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If you upgraded to the latest iOS release on your iPad, only to figure out that the screen orientation lock doesn’t work anymore, here’s how to lock the screen using the new, annoying method. We’re definitely irritated with Apple for making this change—the hardware screen lock was one of the best features of the iPad, and now it’s gone. At least you can still lock it. Locking the Screen Orientation Start by holding the iPad in the direction you’d like to lock it, and then press the Home button twice quickly, like a double-click....

Basic username and password authentication is an easy and simple way to secure administrative panels and backend services. Nginx can be configured to protect certain areas of your website, or even used as a reverse proxy to secure other services. How Does HTTP Authentication Work? In basic HTTP authentication, certain routes on the server are locked and require a username and password to access them. For example, the admin panels of most home routers are secured this way; when you attempt to access them, the browser opens a dialog asking for credentials....

What Is AWS Lex? AWS Lex is made up of many different machine-learning services, most of which are available as a standalone AWS service. The first step is speech recognition—converting spoken word into text that a machine can more easily understand. AWS’s Transcribe service does this quite well, though it’s better suited for non-realtime applications, such as subtitling video or transcribing audio call logs. This step isn’t necessary if you’re making a text-based chatbot, but it’s crucial for bots like Alexa and Siri....

Installation We installed the 64-bit version of IE 9 on a Windows Ultimate x64 computer and the install took several minutes. We have the download link for the public beta below so you can download it and try it yourself. To complete the installation we did have to reboot our machine for everything to be installed correctly. New Look, Features, and Performance The interface is very slick and clean looking now....

Google has added two new food-related features to Search. The first one is related to Google Lens. If you want to look up a tasty dish you saw somewhere — maybe you grabbed a picture of it online or you saw a picture of it somewhere — you can now look it up with the “near me” multisearch element. This way, Google Lens will return results of places near you where they may have the dish or dessert you’re craving at that very moment....

If MSE needs to be updated it will show in the Taskbar as an orange exclamation point icon letting you know it needs attention. Update MSE 1.0 and 2.0 Beta Definitions Manually There are a couple of ways you can update MSE 1.0 and the 2.0 beta manually. First you can open it up and go to the Update tab and click the Update button. Another method is to use Windows Updates....

Before Here is our example browser with very plain looking tabs…the only parts that really stand out are the favicons. How about getting those tabs to better represent the individual websites using color from the websites themselves? After What a difference a little color makes…notice how each of the tab colors bases itself on a “most common color” in each of the webpages. Note: The settings in the options have reduced the possibility of white being used as a tab color…you may change this further (reducing or increasing) to suit your personal preferences....

Office 2011 for Mac is going to be released in a couple of days, and we got our hands on the latest version already. Here’s a quick tour of some of the new features in the latest version of Office. This new release brings many features from Office for Windows that have been missing or have not worked the same—for instance, Office now includes the Ribbon interface, and replaces Entourage with Outlook....

How Much Memory are the Extensions Using? Here is our test browser with a new tab and the Extensions Page open, five enabled extensions, and one disabled at the moment. You can access Chrome’s Task Manager using the Page Menu, going to Developer, and selecting Task manager… Or by right clicking on the Tab Bar and selecting Task manager. There is also a keyboard shortcut (Shift + Esc) available for the “keyboard ninjas”....

Note: XP Mode is a separate download that only works in Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate editions. Can My Computer Run XP Mode? If you have a new computer you might assume that it should be able to run XP Mode right? Not necessarily. Your system CPU will need to be able to support hardware virtualization. An Intel processor uses Intel Virtualization Technology and an AMD processor would be AMD-V with their Virtualization capability....

Note: If you’re still rocking Windows XP, you can remove items from the boot menu there too. To edit the boot menu, we will use a program called bcdedit that’s included with Windows 7. There are some third-party graphical applications that will edit the menu, but we prefer to use built-in applications when we can. First, we need to open a command prompt with Administrator privileges. Open the start menu and type cmd into the search box....

Getting Started Download the Portable Google Chrome installer (link below). Once it’s downloaded, run the installer to get it setup on your flash drive. The installer is a 7zip-powered extractor. Click the “…” button to select your flash drive, and then click Extract. It will now extract Portable Chrome to your flash drive. This may take a few minutes, but once it’s done you’ll be ready to immediately use your portable version of Chrome....

When working with a new Windows Server, securing it against attackers is one of the first things you will want to do. A default Windows Server configuration is not inherently locked down and leaves important protection open and accessible to hackers. Let’s take a look at how we can secure our web server! Changing the RDP Port from the Default By default, RDP access to your server is open on port 3389....

Version 13.7 of the Shazam app on Android now lets you quickly identify a song playing without needing to open the app, thanks to a brand new widget. It’s redesigned for Material You in Android 12 and 13 — kudos to Apple for actually caring about its few Android apps. The widget can search for a song and give you a result without needing you to actually open the app....

Before If you want to add a new feed to your Google Reader account in Chrome then you have to do it manually. A single feed now and then is not a problem but if you are wanting to build a serious set of RSS feeds quickly then not so good. Chrome Reader in Action Once the extension is installed you are ready to go. Any time that you visit a webpage with an RSS feed available you will see the familiar orange feed icon appear in your “Address Bar”....

Google’s Cloud Platform offers many solutions for modernizing your existing database infrastructure. By moving to the cloud, and taking advantage of Google’s PaaS offerings, you can reduce the headache of database administration. Cloud SQL Cloud SQL is Google’s alternative to AWS’s RDS—a simple managed database solution for MySQL, SQL Server, and PostgreSQL. Rather than having to configure the database yourself, it’s all handled for you and manageable from the Cloud SQL Console....

A Brief History of Fingerprint Scanners Fingerprint scanners first appeared on smartphones in the 2010s. Apple launched the iPhone 5S with a fingerprint scanner in 2013, and Samsung followed suite with the Galaxy Note 4 a year later. These first fingerprint readers were using capacitive technology. The sensor is covered in tiny electrodes, and the capacity between the electrodes is how your fingerprint is scanned. It changes depending on the distance between ridges on your finger....

Dealing with computers day in and day out can be a harrowing experience. In difficult times, or even when things are idle, finding some spirituality can help cope with the experience—Techies: I give you the Eightfold Noble Geek Path. The Noble Geek Path outlines eight aspects that closely mirror the Buddhist tenets of the Eightfold Noble Path, and they are divided into three categories: wisdom, ethical conduct, and concentration. They’re just more geeky....

Windows 11 reintroduced widgets, which are now accessible with a dedicated button on the taskbar. They aren’t all that useful right now, but Microsoft has a few improvements in the works, including a change to the widget panel’s appearance. Microsoft is now rolling out Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 25201 to PCs on the Dev Channel of the Windows Insiders program. The main change is that the widgets board can be expanded to fill most of your computer’s screen, instead of the fixed side panel available on most PCs right now....

2022’s New iPads Make Things Extra Complicated Apple unveiled two brand-new iPads in 2022 — the 10th generation iPad and a new, Apple M2-powered iPad Pro. However, they were just the newest members in a lineup that has been getting increasingly confusing over time. Let’s explain why. First off, at the bottom of the barrel, we have the 9th-generation iPad. Apple didn’t discontinue this one with the launch of the 10th generation iPad, despite the newer one being a radical improvement in many regards....