote for Firefox
How many times have you wanted to put a sticky note on a page to remind you of something? For instance, you could put a sticky note on digg.com so the next time you visit it tells you that you should really be doing something more productive. =)
Add Sudo to Your Last Bash Command With "!!" Syntax
How often have you typed in a command in your linux shell, and then realized that you forgot to type sudo, so you end up with an error or editing the dreaded read-only file? This happens to me much more than I'd like to admit, so I'm writing about it.
Quick Hits: 11 Firefox Tab How-Tos
We couldn't live without Firefox's tabbed browsing support, and we also couldn't live without 10 of these 11 tips for optimizing your tab experience.
Customize Your Welcome Picture Choices in Windows Vista
Everybody knows how to change their Vista logon picture, but if you select a new picture, Windows Vista removes the last picture from the list entirely, leaving just the new picture and the default pictures. Does anybody really use the robot or the fish picture?
Delete Wrong AutoComplete Entries in Windows Vista Mail
If you've entered the wrong address into the Windows Vista Mail client, you might have problems getting rid of the wrong autocomplete entries in the list. There's a couple of things you can try to delete the entries in the list.
How-To Geek Bounty: $103.24(Paid!) for Active Desktop for Vista
One of the glaring changes in Windows Vista was the complete removal of Active Desktop, the feature that let you use a live web page as your background image, or in the case of some users, many live web pages.
Replacing Task Manager with Process Explorer in Vista
If you are unfamiliar with the Sysinternals Process Explorer utility, you should really check it out... it gives you so much more information than the default task manager, including a tree view of all the processes so you can see which processes launched other processes.
Using Secure Login in Firefox
If you allow Firefox to store your passwords you might be worried about the recent security holes found in the password manager. The solution to these problems is to use the Secure Login extension to prevent Firefox from automatically filling in password fields
The How-To Geek Bounty Program
A common frustration of non-programmers is that you don't often get to inspire new software programs that work the way you want them to, you simply have to wait and hope that somebody comes up with something... until now.
Keyboard Ninja: Enter Vista Sleep Mode with 3 Keystrokes
Let's face it - the Windows Vista shutdown dialog is one of the worst pieces of UI nonsense ever. Just look at it... what were they thinking with that popup dialog?
Make Grub Bootloader Wait Indefinitely for OS Selection
If you are doing a lot of testing of different builds, there's nothing more annoying than rebooting and then having the system boot into the wrong choice on the grub menu before you have a chance to pick the one you want.
Disable Delete Confirmation Dialog in Windows 7 or Vista
Every time you delete a file, Windows asks you "Are you sure you want to move this file to the Recycle Bin?" This is typically a good thing, to prevent you from deleting files by accident, but if you are trying to do some cleanup and need to delete a lot of files, you might not want to be prompted every single time.
Disable ProFTP on CentOS
In my efforts to ban the completely insecure FTP protocol from my life entirely, I've decided to disable the FTP service running on the How-To Geek server, which is running the CentOS operating system.
Add Copy To / Move To on Windows 7 or Vista Right-Click Menu
There's a registry hack for Windows that will let you add a Copy To Folder or Move To Folder to the right-click menu, which can be very useful when you want to move a file but don't have the other folder open already.
Roundup: 16 Tweaks to Windows Vista Look & Feel
A roundup of all the articles that tweak the appearance of Windows Vista.
Show Alexa Ranking in Firefox
Up until now, there's been no way to show the Alexa rankings directly in Firefox... if you wanted to see them you had to either use the really great About This Site extension, or use the toolbar for Internet Explorer.
Customize Your Windows Vista Logon Screen
For those of us looking to customize the Windows Vista UI experience, there's nothing more annoying than seeing the default logon screen every time you start up your computer, or when you lock your workstation.
Great Expose Clone for Windows Vista
The market seems to be full of OS X Expose clones, but this is the first one that I've found that not only works really well, but has a ton of customization options.
Shell Geek: Rename Multiple Files At Once
Today we'll learn how to replace text in a variable in a for loop.
Remove the Java Icon From the System Tray
Why does every single application insist on installing a completely useless icon into the system tray? It would be one thing if it performed some function, but it doesn't do anything that you can't do from your control panel.