Intel showed off a preview of the “next generation of Thunderbolt,” which doesn’t have a name yet — it could launch as Thunderbolt 5, as a minor sub-version of Thunderbolt 4, or go with another name entirely. The company says the future spec will be three times as capable as Thunderbolt 4 currently is. Looking at the specs, the new Thunderbolt will be able to transfer up to 80 Gbps both ways....

Just like the previous model, the Fire TV Cube is a media streaming box and an Alexa-powered smart speaker in one device. The Fire TV OS software includes access to most popular streaming services, as well as some games — the company has been heavily promoting its Luna game streaming service. The Fire TV Cube can listen for voice commands, and if the TV is off, it can broadcast a response through the built-in speaker....

Yeah, there’s nothing really of value in this article, so you should check out our awesome Lego Wallpapers instead. I’ll try to make it quick… Pixels and Charts and Numbers and Such! Last year we ended up a little short of our 30 million pageview goal, but this year we smashed our goal of 40 million with ease, especially after the Windows 7 launch had the XP users scrambling for answers....

LiteDB is a .NET native NoSQL embedded database. Built-in .NET, LiteDB is easily accessible to PowerShell and works wonderfully as a local and flexible database. Built-in encryption, SQL-like commands, and ACID-compliant with full transaction support LiteDB is simple and easy to use. In this article, we will talk about you can use LiteDB within PowerShell and potential use cases! Installing LiteDB in PowerShell Available as a NuGet package, LiteDB is easily installable as a package using the Install-Package cmdlet....

xargs Introduction My colleague Dave McKay wrote an interesting article How to Use the xargs Command on Linux, which you may like to read first for an detailed introduction and exploration of xargs in general. This article will focus on a specific problem: what to do when you run into limitations of traditional pipe-based stacking, or normal (; delimited) stacking of Linux commands, and when even using xargs does not immediately seem to provide an answer?...

High Refresh Rate Gaming Explained The refresh rate of a computer monitor or television describes how many times the display updates in a single second. Measured in hertz (Hz), a refresh rate of 60Hz is the baseline found on most “office” monitors designed for productivity and the majority of televisions manufactured up until a few years ago. By contrast, a high refresh rate monitor of 240Hz updates four times faster than a comparable 60Hz screen....

Using Keyboard Shortcut You can connect to a server by opening the run application window with the Alt+F2 keyboard shortcut. You will just need to specify the server type by adding the protocol at the beginning of the command. For example smb:// will connect to a samba share; other supported protocols are ssh, ftp, sftp, http, and https. Note: In the example below my server name is playground and the shared folder is called music....

Installation During the installation process you will see the following confirmation message window…click “Install” to finish adding Task List to Chrome. After the extension has finished installing you will see your new “Task List Toolbar Button” and an extension management message. As you can see here there are no options for you to worry with. All that you have to do is enjoy easy access to your Tasks account…...

Different Ways of Amplifying The difference between active and passive speakers all comes down to how they’re amplified. All speakers require amplification, but passive and active speakers go about it in very different ways. Passive speakers are most likely the type that pops into your head when you think of a basic speaker. These rely on an external amplifier or stereo receiver to provide power. If you think of a classic stereo system, these use passive speakers almost exclusively....

Note: We will show you examples in Excel, but the Artistic Effect are available in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. To insert a picture into your Office document, click the Picture button on the Insert tab. Once you import your picture, the Picture Tools format ribbon should be active. If not, click on the image. In the Adjust group, click on Artistic Effects. You will see a selection of effects previews images in the dropdown list....

Interior AI is a website that accepts photos of a room, and then uses AI to decorate the room in one of several styles. The current list of options includes Tropical, Minimalist, Cottagecore, and Art Deco. Some functionality is available for free, but there is also a subscription that adds unlimited renders, faster and higher quality images, more styles, and other features. The results can be impressive, especially how the site is able to remove decorations in a room before applying new ideas....

Photo by Svadilfari Make Sure You’ve Got The Basics First, of course, you’ll need to make sure you’ve got the basics covered. It’s fairly cheap to get up-to-date software as a student, so there’s no reason to skimp. Microsoft is currently offering Office 2010 Professional for $79.95 and Windows 7 Professional upgrade for just $29.95 if you’re a college student. For more on this check out this check out how students can upgrade to Office 2010 and Windows 7 cheap and easy....

XRECODE II To get an idea of the amount of conversions possible take a look at this description from their site… xrecode II is converter and audio-grabber which allows you to convert from mp3, mp2, wma, aiff, amr, ogg, flac, ape, cue, ac3, wv, mpc, mid, cue ,tta, tak, wav, dts, m4a, m4b, mp4, ra, rm, aac, avi, mpg, vob, mkv, flv, swf, mov, ofr, wmv, divx, m4v, spx, 3gp, 3g2, m2v, m4v, ts, m2ts, adts, shn, tak, xm, mod, s3m, it, mtm, umx to m4a, alac, ape, flac, mp3, mp4 (using NeroAAC), ogg, raw, wav, wma, WavPack, mpc, mp2, Speex, ofr, ac3, aiff and Shorten formats....

This will create the user, with output something like this: You can see all the options by typing adduser –help at the prompt. So there you have it. Creating a new user is easy.

Spacing in Word 2003 In Word 2003 the default line spacing is 1.0 which might be to compressed for some users. Change Line Spacing in Word 2007 & 2010 In Word 2007 & 2010 Microsoft changed the default line spacing to 1.15. Which might be ok for some users because the sentences don’t seem so crammed together, but you might want to customize it. If you want to change the spacing of an entire document, under the Home tab in the Styles group select Change Styles then Style Set....

Customize the default screensavers If you’ve ever pressed the Customize button on most of the default screensavers in Windows 7 and Vista, you were probably greeted with this message: A little digging in the registry shows that this isn’t fully correct. The default screensavers in Vista and 7 do have options you can set, but they’re not obvious. With the help of an app or some registry tips, you can easily customize the screensavers to be uniquely yours....

Test your RAM with memtest86+ RAM problems are difficult to diagnose—they can range from annoying program crashes, or crippling reboot loops. Even if you’re not having problems, when you install new RAM it’s a good idea to thoroughly test it. The Ubuntu Live CD includes a tool called Memtest86+ that will do just that—test your computer’s RAM! Unlike many of the Live CD tools that we’ve looked at so far, Memtest86+ has to be run outside of a graphical Ubuntu session....

Microsoft has recently updated Hotmail with tons of new features, and we recently looked at all the new features in a screenshot tour. One of the newest features is the integration of Live Messenger, previously known as MSN Messenger, throughout all the Windows Live web apps, including the Office Web Apps and Hotmail. This can be a great tool if you want to catch up with your friends or work on an Office document with a coworker from the browser, but it can also be frustrating if you’re just trying to quickly read your email....

Only Open the Ports You Need, Firewall the Rest The services you run on your server connect to the outside world through ports. Each port has a number, and the service will listen for connections on that port number. This isn’t always a security risk, as you’ll often need to have ports open for users to access your service. Ports 80 and 443 are the default ports for HTTP and HTTPS....