Docker Compose is a tool you can use to centrally manage the deployments of many different Docker containers. It’s an important tool for any application that needs multiple microservices, as it allows each service to easily be in a separately managed container. What Does Docker Compose Do? Docker containers are used for running applications in an isolated environment. It’s quite common nowadays to see application deployments done in Docker for the numerous benefits it brings....

Distance Matters In the Web 1.0 era, it often was the case that websites in other parts of the world were just slower. it wasn’t always too bad, but you could definitely tell it took a few seconds longer if you were in Europe checking out hotel bookings in India or the site of a museum in Canada. If a site was under heavy load, you could wait for 10 or even 20 seconds, at times....

As videoconferencing apps keep become more common, you need to keep your computer’s camera feed looking sharp. Now, you can quickly change your camera’s settings with a new, handy toggle on Windows 11. The new build 22623.885 that is now rolling out to Windows Insiders testers comes with a new button on the operating system’s quick settings panel. It’s called “Studio effects,” and allows you to see your camera feed and tweak several settings, like background blur, eye contact, automatic framing, and voice focus....

iPadOS 16 Even though today’s update for the iPad is labelled as iPadOS 16.1, there was never a 16.0 update — it was cancelled to give Apple more time for bug fixing. This is the first time all the cool features shown off at WWDC 2022 are available outside of beta releases, including deleting messages in iMessages, automatic suggestions in Mail, a new design for the Home app, Shared Photo Library in iCloud, Passkeys to replace passwords in some places, and more features in Safari....

Deepfakes The word “deepfake” includes a whole family of technologies that all share the use of deep learning neural networks to achieve their individual goals. Deepfakes became public attention when replacing someone’s face in a video became easy. So someone could replace an actors face with that of the US president or replace the president’s mouth alone and make them say things that never happened. For a while, a human would have to impersonate the voice, but deepfake technology can also replicate voices....

AMD, the company best known for selling desktop processors and discrete graphics cards, has announced that one of its “space-grade Versal adaptive SoCs” will start shipping to buyers in early 2023. Unlike most of AMD’s popular products, this isn’t intended for use in PCs or servers — it’s a System-on-a-Chip (SoC) design for satellites and other devices that need to be functional in the depths of outer space. AMD says it has “full radiation tolerance,” which is important when you’re beyond the reach of Earth’s natural radiation protection....

ASUS was admittedly a little late to the Chromebook game. While competitors like Samsung and Acer were the first to step up with their Google-powered laptops in 2010, renowned hardware manufacturer ASUS didn’t enter the arena until 2014 with the C200. Since then, however, the company has been regularly introducing new hardware, ultimately resulting in the device on sale today. Launched earlier this year, the ASUS Chromebook Flip CX5 is the first Chromebook to feature a 16-inch display....

The Cooler Master Synk X chair looks, at a first glance, like a comfortable cushioned chair. However, its real features are on the inside. The company says that the chair provides “lifelike immersion,” taking sound waves and converting them into tactile feedback and vibrations across the chair. If you hear something loud in a game, you’ll feel it on your chair as well. This feature is cross-platform, too, and you’ll be able to use it not only on your gaming PC, but also on your game console, your TV, or even your smartphone....

Most of us have done it—deployed temporary VMs to Azure. Something that many of us also have done is to forget to remove resources attached to those VMs when deleting them. This can lead to unwanted costs upwards to thousands of dollars if you’re not careful. In this article, we’ll learn how to deploy VMs to Azure and to remove every trace of them when we are finished by using Terraform....

Three Eve smart home products, Eve Energy, Eve Door & Window, and Eve Motion, are getting free firmware updates on December 12, 2022. If you own any of those products, you can simply open the Eve app on your iPhone after the start of the December rollout and download the new firmware. Other products in the Eve lineup with Thread support, such as the Eve Room, Eve Weather, and Eve Water Guard, will receive rolling updates over time....

The new iOS 16 update for iPhones updates the lock screen with optional widgets, which can act as shortcuts for apps or limited information feeds. Popular apps are gradually adding lock screen widgets, and Facebook is next. TechCrunch reports that Facebook has started rolling out an update to its iPhone app, which adds widgets that can be selected for use on the lock screen. Two widgets are available: “Birthdays at a Glance” and “Top Updates....

Windows 11 introduced an all-new taskbar and Start Menu, which was one of the update’s most controversial changes. Now there’s another change coming to the taskbar: old-fashioned floating tooltips. Microsoft is experimenting with a new tips feature with some Windows Insiders testers, starting with Insider Preview Build 25236 in the Dev Channel. The company said, “to improve the value of Search shortcuts and reduce friction in the broader Windows Search experience, we are trying out different ways to provide tips on how to use Windows Search via the taskbar....

Firebase is a backend-as-a-service suite from Google that’s designed to make making mobile backends simple. While it offers a lot of features, at the core is the Firebase Realtime Database, a serverless database that can scale to millions of users. What Is Firebase? Firebase is a whole suite of products that offers many features, such as simplified authentication, cloud hosting, machine learning, analytics, and crash monitoring. However, the service that started it all is the Firebase Realtime Database, a NoSQL database that clients are able to subscribe to over WebSockets....

We will show you two locations easily accessible through the GUI and, of course, a terminal command that will get your IP address in no time. The first location, and the easiest in most cases, is found by right clicking the network icon in the notification area and clicking Connection Information. This brings up a window which has a bunch of information, including your IP address. The second location, which shows you more detail than this first method, is at System > Administration > Network Tools....

At some point between my two hour Angry Birds marathon today, I happened to be installing some updates when I noticed something interesting—you can pause an application update or install. Here’s how it works. Note: Since this is something I’ve never noticed before, it might have worked this way all along and I’m the last to know about it, but I’m guessing there’s at least one reader that isn’t aware of this....

The message says “In order to play audio notes using the mobile AMR audio format, you need to install an audio player such as RealPlayer that supports AMR files. Considering the fact that the button actually links you to the RealPlayer home page, one has to wonder why Evernote decided to use that format for the mobile audio recording instead of an open format that could be played back directly....

ClearType is font-smoothing technology built into Windows to help make text more readable on LCD monitors. If your text is looking a little blurry, tweaking your ClearType settings can definitely help. There are a few issues that can cause slight blurriness. For starters, you should always use your monitor’s native resolution. Windows uses the native resolution by default, but some games and other apps can lower it and then not reset it properly when they’re done....

CloudTrail is an auditing, compliance monitoring, and governance tool designed to watch over your AWS account history and to keep detailed logs of all events. You can use this event history to simplify security analysis and to detect unusual activity in your account. Using CloudTrail You can use CloudTrail to monitor the last 90 days free of charge. However, if you want to keep extended logs, you need to pay for the associated S3 storage as well as a small fee per 100,000 events logged....

Ever lay out a page of multiple business cards (or other project) to print, only to have to come back to perform dozens of annoying edits? Photoshop Smart Objects can automate this process and turn dozens of annoying steps into an easy few. We’ll make an example of a business card design I’ve done for How-To Geek. Standard American business card sizes are usually 3.5″ x 2″. This is the product I came up with....

Last week we showed you a screenshot tour of the new Microsoft Security Essentials 2.0 Beta running on Windows 7 and the current version of Windows Home Server. Since the current version of Windows Home Server is built on Server 2003, it doesn’t support the new feature of Network Protection. The feature is available in WHS Vail though, as it is built on top of Server 2008 R2. Let’s take a look at installing and running it on WHS Vail....