Whenever you encounter a dialog box in Windows, there are the standard OK, Cancel, Apply buttons—but you don’t actually have to click the Apply button first. The OK button does the same thing, saves the settings, and then closes the dialog box… saving you an extra click. Don’t believe me? Try it out for yourself. Only the worst possible application won’t behave that way, and you probably don’t want to use that type of application to begin with....

While troubleshooting tricky connection or application issues, it can be very helpful to see what is being transmitted across the network. Microsoft originally offered the Microsoft Network Monitor which was succeeded by the Microsoft Message Analyzer. Unfortunately, Microsoft has discontinued the Microsoft Message Analyzer and removed its download links. Currently, only the older Microsoft Network Monitor is available. Of course, you can use third-party tools for performing network captures, such as WireShark....

Has it ever annoyed you to have to open lots of separate windows for Device Manager, Services, Event Viewer, and other system administration tools? Here’s how to pull them all together into your own custom admin panel. We’ll accomplish this easily since most of the system admin panels are implemented as plugins for Microsoft Management Console, a wrapper framework that we’ll use to create our panel. Create Your Custom Administration Panel Open up mmc....

The Usual Locations The default location for the nginx configuration folder is: This location likely is the default for all normal installs. If you installed nginx from your distro’s package manager, it’s likely located here. Within this directory you have a few files, regardless of where the main folder is located on your drive: nginx. conf, which is nginx’s primary configuration file. sites-available/, a directory that usually contains different configuration files for each individual domain name your server hosts....

The Scenario So you finally have your rpm based server set, stable and secure. Life is good and you don’t figure you have to do anything else for some time. Then, for some reason, you run at the command line as root: Which just happens to supply an affirmative answer to all prompts for the yum command. Which also happens to run as quietly as possible. And which happens this time to include an update to the kernel packages....

Increasing the Size of the VHD File With the help of the freely available VHD Resizer tool, you can expand the size of a VHD using it’s simple wizard interface. When opening VHD Resizer the wizard prompts you for the source VHD file to resize. After selecting the source, set a destination VHD to a new file. This new file will be an exact copy of the source, only a larger size....

React contexts are a feature which help you eliminate repetitive prop drilling. Props are often passed down from a parent component to a deeply nested child. This requires each intermediary component to “forward” the prop to the next component in the tree. Contexts let you pass props through the tree without manually forwarding them at each level. This is particularly useful for data representing top-level application state. User settings, authentication tokens and data cached from API responses are good candidates for the Context API....

Make sure their computer is locked An unlocked computer is a vulnerable computer. Vulnerable to malware sure, but much more vulnerable to the local office prankster, who thinks it’s hilarious to make a screenshot of your desktop, change your background to that screenshot, then hide all of your desktop icons. These incidents have taught us that you should lock your computer when taking a break. Hopefully your coworker has learned the same lesson, and pressed Ctrl+Alt+L before stepping out for a coffee....

Microsoft Designer was announced today, based on the Designer feature in PowerPoint, which attempts to match the content of your slideshows with less-generic backgrounds. The new dedicated Designer app is branded as a graphic design tool “that helps you create stunning social media posts, invitations, digital postcards, graphics, and more, all in a flash.” The new app allows you to type in text, which appears like the title of a PowerPoint slide, as well as a text prompt for generating a background image....

UPDATE: If you are running the latest versions of Windows Live Essentials (15.4.3502.0922 or 15.4.3508.1109), then here is how to get the minimize to System Tray functionality back. Modify the properties for the shortcut as shown here, then once you have Live Mail open right click on the System Tray Icon and make certain that “Hide window when minimized” is selected. Afterwards the Live Mail app window will minimize to the System Tray just like before....

Governor Kathy Hochul of New York has directed the State Department of Environmental Conservation to require “all new passenger cars, pickup trucks, and SUVs” to be zero-emission by the year 2035. Notably, that rule only applies to the sale of new vehicles — sales of used gas cars can continue, and gas cars are not barred from driving on roads. However, the state is also planning “new pollutant standards” for light-duty gas trucks and medium-duty gas vehicles, which could also impact which cars can be sold or registered in New York....

The Office 2010 beta will expire on October 31, 2010, at which time you may see a dialog like the one below. At that time, you will need to either upgrade to the final release of Office 2010, or reinstall your previous version of Office. Our computer was running the Office 2010 Home and Business Click to Run beta, and after uninstalling it we reinstalled Office 2007 Home and Student....

Using Save-To-Read As soon as you install the extension you will notice two new additions to your UI. You will see a small plus sign in the address bar and a new toolbar button (opens and closes the sidebar shown here). Your bookmarks menu will also have a new folder entry. For our example we chose to save three pages for later reading. Each time you want to save a website click on the small plus sign, and it is automatically added to your read later list....

Continuous Deployment and Integration is the process of automatically running tests and builds whenever source changes are pushed. You can set up Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to run automated Docker builds whenever you make updates to your container, and deploy to Cloud Run or Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Overall, the configuration for this is fairly easy—Dockerfiles already handle most of the build configuration, so all that’s required from you is linking a few services together, and configuring Cloud Build to deploy updates to Cloud Run or GKE....

VPN Over Tor vs. Tor Over VPN While both approaches do very different things, the idea behind them is the same: you combine Tor and VPN to get the best of both worlds. As we explain in our article comparing VPN and Tor, both have their strengths and weaknesses, and combining them should erase many of their weaknesses and improve their strengths. However, theory and reality collide a little here. Due to the way these technologies work, you can’t combine them directly; you have to choose one of two options....

Trojan Software Trojan software carries a hidden malicious payload. You think you are installing one application but in fact, there are stowaways in the installation routine that get installed at the same time. Or the application you are installing has itself been compromised and now harbors malicious code. A recent example is a bar code scanner app that was removed from the Google Play app store. The bar code scanner had been published for several years and had a healthy installed base of 10 million users....

What Are You Talking About? The thing you probably don’t realize is that behind the scenes, your web browser sends a request to the web server using the HTTP protocol, which is nothing more than a pre-defined set of commands in text format so the browser and web server can communicate. …but that’s really boring. Which is why the geeks that run various web sites decided to hide messages in those headers just to see if anybody would notice....

Touchpad devices have become increasingly interesting as they’ve included support for multi-touch gestures. Scrybe takes it to the next level and lets you use your touchpad as an application launcher. You can launch any application, website, or complete many common commands on your computer with a simple gesture. Scrybe works with most modern Synaptics touchpads, which are standard on most laptops and netbooks. It is optimized for newer multi-touch touchpads, but can also work with standard single-touch touchpads....

It’s very common for people to buy more compute power than is really needed. Unless you have experience running similar workloads, you might be unsure which instance type to use. AWS’s Compute Optimizer is a tool that can help you figure that out. What Is Compute Optimizer? The concept is very simple. Once enabled, Compute Optimizer will analyze your running EC2 instances, using CloudWatch logs and other metrics, and give you a recommendation for a different instance type, if a change is needed....

Going to a lot of night parties? We all know that the flash will give your pictures red eye, but here’s a simple way to use freeware Paint.NET to remove the red eye from any of your pictures. Paint.NET has a simple tool for doing this called the “Color Replacement Tool,” illustrated here. Shortcut key will give it to you. You can adjust the colors you want to change in your colors panel....