Posts

If you tell us email has fallen out of fashion, we’d ask you to have a look at our inboxes. Being able to sort through and organize the mess of messages that arrive daily is fairly key to maintaining workplace sanity. It’s not just about spam either. Spam still exists, an annoying fact of life, but there are ways to deal with that. It’s the crush of other email we get – updates about software, invitations to events, mailing lists we [got] subscribed to but never remember to unsubscribe from – all of which necessitates some way to organize, sort, and file messages to their proper place, whether it’s a designated folder or the trash....

How to Access Your Xbox Friends List in Windows 10 The Xbox Game Bar gives you access to various chat tools, streaming features, performance statistics, and even Spotify. You don’t have to Alt+Tab between apps. To chat with your Xbox friends on Windows 10, press the Windows key+G at any time to bring up the Xbox Game Bar. This overlay works while you’re playing a game, and it also works if you’re just using Windows desktop applications....

For most people, Caps Lock is only an obstacle to avoid while typing. Having Caps Lock do nothing at all would be an improvement. You don’t have to pry Caps Lock off your keyboard — you can disable it. You can also remap Caps Lock to use that prime keyboard real estate for something useful. Here are instructions for doing this on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Chrome OS, iOS, and Android....

Downloading files from the PHP mirrors is annoying, because by default the redirector makes the name of the filename change to just “mirror.” So how do you fix this? Luckily wget has a simple argument that you can use to fix it — and it is useful for many scenarios. Whenever you want to force the output from the Wget command into a specific filename, you just need to use the -O argument (that’s a capital letter o), or the longer version, –output-document=FILE that is a lot of extra typing for no reason....

Macro photography–or, taking photos of things under high magnification–is really fun; the price of dedicated macro lenses, on the other hand, is not. Read on as we show you how to use low cost tricks and techniques to enjoy macrophotography on a budget. Why Do I Want to Do This? Dedicated macro photography equipment is pricey–a single high end macro lens can easily cost over $800. If you’re not sure if you want to sink that much cash into an aspect of the photography hobby you’re just starting to explore (or if you’re a die-hard MacGyver-style photographer at heart) there are a wide variety of ways to enjoy the high-power magnification of macro photography without skipping the mortgage payment this month to fund your adventures....

grep is a command line text searching utility that is able to find patterns and strings in files and other types of input. Most matches will match on one line only, but it’s often useful to match across multiple new lines. Matching Across Multiple New Lines With grep Handling multi-line matches is something grep struggles with. A better tool for the job is awk or sed, which both handle multi-line input naturally....

Thanksgiving is behind us and most people are making their lists and checking them twice in preparation for the coming holiday. Which gadgets should you snatch up for friends and family (or add to your own wish list)? Read on as we take a tour of this year’s top offerings. Whether you’re buying big or small, we have a veritable pile of gadgets for budgets and bags of all sizes to share with you today....

We recently showed you how to turn your Raspberry Pi into an always on Usenet machine centered around the feature-rich SABnzbd Usenet client. Now we’re back to show you how to use NZBGet, a more Spartan but also very lightweight Usenet tool. Why Do I Want To Do This? If you followed along with our How to Turn a Raspberry Pi into an Always-On Usenet Machine and you’re perfectly happy with the results, then you can skip this tutorial altogether....

Windows’ BitLocker encryption defaults to 128-bit AES encryption, but you can choose to use 256-bit AES encryption instead. Using a 256-bit AES key could potentially offer more security against future attempts to access your files. Is this really more secure? Well, that’s a matter of some debate. You might naively assume that 256-bit encryption offers more security, but it isn’t that clear. Is 256-bit AES Encryption More Secure? RELATED: How to Set Up BitLocker Encryption on Windows...

A Mac’s keyboard layout just isn’t quite right for Windows. Whether you’re primarily a Windows user or primarily an OS X user, the layout doesn’t feel quite right when you run Windows in Boot Camp — but you can fix that. There are several possible ways you might want to rearrange these keyboard shortcuts depending on what you’re used to. All it takes is a few clicks with SharpKeys and you’ll feel more at home in Boot Camp...

If you have multiple user accounts on your computer, you might find it annoying to have to click on the icon for your username each time you start up the computer. To remedy this problem, you can hide a user account with a registry hack. If you aren’t the only actual active user on the system, then you shouldn’t really hide the other user accounts, although you could set your main account to logon automatically and then use the Switch User function only when necessary....

What is Chunky? In a previous Minecraft tutorial we showed you how to render your entire world map into a Google Earth-style interactive map with Mapcrafter. If you’re interested in a more up-close and personal render than MapCrafter can provide, however, you need Chunky. Where MapCraft renders your Minecraft world in totality across all available chunks, Chunky renders a tiny portion of your Minecraft world in very high detail, so it’s a great tool for really showing off a build you’re proud of....

Google removed access to App Ops, the hidden Android app permission manager interface, in Android 4.4.2. App Ops is still present in Android, however — with root access, we can get it back. The cat-and-mouse game with Google’s Android developers continues. We’ll have to continue the battle until Google waves the white flag and admits that we users should be able to control access to our own private data....

Some people love Minecraft’s 8-bit chunky look, while others can’t believe a game would look like that these days. Whether you want to make Minecraft look chunkier, smoother, or somewhere in between resource packs make it easy to do so on the PC, pocket, and console editions of Minecraft. For those of you with a bit of video game experience under your belt, you’re likely well familiar with the concept of “skin packs,” “texture packs,” and “resource packs” as the things have been known over the years and across various video game genres....

When you open Microsoft PowerPoint, the slide thumbnails appear in the left-hand pane by default. PowerPoint lets you hide, show, or even change the size of those thumbnails. Here’s how. Manipulating Slide Thumbnails Everyone has a different working style. Some may prefer to keep the slide thumbnails to create an outline or easily navigate between slides when making edits. However, some might find them distracting or intrusive and, as such, would like to hide or decrease their size....

What Is Cinematic Mode? Cinematic mode is a function found in Apple’s default camera app. At its heart, this mode is all about adding depth-of-field to shots with smooth transitions between different subjects. By using multiple cameras on the back of the device, Cinematic mode can intelligently track subjects as they enter or exit the scene and apply a faux depth-of-field effect not dissimilar to that seen in the iPhone’s Portrait mode....

The docker buildx command group uses BuildKit to expose advanced image build capabilities. Baked builds are a high-level feature that can be used to define automated build pipelines. They lets you produce multiple images from a single build operation. Baked workflows are helpful when you want to publish different variants of your images or build several linked projects in parallel. In this article we’ll cover the key features of docker buildx bake and how you can use them to streamline complex builds....

iOS 13 expands third-party support for Siri. And one of the apps that’s taking advantage of the new feature is Spotify. This means you can get Apple Music style playback controls with Siri on your iPhone. There’s now one less reason for you to stick with Apple Music. RELATED: The Best New Features in iOS 13, Available Now How to Enable Spotify Access for Siri If you already have the Spotify app installed, and you’re logged into your account, all you have to do is start talking to Siri....

Considering that DOS was a single-tasking OS and the ties it had with early versions of Windows, just how did earlier versions of Windows manage to accomplish multi-tasking? Today’s SuperUser Q&A post looks at the answers to this question. Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. Windows 95 screenshot courtesy of Wikipedia. The Question SuperUser reader LeNoob wants to know how older versions of Windows were able to run as multi-tasking systems?...

If you’ve been dragging your feet in the router upgrade process waiting for a router that packs in every feature you could possibly need and then some, it’s definitely time to stop digging in your heels and start shopping. Read on as we review the ASUS RT-AC87U, a router bristling with so many features you’ll find yourself doing more with your home network than ever before just because you can....