Microsoft has made an interactive guide to Office 2010’s new interface to help users learn their way around the new version. If you’ve already used Office 2007, then Office 2010 will be very easy to transition to, but if you’re still using Office 2003 you may find the learning curve more steep. With this interactive guide, upgrading your Office skills doesn’t have to be hard. Learn Your Way Around the Office Ribbon...
Tired of waiting for your bloated OEM copy of Nero to open and ask you to upgrade to the latest version just to burn a CD? You can get almost all of Nero’s features with free alternatives, and here’s how. There are numerous programs available for burning media of all types to CDs and DVDs, and many tools you need are built right into Windows—for instance, Windows 7 can burn ISO files to a disk directly or help you create a fairly stylish DVD video quickly and easily....
You can do this either for one boot, or permanently for a particular virtual machine. Even experienced users of VMWare Player or Workstation may not recognize the screen above – it’s the virtual machine’s BIOS, which in most cases flashes by in the blink of an eye. If you want to boot up the virtual machine with a CD or USB key instead of the hard drive, then you’ll need more than an eye’s-blink to press Escape and bring up the Boot Menu....
If you have employees with their own IAM accounts and want to delegate permission management by giving them the permission to make their own IAM roles, you must set it up correctly, or your employees may be able to escalate their privileges. Full IAM Access Enables Privilege Escalation If you thought about giving blanket access to the IAM console, that would certainly solve the issue and enable your employees to make new IAM accounts....
There are numerous ways to block advertisements in your browser, but what if you could block them on the router? Here’s how to use the DD-WRT firmware and deliberate “DNS poisoning” to block ads for every device on your network. Overview Update: Guide updated to reflect the feedback provided by commenters and updated the anti-ads pack with the newer pixel-server executable and a changelog. The first question on everyone’s mind right now is “why not just use ad-block?...
For today’s lesson we’ll show you how to secure data by encryption a partition, a folder, and also how to create a hidden volume with TrueCrypt. Encrypting a Partition Ubuntu’s alternate CD installation wizard gives us an option to encrypt our Ubuntu installation partition, so you’ll want to burn the ISO file into a live disk or create a bootable USB drive and install Ubuntu with it. Ubuntu’s alternate installation menu is very similar to your standard Ubuntu installation menu....
Over the years, Windows has gotten much better about how it handles networked printers. But if you want to share a printer over the network, you may still need to do a little legwork to get it all up and running. Here’s how it all works. Setting up a printer on your network involves two steps. The first step is getting the printer connected to the network, and there are three ways you can do that:...
Note: make sure that you’ve read our article covering how to setup a VPN server for Debian-based Linux, which also covers configuring the Windows client. Split what the what now? The “split tunnel” term refers to the fact that the VPN client creates a “tunnel” from the client all the way to the server for “private” communication. Traditionally the VPN connection is set up to create “the tunnel” and once it is up all the client’s communication is routed through that “tunnel”....
Thanks to a feature called “Focus,” you can set up specialized Do Not Disturb modes for different situations. We can set up a special Focus mode that will automatically be enabled when you open apps that you use for reading. Let’s do it. RELATED: What Is Focus on iPhone and iPad, and How Is It Better Than Do Not Disturb? First, launch the “Settings” app from the home screen on your iPhone or iPad....
You are free to upgrade or downgrade your on-demand EC2 instances as you please. If your instance is struggling to handle your workload, upgrading to a higher tier or another instance class can help your applications run smoother. Consider Using Auto Scaling, or a Load Balancer Before upgrading, it’s worth considering whether you really need to. For example, if you’re running a web application, it’s pretty typical for traffic to climb throughout the day and dip down at night when there’s little to no usage....
The throne of “Best Linux Text Editor” is widely debated, but one thing’s for certain—nano isn’t great. It’s simple, but lacks features included in its more complex contemporaries. micro is designed to replace nano as the text editor for the masses. Installing Micro micro isn’t on apt yet, but it’s only a single binary, so you can install it from its install script. Luckily, they’ve given it an easy-to-remember URL, which makes installing it on remote machines fairly simple:...
Firewalls are crucial for any server’s security. Only allowing the right traffic through to the right resource prevents malicious traffic and potential attacks from taking advantage of your unprotected server. DigitalOcean offers virtual machines, known as Droplets, which come with their own firewall system configuration, monitoring, and maintenance benefits over traditional OS-level firewalls. The firewall system is called Cloud Firewalls. It is a networking-level firewall that drops the traffic that you do not want to make it to your Droplet, and therefore the potentially malicious traffic will never reach your server....
As many a system administrator has learned over the years, making sure that a system is highly available is crucial to a production operation. Managing and maintaining a load balancer can often be a difficult task. DigitalOcean offers a Load Balancer product for only $10/month that greatly simplifies the task of managing and maintaining a load balancer. What are the features of the DigitalOcean Load Balancer? A lot of options are available that can influence how well the load balancer works and performs....
Netbooks, along with the growing number of thin, full powered laptops, lack a CD/DVD drive. Installing software isn’t much of a problem since most programs, whether free or for-pay, are available for download. Operating systems, however, are usually installed from a disk. You can easily install Windows 7 from a flash drive with our tutorial, but installing Ubuntu from a USB flash drive is more complicated. However, using Wubi, a Windows installer for Ubuntu, you can easily install it directly on your netbook and even uninstall it with only a few clicks....
According to Logitech, these new products are designed to meet the “evolving needs of hybrid workers.” The pair of Brio webcams, the Brio 500 and the Brio 505, come with a number of features that make them great for videoconferencing. For one, the Show Mode feature lets you share objects that are on your desk, such as documents or sketches. The camera itself is a 4MP sensor with a 1080p resolution and a 90-degree field-of-view....
Adjust Navigation Pane In Windows 7 there are five locations shown by default. They are Favorites, Libraries, Computer, Network, and Homegroup. You can click through to each location in the navigation pane, but that becomes tedious and annoying, especially when working with a lot of files and directories. If you are moving from XP to Windows 7 you might find this method annoying and want to show subfolders instead of clicking through the hierarchy of folders and drives....
The new “Sunset” versions were created so that existing customers could continue to install MS Money without requiring activation, but that also means anybody can download and install it. From their page: Microsoft Money Plus Sunset [Microsoft.com via Get Rich Slowly]
Microsoft is rolling out an updated contextual command bar and ribbon layout in the iPhone versions of Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. The command bar is accessible from the bottom of the screen, or the top of the keyboard when you’re typing. It now more closely matches Microsoft’s “Fluent” design, with more rounded corners and a slightly-tweaked layout. Just like before, the menu has most of the settings you would find in the ribbon bar on the desktop apps: text formatting, search, buttons for inserting objects, review tools, and everything else....
Preview Ebooks Before you Purchase Sometimes, it can be hard to know if you want to purchase a new book without reading some of it first. With Kindle for PC, however, you can download a sample of any ebook available for free. The sample usually includes the table of contents, forward or introduction, and often part or all of the first chapter. To get an ebook sample, find the book you want in the Kindle store (link below)....
A global consortium of scientists and government officials voted Friday to stop turning the tiny proverbial knob that tracks leap seconds, those minute time adjustment sometimes inserted to account for our planet’s uneven rotation. Because we don’t have Superman available to spin the planet to our liking, the Earth sometimes shifts and wobbles like a drunk guy doing a field sobriety test outside his car. This minor fluctuation in symmetry just barely throws off the speed of the Earth’s rotation enough such that days are a tad longer than what we have on the books....
