Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has announced a new online tool called Make a Video. Once it’s out, it will work pretty much identically to current AI image generators. You give it a text prompt, and the tool will interpret your prompt and put together a video to the best of its ability. Instead of generating one single image, it’ll instead generate multiple frames of the same idea to make a video for you....
The maker of the Firefox browser is officially spinning up its own Mastodon server, joining the many servers currently available. It will be available for public testing early next year, and whenever it’s out, you’ll be able to sign up for an account there on mozilla.social. The page isn’t live yet, but it’ll presumably be filled up with more info soon The magic of Mastodon server is that you can still follow other people even if they’re on other servers....
We’ve shown you simple ways to recover accidentally deleted files, even a simple method that can be done from an Ubuntu Live CD, but for hard disks that have been heavily corrupted, those methods aren’t going to cut it. In this article, we’ll examine four tools that can recover data from the most messed up hard drives, regardless of whether they were formatted for a Windows, Linux, or Mac computer, or even if the partition table is wiped out entirely....
Reader Jeevus wrote in asking how to remove the “Troubleshoot Compatibility” item from the Windows context menu whenever you right-click on an application—naturally, we were happy to explain how to do it, and share with the rest of you. You’ll want to note that we’re not necessarily recommending that you remove this item, since it could be useful if you’re having compatibility issues with an application, but we’re fans of showing how to do something—also, we just like tinkering in the registry....
Note: This article is geared towards those who may not have used this accelerator before or declined to “add it” when setting up IE 8. Send with Windows Live Hotmail in Action There are two steps to add the accelerator to IE 8. First, click on Add to Internet Explorer and then confirm the installation when the secondary window appears. To e-mail the link for a particular webpage right click somewhere within the webpage and select Send with Live Mail....
Whether you’re a budding tech writer or just trying to show your Mom how to send an email, there are many reasons you might want to take a screenshot of a webpage. Want to show a friend a neat webapp or you found, or tell your Twitter friends about a new Google feature you discovered? One of the best ways is to take a screenshot and share it. Many of us have tried to save a purchase receipt page or product key, only to find that the web page looks scrambled when you later open it....
If computer keyboards had an issue the past few years is that you could never use them to kill spiders on the ceiling or have a duel at the office. That’s no longer an obstacle thanks to Google Japan, which showed off its five-foot-long Gboard keyboard. Ergonomics be damned. The new Gboard QWERTY bar places keys in a line as wide as a single key and as long as your average child is tall....
Blackmagic Design has officially released an iPad version of its acclaimed color correction and video editing software, DaVinci Resolve, which you can now download and check out from the App Store. It has an interface that’s very similar to the desktop version, except a little more touch-optimized, so if you’ve used the software before, you’ll feel right at home here. You can also use it with an Apple Pencil if you’d rather work with more precision....
Before Everyone is familiar with the many app windows in their Windows OS that simply can not be resized. What you need is cooperation, not attitude. For our example we chose the “Taskbar and Start Menu Properties Window”…notice the cursor in the lower right corner. No resizing satisfaction available at all… After The program comes in a zip file with three files as shown here. Once you have unzipped the program place it in an appropriate “Program Files Folder”, create a shortcut, and you are ready to go....
Uber is making robotaxis available to its customers to hail in Las Vegas, which will be operated by Motional as part of a 10-year deal. As is always the case with these types of stories, the so-called robotaxis (so we’re just going with this name?) will feature safety drivers behind the steering wheel to make sure the car doesn’t careen into the jets at the Bellagio or something. But the vehicle will still be operated by Motional’s autonomous driving system....
What Is shellcheck? If you have been a Linux Bash developer for a while, you have likely found a good number of bugs in your own scripts, or the scripts of others. Introducing bugs into code is bound to happen when humans are developing code. Even the best developers may once in a while miss a unforeseen complexity or caveat in their code. In Bash, there is no real compiler as there is for example in C++....
One of the key components of Object-oriented languages like Java and C# is the ability to write classes using interfaces, which standardize method definitions and enable enhanced polymorphism. We’ll discuss what they are, and how to use them. Formalized Polymorphism Interfaces are basically classes without code. The can define properties and methods (though not fields directly) without actually storing data or writing an implementation for functions. For example, .NET’s IEnumerable interface is very common....
What Do APIs Do? At a high level, APIs simply establish communication between two applications. They can’t communicate directly, since they don’t have access to each other’s code, so they have to run a wire between them and send signals down the line. The API defines how those signals should be sent. Nearly every application running on your computer uses an API of some sort to talk to thousands of other things....
Allocating memory in C# is relatively expensive, and is a key point of optimization for any performance-critical application. Object Pooling is one technique that can help reduce the overhead of a memory-intensive application. How Does Object Pooling Improve Performance? At the end of the day, the performance of computers is basically limited to two things: CPU processing speed and memory performance. The former can be improved with more efficient algorithms that use less clock cycles, but often it’s harder to optimize memory usage, especially when working with large datasets and very short timescales....
As an aspiring game developer, this is the single biggest question you must answer before beginning your project. Your game engine effects how you build your game, what kinds of issues you may run into, and even how much money you make. Unity Unity is first on this list for a number of reasons. It’s by far the most popular engine—you’ll find that any random indie title probably runs on Unity....
Matter Is Moving Smart Home Beyond the Hub If you’ve been in the smart home game for any length of time, you’re more than familiar with the smart home hub model. Hubs both serve as a way of controlling your smart home gear and as gateways for smart home devices to communicate with the rest of your network and the greater internet. In some cases, a hub is just for a particular ecosystem....
2022: Microsoft Buys Activision Blizzard for $68.7 Billion As of November 2022, the biggest tech acquisition of the last decade happened earlier this very year. Microsoft shocked everyone by acquiring the gaming company Blizzard Activision for $68.7 Billion. Massive titles such as Call of Duty and Overwatch are now under the Microsoft umbrella. The deal has not been approved yet. 2015: Dell Buys EMC for $67 Billion Dell isn’t in the news as much as it used to be, but back in 2015, it made headlines by acquiring network storage company EMC—including VMWare—for $67 Billion....
There are certainly other factors that cause iTunes to run slow such as how many apps you have running at the time and how powerful the machine is. But we can make some adjustments to the settings in iTunes to help speed it up. Note: Here we look at tips for getting better performance out of iTunes. Each user is different, so you might not want to disable certain features if you’re happy with them....
This Kindle isn’t just for reading, though. There’s a stylus that magnetically attaches to the Kindle Scribe, which doesn’t require charging or pairing. That likely means it’s not an active pen, which rules out pressure sensitivity and other advanced features you might find on an Apple Pencil. There’s also an eraser on the end. The Kindle Scribe is priced at $399.99, making it by far the most expensive Kindle reader currently sold — almost twice the price of the premium Kindle Oasis....
While we’re not getting new hardware, we are getting a new color. The Echo Studio is now available in a new Glacier White color that looks very slick, in addition to the existing Charcoal option. If the new features, or the new white color, are enticing enough to get you to buy one, you can grab one for its usual $200 price point.
