Microsoft PowerToys is a handy utility for Windows that lets you customize all sorts of things about Windows—everything from the behavior of windows on your screen to your keyboard shortcuts. Here’s how you can use PowerToys to remap your favorite (or least favorite!) shortcuts. Download PowerToys from Microsoft and Install It PowerToys doesn’t come preinstalled on Windows; you need to download it manually. Microsoft recommends that you download PowerToys directly from GitHub....

This is the first part in a series on how to create your own professional quality blog site. No, we’re not talking about some cheapo looking blog from Blogger or something on Facebook, but creating a quality blog you can be proud of and present to millions of readers online. WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platforms, powering hundreds of high-profile websites and blogs around the world. It’s both powerful and easy to use, which makes it great whether you’re just starting out or are a blogging pro....

AWS’s Route 53 DNS service is awesome—it integrates well with EC2, and is able to dynamically change DNS settings based on latency and health of the endpoints. If you’d like to transfer an existing domain to Route 53, the process is fairly simple. Transferring a Domain From the Route 53 Management Console, head over to the “Registered Domains” tab and select “Transfer Domain”. This will bring you to a page where you’ll input your domain name along with the TLD extension....

What Are Signal Stories? Don’t get us wrong, we love Signal. And the folks at Signal seem pretty excited to announce Story Time as a feature many users will get a lot of enjoyment and mileage out of. It makes sense for users who want a bit of that social media experience on Signal but without all the privacy implications of using Instagram or other platforms. The Story Time stories you make are only shared with the friends you select, they’re end-to-end encrypted just like all your other Signal communications, and just like stories on other platforms, they fade away after 24 hours (or sooner if you delete them)....

What Is Aspell? GNU Aspell is an open source and free spell checker which can be installed easily on your Linux system. You can use it at the command line, and with a few option tweaks one can check text files reliably and quickly. This article was spell checked with Aspell at the command line, as well as spellintian which is another utility you may like to explore. Installing Aspell To install Aspell on your Debian/Apt based Linux distribution (Like Ubuntu and Mint), execute the following command in your terminal:...

Many companies use human workers to do manual data entry on forms, applications, and other physical documents. While this is very accurate, it’s slow and costly. AWS Textract uses machine learning to automate this process. Why Use AWS Textract? Textract certainly isn’t the only Optical Character Recognition tool—there are plenty of open source solutions available for free, such as Tesseract OCR. You can read our guide to using that to learn more....

Installing Boxee Download and install the current version of Boxee. (See download link below) The install is very straightforward, just take the defaults. You’ll also need to register for a Boxee account, if you don’t already have one. If you have Windows Firewall enabled and this is the first time you’re running Boxee, allow it to access your network. Boxee Integration 1.0 Close out of Windows Media Center, then download and install the Boxee Integration application....

Microsoft has announced that it’ll be holding its “Microsoft Fall 2022 Event” on October 12 at 10 AM. The event will be held right before it kicks off its annual, developer-focused Ignite event in Seattle from that same day through October 14 — which is, as a matter of fact, its first in-person event since the beginning of the pandemic. The hardware event’s invite graphic is Windows 11’s wallpaper with watercolor-like stains and “Save the date” handwritten on top, and Microsoft confirmed it’ll “talk about devices....

Smart Canless Recessed Lighting These smart canless recessed lights can easily create brilliant, customizable lighting for any space and scenario. The high-quality LED bulbs provide 1,100 Lumens of rich color, warm white, or cool white with scalable brightness levels. Each light in this set comes with a quick connector cord, wire nuts, and snap springs that make them easy to install for convenient soffit lighting, no hub required. They feature high-transparency lenses and various internal layers to ensure a bright and vivid color display with every use....

Apple has many services under its umbrella, but most of them don’t work well (or at all) with non-Apple devices. That has gradually started to change over the past few years, and now more of them are coming to Windows PCs. Microsoft revealed during today’s Surface event, where the company showed off new tablets, laptops, and all-in-one PCs, that Windows PCs will soon have marginally better integration with Apple products and services....

But when it’s the Pillars of Creation, it tends to be justified, even if the photos are only about a week apart. Recently the Webb telescope used its Near-Infrared Camera to release a sharper, more detailed image of the region with a view that peered through much of the space dust that normally obscures the area. Like a photographer changing the setting on a camera, NASA then switched to the Mid-Infrared Instrument....

This is probably why Walmart is launching the Be Your Own Model virtual fitting room that allows users to upload half-naked photos of themselves (nope!), and try on clothes in a somewhat realistic manner. It doesn’t merely overlay the image in an artificial-looking way but displays shadows and how the fabric might drape over you. Walmart says the augmented reality technology involves “techniques originally utilized in developing highly accurate topographic maps,” which means if the technology can develop topographic maps of Cleveland, it can handle your body....

Not every paste preview option will be available in every circumstance. The available options will be based on the applications being used and what content is copied. Copy your content like normal by right-clicking and selecting Copy, pressing Crtl + C, or selecting Copy from the Home tab. Next, select your location to paste the content. Now you can access the Paste Preview buttons either by selecting the Paste dropdown list from the Home tab…...

What Are Bash Loops? To define this a little better, we should start with the question what are loops. Loops are a programming language construct, allowing a developer to repeat (i.e. loop) certain parts, or all, of the code inside such a loop definition. It is now easy to define Bash Loops as any loop programming language construct used in Bash! Bash natively supports ‘for’, ‘until’ and ‘while’ based loops. Each of these has their own advantages, but you can already get a sense of their meanings just by looking at the main word idiom....

In all likelihood, any commercial DVD will be copy protected. Handbrake doesn’t have the native ability to remove copy protection. So we will use HD Decrypter, which is the always free module of the DVDFab software suite, to rip each DVD to a folder on our hard drive. Then we’ll use Handbrake to convert the episodes in those folders to individual MP4 files. Note: You’ll get full access to all the options in DVDFab during the 30 trial period....

To stream video to another computer on your home network they will all need to be running Windows 7 with Windows Media Player 12. In our example we will stream video from a computer running Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit) to another machine running Windows 7 Home Premium (32-bit) which are part of the same Homegroup. Setup Streaming The first thing you’ll want to do is turn on media streaming. Type media streaming into the search box in the Start menu and select Media streaming options....

We’ve already told you how to stop them from automatically playing if you’re a Firefox user (best answer: use Flashblock!), but now it’s time for Chrome users to get their turn. Use the Stop Autoplay for YouTube Extension The great thing about this extension is that it stops the video from playing, but it allows it to continue buffering, so when you do feel like playing the video, it’ll already be downloaded—really useful for people with slower internet connections....

Russian scientists are exploring the feasibility of advertising from space in the form of displaying giant pixel images to suckers on the ground, reports The Register, essentially turning the sky into a global version of the downtown in Bladerunner. This wouldn’t be shuttles flying giant banners or anything like that. Instead, they propose a satellite system that can project a constellation of bright artificial stars formed into an image, or in this case, an advertisement....

If you’ve used Windows, you’ve probably stared at the file copy dialog a few times as you wait for large files (or files from slow drives) to transfer. Now you can play a game inside the copy window. GitHub user Sanakan8472 has created Copy Dialog Lunar Lander, a game overlaid on top of the file transfer graph in the Windows copy dialog. The project’s readme file explains, “here is one of the most pressing issues of our times: You need to download a huge file from the other side of the world to continue your work....

Setting up global key bindings The GNOME desktop environment by default uses the Ctrl+Alt+Del shortcut to bring up the shutdown, logout, restart, and hibernate dialog. This is not useful for users who are used to quick access to a task manager. To change the settings of Ctrl+Alt+Del in GNOME open the keyboard shortcuts preferences. In Ubuntu it is located under System -> Preferences -> Keyboard Shortcuts, and in Linux Mint open the mintMenu -> Control Center -> Keyboard Shortcuts....