Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

File systems are the organizational systems that decide how data is stored, named, located, and protected on a disk, SSD, USB drive, or partition. They handle directories, file metadata (permissions, timestamps, ownership), free space tracking, and more. Windows side Windows primarily uses: NTFS — the modern default. It supports journaling (for crash recovery), large files and volumes, fine-grained permissions, encryption, and compression. FAT32 and exFAT — simpler, widely used on removable media (USB sticks, SD cards) because they are highly cross-compatible with other operating systems. Windows has no native support for the main Linux file systems. When you connect a drive formatted with ext2/3/4, Windows typically sees it as “RAW” or unknown and may offer to format it (which would destroy the data). Linux side Most Linux distributions default to the ext family: ext2 — the older, non-journaling version. ext3 — added journaling for better reliability. ext4 — the current standard. It a...

On the Open Food Facts (OFF) website, “Facets” are essentially filters or categories that let you browse products by the following attributes: Added amino acids  (7) Added minerals  (62) Added nucleotides  (2) Added vitamins  (38) Additives  (331) Allergens  (67; e.g., gluten, peanuts) Brands  (5984; “Tata Tea,” “Lipton,” etc.) Categories (2934) Codes (34477; Example ) Contributors  (962) Countries  (129) Data sources  (75) Editors (5213) Entry dates  (2826) Food Groups (54) Green-Score  (9) Ingredients  (15125) Labels  (445; e.g., Green Dot India, organic, fair trade) Languages  (91) Last check dates  (11) Last edit dates  (2053) Manufacturing or processing places Miscellaneous  (677) NOVA groups  (6; Nutri‑Score A–E) Nutrition grades  (7) Origins of ingredients  (129) Other nutritional substances added (8) Packaging (339; e.g., plastic bottle, carton) Photographers (2073) St...

This Week I Learned -  * Anthropic has released a report titled " Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026 " that details the disruption of Claude model misuse from December 2025 to August 2026 across seven categories including cyberattacks, influence campaigns, surveillance, weapons development, biological research, scams, and model distillation by actors linked to Russia, China, Iran, and Yemen. Sophisticated attacks no longer require sophisticated attackers. A single Claude subscriber built a mass surveillance platform for Mali's state intelligence. It covers 25 million SIM cards from all its national carriers. Banning the user's Claude subscription was pointless as their system now fully runs on local AI.  * Cloudflare (and similar systems) now treat declared AI crawlers as a monetizable, identifiable class of traffic that can be allowed or charged, while ordinary human visitors routinely face CAPTCHAs, challenges, and other verification steps meant t...