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Before Here is the “Progress Bar” showing in the “Status Bar” while a webpage is loading…nice if you like having the “Status Bar” displayed. But what if you prefer to have the “Status Bar” hidden? After Once you have installed the extension, the “Progress Bar” will display on any tabs that are currently loading leaving you free to completely hide the “Status Bar” if you desire. Note: There are no options to have to worry with for this extension…just install and go....

Using Google Voice you can call any number for free but you are not able to receive calls directly to your Google Voice number on your Android phone without a voice plan with your carrier. Using sipgate you can receive any call for free but cannot place calls without adding money to your account. Combining the two services, we will be able to place calls using Google Voice which will automatically call back your sipgate number connecting you to your intended recipient, and we will do all of this using WiFi, 3G data, or EDGE, meaning you will never run out of minutes again....

Stay-Open Menu in Action You can start using the extension as soon as you have installed it…simply access your favorite links in the “Bookmarks Menu, Bookmarks Toolbar, Awesome Bar, or History Menu” and middle click on the appropriate entries. Here you can see our browser opening the Productive Geek website and that the “Bookmarks Menu” is still open. As soon as you left click on a link or click outside the menus they will close normally like before....

Speed Dial Page The search bar and text at the bottom take up room and add clutter to the look and feel of Opera’s Speed Dial page. Changing the Settings Two small tweaks to the config settings will clean it all up. To get started type opera:config into the address bar and press enter. Type “speed” into the quick find bar and look for the Speed Dial State entry. Change the 1 to 2 and click save....

An Unexpected Addition to Your Extensions You may be wondering what the new mysterious extension that showed up is for. Its’ purpose is to help the Bing Toolbar better integrate with your browser. Unless you have the Bing Toolbar installed you really do not need this cluttering your browser up. So how do you get rid of it? Removing the Extension In order to remove the extension you will need to navigate to the following location:...

Intro & the JustPaste.it Website The “About Page” provides a very nice overview of what you can do with JustPaste.it for your text, images, embedding video files, and importing files. Your work is automatically backed up every 3 minutes and you may also download your documents as PDF files. This is what the “Main Window” looks like for JustPaste.it. Notice that you can switch back and forth between the “Main Editor Window” and an “Edit HTML Window” using the tabs....

The Consumer Product Safety Commission found that the Cyberquad fails to comply with federal safety standards, particularly with issues related to the mechanical suspension, maximum tire pressure, and kids probably having too much fun on it. In response, Radio Flyer (which built it) voluntarily issued a recall for the Cyberquad Tesla was featuring on their site. If you’re one of the 5,000 or so people who purchased the Cyberquad for Kids, you can attain your full $1,900 refund by removing the motor controller and sending it back to Radio Flyer....

Mastodon uses the ActivityPub protocol to discover, follow, and message people across servers, much like how all email services use the same protocol for sending and receiving messages. Other social media platforms have already adopted this protocol, such as PixelFed and PeerTube, allowing people on one platform to follow and talk to people on other platforms. The services that support ActivityPub and all the people using them is sometimes collectively called “the Fediverse....

The Ubuntu Font Debuts Ubuntu 10.10 is the first version of Ubuntu to come with the Ubuntu font family, and it uses it for many user interface elements by default. If you’ve been using Ubuntu for any length of time, the change is immediately noticeable. In our opinion, it’s a very positive change, but if you prefer the old font, you can change back to the Sans font in System > Preferences > Appearance....

Solid state drives have become cheaper and better over the past decade, and now it’s almost a no-brainer to use SSDs in all your PCs. Now you can pick up a Crucial MX500 SSD at a great price. The MX500 is a SATA-based SSD that has been around for a few years. Crucial promises sequential read speeds of 560 MB/s, and sequential writes of around 510 MB/s, which is close to the physical limit of the SATA 3 connector....

Get Started With IE 9 on Windows Vista Installing IE 9 on Vista works almost the same as it does on Windows 7. The biggest difference is that you’ll need to have Service Pack 2 installed before you can install it. If you don’t already have it installed, IE 9’s installer will let you know that it’s not supported on your current service pack. Install Service Pack 2, and then run the installer again to setup IE 9....

By default, Safari will show standard desktop websites. But by making a simple change, you can switch it to work like Safari Mobile on the iPhone or iPod Touch. Getting Started First make sure you have Safari 4 for Windows installed. You can download Safari directly (link below) and install it as usual. Or if you already have another Apple program installed, such as QuickTime or iTunes, then you can install it from Apple Software update....

The Alphabet company announced that the latest version of the sensor array on its autonomous vehicles — using a combination of cameras, radar, and lidar — is able to measure weather conditions the car may face, specifically the intensity of rain drops (or lack thereof), as well as fog. It would turn the vehicles into, as the company puts it, “mobile weather stations.” This doesn’t mean you’ll be seeing a Waymo car giving out the weather on your local TV station anytime soon, but it will help the robotaxis make real-time decisions in adapting to the weather conditions on the ground....

The latest version of Windows 11 is the 2022 Update, version “22H2,” which was named “Sun Valley 2” during development. Microsoft says it will release major updates once per year, and this is the first major update Microsoft has released since the initial launch of Windows 11 in 2021. Major updates like 22H2 can take time to reach individual PCs. Microsoft has a slow rollout process and spends time testing updates on different hardware and software configurations to ensure they’re as bug-free as possible when Windows Update automatically downloads them....

Ubuntu 22.10 The Kinetic Kudu is an interim release of the Ubuntu Linux distribution produced by Canonical and the Ubuntu community. Interim releases are the builds—usually three of them—that come out at six-month intervals between the Long Term Support versions. LTS versions are released in April every two years. The last LTS build was 22.04, the Jammy Jellyfish. 22.10 is the first interim build since then. Commercial or mission-critical installations tend to move from LTS build to LTS build, because they prioritize stability and long-term support over the newest visual tweaks and the latest round of upgraded applications....

The Smartphone As a Target Some cyberattacks are targeted at a specific individual or company. The victim is selected because they are a high-value target to the threat actors. High value most often means rich financial gains for the threat actors. But sometimes their goal is to exfiltrate sensitive or private documents, intellectual property, or industrial secrets. Occasionally, the entire motive is to cause trouble for the victim. Hacktivists, for example, will try to destroy the victim’s IT systems and information....

OAuth gets rid of the need to store confidential user passwords on your server. Instead, the user trusts you to access their basic profile information from a service like Google, who handles the authentication for you. Third-Party Sign-on Frees You from Handling Passwords Third-party sign-on is an alternative to username/password authentication. You’ve definitely encountered this before if you’ve ever been asked to log in with Google or Facebook—you simply authenticate with your social media profile without putting in any passwords....

DirectTV has released a new feature available to residential TV subscribers, called “SignalSaver,” which can use your home internet connection as a fallback when a satellite TV signal is unavailable. On supported set-top boxes, when the satellite signal goes out, the TV can automatically switch to the same channel streamed over your home internet connection. Streaming TV over the internet is not new or revolutionary — services like YouTube TV, Hulu TV, and Sling are only available over an internet connection — but DirectTV’s new feature is a helpful boost for satellite connections....

Google Cloud Platform is pretty easy to use compared to more complicated cloud providers like AWS. We’ll explain the basics of how it works, and where to look to get started with popular solutions. What Are Projects? Google Cloud Platform splits every resource and every service up into separate projects. Resources in one project are isolated from resources in another (for the most part). If you’re only using it for one purpose, you’ll be fine with just the default project, but if you’re working with multiple projects or even with multiple companies, you’ll get a lot of benefit out of splitting up projects....

Can a VPN Improve Your Ping? Before we go into any detail, let’s make one thing clear: in most cases a VPN will not be able to improve your ping, either while gaming or otherwise. There are some very specific exceptions—we’ll go over them below—but under normal circumstances there’s no way to improve your ping using a VPN. You may want to think twice about buying from anybody claiming otherwise, as it’s a sign of an untrustworthy VPN....