Last time, it was as simple as spam links showing up in your browser, and tracking the URLs you were going to—really frustrating and evil, but not necessarily the end of the world, since it wasn’t going to take over your PC. Yesterday, the Mozilla Add-ons blog reported that two extensions contained nasty trojans that hijacked your PC. If you’ve installed those extensions at any point, you should make sure to run a full virus scan on your PC....

The Two Types of Depth Perception We perceive depth in two main ways. First, there’s stereoscopic vision using stereoscopic depth cues. This is what most people think of as “3D vision” and works by using the slight difference in viewpoint between both eyes to calculate depth. This is what VR and 3D movies use to give you the perception of depth using two 2D images. However, this is only one way we perceive depth, and these depth “cues” only work when an object is close enough for your eyes to have “vergence....

Note: This uses Local Security Policy which is not available in Home versions of Windows. These are local settings on machines not on a domain. Domain settings will take precedence over local settings. Changing Password Age in Windows 7 Log in as Administrator and type Secpol.msc into the Search box of the Start Menu and hit Enter. Local Security Policy opens. Navigate to Account Policies \ Password Policy and double-click on Maximum password age....

How Tor Works In many ways, dVPNs have more in common with Tor than with regular VPNs—the name notwithstanding. All three types of technology share the fact that they serve as ways to anonymize your browsing. When using any of these programs, you’ll appear to be browsing from a different location than where you actually are and nobody should be able to track you. Tor does this by rerouting your traffic through so-called nodes....

What you’ll need to do is use the new compatibility hack to get it working. And before you start talking about nightly tester tools and other extensions to force compatibility, some of us don’t want to bloat up Firefox with yet another extension, and prefer the about:config hack instead. How To Force Extension Compatibility with Firefox 3.6+ You can click the link to read the full description, or just create a new boolean key with this name, and value set to false:...

Auto scaling is very simple in concept—when your servers start to become overloaded with traffic, AWS’s auto-scaling systems will spin up new servers to help meet demands. This can help you both cut costs and scale quickly. Auto Scaling Saves You Money Auto scaling allows you to scale up to meet traffic needs, but also fixes an issue with traditional server hosting; you must build your servers around peak load, but that server may remain mostly idle during non-peak hours....

If your application needs a way to convert text to speech programmatically to interact with users, AWS has a managed service that uses machine learning to create lifelike believable voices that improve your user experience significantly. Neural Based Text-to-Speech Is So Much Better We can’t overstate this enough, neural text-to-speech (TTS) sounds fluid and human, much like Siri or Alexa, and standard TTS sounds robotic in comparison (though, admittedly, still quite acceptable)....

Why Good Logging is Critical To one degree or another, operating systems, network appliances, software applications, and software services all create diagnostic logs. By cross-referencing the timestamps in the logs you can build up an accurate picture of what was happening in your network at any point in time. User activity, inter-process communication, file access, the network traffic moving through your network, connections into and out of your network, and more are all logged....

One of the largest costs of AWS is bandwidth—it’s expensive, especially if your app is dependant on serving content. Compressing the images you serve can reduce your bill significantly, as well as save you money on the storage costs. Why Lower the Size? The simplest way to lower bandwidth is to lower the size of the objects you’re serving with compression and encoding. It can also reduce your storage costs as well, which can save a lot of money over time....

We’ve just got a list of new employees from the HR Department, and they’ve been kind enough to give it to us in an excel format. Make sure that your own Excel file matches the same format, and make sure that you are using First Name and Last Name as column headers. The first thing we are going to do is save the file as a .csv, and to do that, we click on the Office Button and select Save As....

Any script development usually requires troubleshooting which usually results in one of two approaches. Either manually setting variables to values and outputting that data when running the script, or utilizing debugging to set breakpoints to inspect data before continuing or aborting. Built-in to PowerShell ISE and to Visual Studio Code is the ability to perform debugging. How does PowerShell Debugging Work? Included with Windows PowerShell, the PowerShell ISE has been the traditional go-to environment to debug PowerShell scripts....

If you want to find numbers that are above or below average, you don’t have to calculate that average and then review the values for those higher or lower. With conditional formatting in Excel, you can automatically highlight those numbers. Along with a quick way to highlight values above or below average, you can go a step further and see those that are equal to and higher or equal to and lower....

Getting Started You’ll need the following items to get started. VMware Workstation with a valid license or you can use it free for a 30 day trial period WHS Vail Beta ISO Computer Capable of Hardware Virtualization Enough Hard Drive space on the Host computer to create a 160GB virtual hard drive which is the minimum system requirements At least 2GB of RAM or more on the Host computer – The minimum amount of RAM to allocate for Vail is 1GB...

If your PC never leaves your home and you don’t really need a password, automatically logging in will save you the trouble of typing in your password every single time you turn on or restart your PC. Here’s everything you need to know to enable auto login. You Generally Shouldn’t Use Auto Login Automatically signing in potentially exposes your sensitive data to anyone that has physical access to your PC....

So once we got into the HSTS preload list, nobody could to go http://feeds.howtogeek.com anymore, and Feedburner’s custom DNS option didn’t support HTTPS. So it was time to switch to our own thing. The quick and easily solution was to serve up all requests to a static copy of our RSS feed that we had stored in the index.html file. To force nginx to serve that file whether somebody went to /howtogeek/ or /howtogeek/1 or even /howtogeek1 was as simple as using the try_files directive....

Google Chrome seems to have a new version coming out all the time, and is already on version 5 after being released less than two years ago. Chrome makes it easy to stay up to date since it automatically installs the latest version without any prompts or installs, so you can simply install Chrome and use it without worrying about updates. However, there are actually three different release channels of Chrome available: release, beta, and dev....

Note: To upload to Office Web Apps you need to install the Office 2010 Beta. Upload Document To SkyDrive Open up the document you want to upload to Web Apps in Windows Live, and click on the File tab to open the Backstage View. In this example we’ll be uploading a Word document to a Windows Live SkyDrive. With Backstage open, click Share on the left column and then Save to SkyDrive....

CloudWatch is commonly used for log processing and monitoring of your AWS resources, but it also has powerful tools for automation from within your account. We’ll show how to set up and work with CloudWatch Events. What Is CloudWatch Events? CloudWatch Events is a service from AWS that basically maps cause to effect using actions happening in your account. It can route API events, such as an EC2 instance stopping or an object being uploaded to an S3 bucket, and send them to other services like Lambda functions or messaging queues....

How to Stream UFC 280 Live in the United States Play Video The main card of UFC 280, headlined by Charles Oliveira and Islam Makhachev competing for the open lightweight title, streams exclusively on ESPN+ in the United States. Current subscribers to ESPN+ ($9.99 per month or $99.99 per year) or the Disney Bundle (featuring ESPN+, Disney+, and Hulu’s ad-supported tier for $13.99 per month) can purchase the UFC 280 broadcast for an additional $74....

Accessing TwitKit+ There are three ways that you can access TwitKit+ after installing the extension. The first is by adding the “Toolbar Button” to your browser’s UI. The second and third methods are through the “View & Tools Menus”. TwitKit+ in Action When you open TwitKit+ for the first time you will see Twitter’s “Public Tweet Stream”. To get started login into your account. Note: If you do not care for the “brown theme” you can select a different one in “Preferences”....