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Hello! How often in your work have you needed to run some strange application that you really don't want to or it's very dangerous to run on your personal smartphone, but you don't have a test device (a victim of future experiments) on hand to run it?

Yes, you can run Android Studio, but this software requires a preliminary study of the manual - without it, you won't be able to run anything on it, but there isn't always time and desire for such tasks. It is believed that the best task is one that can be delegated to another person, and all their emerging questions can be answered with a link to an article.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find such an article, and not to go far, I wrote one myself. In short, it's a common problem: if you can't find a good comparison, figure it out yourself.

Are you familiar with that feeling of slight panic when your laptop suddenly starts beeping plaintively, and a sinister warning appears on the screen: 'Disk almost full'? This happened to me recently too. I opened File Explorer and was stunned – my 1 TB external drive was filled to the brim – 95% full!

The culprits weren't movies or games, but a giant graveyard of photos. Twelve folders with the generic name 'DCIM,' mountains of screenshots I had copied five times 'just in case,' and heaps of nearly identical sunset shots taken in burst mode. Trying to manually find identical photos was like looking for a needle in a haystack the size of Siberia.

In a previous article, I discussed how to best sort photos, and even then I realized it was time to declare war on duplicates. And that moment has come. After testing more than 15 tools (and wasting a lot of nerves), I've selected 5 free programs that really help solve the problem. I'll share this experience with you.

Regular expressions (also called regexp, or regex) are a mechanism for finding and replacing text. In a string, a file, multiple files... They are used by developers in application code, testers in autotests, and even just when working on the command line!

Why is this better than a simple search? Because it allows you to specify a pattern.

For example, you receive a date of birth in the DD.MM.YYYYY format. You need to pass it on, but in the YYYY-MM-DD format. How can you do this with a simple search? You don't know in advance what the exact date will be.

Page pruning (HOT cleanup) is an optimization allowing to efficiently remove old row versions (tuples) from table blocks. The freed space will be reused for new row versions. The only space occupied by row versions beyond the database's xmin horizon is reclaimed. This article examines the algorithm behind a similar optimization for indexes. If the xmin horizon is held back - by a long-running query or transaction - neither page pruning nor VACUUM can reclaim space, forcing new row versions to be inserted into different blocks. With the standard pgbench test, we demonstrate how significantly performance can degrade when the database horizon is held back, and we analyze the underlying causes. 

With the rise of privacy threats and constant internet restrictions, using a VPN has become the norm for many users. However, behind the simplicity of connecting lie technical features that can significantly impact

the user experience. One of the key factors is the choice of VPN protocol, which determines the speed, stability, and security level of the connection.

This article will provide a detailed breakdown of the most popular VPN protocols, their features, advantages, and disadvantages, and will also offer examples of how to use each of them.

By the way, I took all the pictures from those, you know, the internets, but I analyzed and explained them myself, just for you :)

A good way to improve product communication is to use special characters for their intended purpose.

In Russian typography, there is a rule for using quotation marks depending on the context.

Having your own VPS for a VPN is quite advantageous. There are no limits on the number of clients; you can provide a VPN connection to all your relatives, friends, and acquaintances. And you can pay 160–300 rubles a month for it. And while public VPNs are being actively blocked by DNS and IP, personal VPNs have so far avoided this fate.

There are downsides: server administration and a lack of geographical diversity.

A VPN requires a foreign server, and for over a year now, there have been problems with paying for foreign services in Russia. But there are Russian companies that provide foreign servers, and you can pay them with a Russian card.
I registered with a dozen providers and got as far as purchasing a VPS with five of them. And after testing, only three remained.

Hack Time, Habr!

The other day, I came across a high-profile investigation by Dmytro Tarasenko (aka iTaysonLab).

He was the one who decompiled the APK of the new 'Telega' app, identified links to the VK and Catogram infrastructure, and published the details on the BruhCollective Telegram channel.

My colleagues uncovered many alarming facts, but as someone who loves to dig into the guts of applications, I wanted to go further, confirm their findings, and find what dynamic analysis missed.

I decided to conduct a full static analysis of the APK, deobfuscating the code to create the most complete and technically supported picture possible.
What is really hiding behind the promises of an 'improved' Telegram?

Let's take a look.

Spoiler: it's not secure, not private, but it's damn interesting. Let's go!

A quick guide on how to enable the new Google AI Mode and set it as the default search in Chrome. Now, queries from the address bar open directly in “AI Mode”.

Hi, I'm Dima and, like many, I've been using neural networks to create images for many years. But over the last year and a half, the market for generative models has changed so much and become so huge that it's impossible to try all the models. However, the question of which neural network is the best still remains. Benchmarks are poorly suited for a real assessment of creativity and cost, so I've gathered 10 models in one place, what they are best suited for, and what the price is (or rather, the free limit). I hope this helps you choose the most optimal neural network for your tasks.

Below is an honest rating based on quality, realism, convenience, and price.

It's been two years since I posted a video and a post about how I recovered my friend's Telegram account using JavaScript. Since then, I've helped over a hundred people regain access to their accounts. Then the method stopped working

I decided to gather the important security aspects of your Telegram account in one place.

In this article, we take a detailed look at Ollama — a tool for running large language models (LLMs) locally. You will learn how to install the program, choose a suitable model, understand formats and quantization, configure the system for your hardware, and work both via the CLI, and via the API. Practical tips, configuration examples, and VRAM recommendations will help you use Ollama as effectively as possible for dialogues, text generation, code, and other tasks.

Hello everyone, today we'll talk about Android TV. Bypassing the throttling on a TV seemed to be the most problematic and difficult for me. Since I have several TVs at home deprived of YouTube, and even more are waiting to be set up for friends and acquaintances, I decided to collect all the bypass methods I could find.

In this article, we will not only install a local (and free) alternative to ChatGPT, but also review several open LLMs, delve into the advanced settings of LM Studio, connect the chatbot to Visual Studio Code, and teach it to assist us with programming. We will also look at how to fine-tune the model's behavior using system prompts.

What do we have at the end of 2025?

Mass layoffs, tightening of the screws by the state and marketplaces. An increase in VAT, which means a rise in store prices. The SMO continues, leading to high government spending, a high Central Bank rate, and consequently, a business freeze.

I spoke with the owners of manufacturing companies, an IT company, and an analytical agency who have already been through crises, and I asked:

'What are you going to do in 2026 to survive?'.

In short: in the year of the horse, you'll have to work like a horse.

Hello everyone!

I want to note right away that this article is written exclusively for people who are just starting their journey in learning SQL and window functions. It may not cover complex applications of functions or use complicated definitions—everything is written in the simplest language possible for a basic understanding.

P.S. If the author didn't cover or write about something, it means they considered it non-essential for this article)))

For the examples, we will use a small table that shows student grades in different subjects. In the database, the table looks like this:

Hello, Habr!

I've been putting off writing this article for a long time, but the time has come.

There are quite a few materials on the internet about how to run macOS on regular, IBM-compatible PCs. Their problem is exactly the same as with Wine, which I also wrote my own article about - they are too... vague on the details of how to create an installation media and what to do after installation.

In this article, I will be following the guide from Dortania. There is a Russian version, but it's always older than the most current one, so I will use the original. I will also be taking some screenshots and links from there.

Before we begin, I'd like to enlighten those who are not aware of what a Hackintosh is.

A Hackintosh is the process of installing macOS on regular PCs. What's the difficulty?

All MacBooks use their own hardware (at least now, in 2025). They used to use different processors - in classic Macintoshes they used processors from Motorola. Later models featured processors from IBM PowerPC (during this period they were called PowerMacs). And in the early 2000s, Apple switched to Intel processors. It was during this period that the system we are most interested in appeared - OSX, later renamed to macOS.

When the question of describing a system's architecture arises, there are several main solutions for where and how to do it. Among the popular notations for visualizing architecture diagrams, one can choose C4, developed by Simon Brown.

In this article, I want to show an example of applying the C4 notation, which you can use as a guide in your work, as well as tools for creating it. In particular, I highlight Structurizr.

This article is useful for system analysts, architects, developers, project managers, and anyone involved in creating and making decisions about project architecture.

Since I'm a fan of self-hosting, I have a home infrastructure:

Orange Pi - a media server;

Synology - a file dump;

Neptune 4 - a 3D printer with a web interface and a camera feed. And I'd like to have secure access to it externally via my phone and PC, while also having internet access outside the RF. I used to use OpenVPN for these needs, but it's no longer reliable. So I started studying the documentation for an excellent tool from our Chinese comrades - Xray!

What you'll need:

A server with an external IP for the infrastructure. In my case, it's an Orange Pi, hereinafter - Bridge

The server you want to access - Server

A server outside the RF for internet access. Hereinafter - Proxy

A client of your choice. Hereinafter - Client

Client and server on Linux - Xray-core, which can be installed via the official Xray installation script

Client for Android - v2rayNG

More clients can be found in the Xray-core repository

Let's take the VLESS-TCP-XTLS-Vision-REALITY configuration file as a base and start reading the Xray documentation

Routing is done on the client. For example, if the client accesses the xray.com domain, we route the traffic to the Bridge, and for all other connections - to the Proxy. Then the Bridge routes the traffic to the Server if the client accessed server.xray.com.
It looks like this: