If you’ve installed the Windows 8 Developer Preview and have run into some problems (after all, it’s pre-beta software), you may want to boot into Safe Mode to try and fix the problems. By default, Windows 8 does not enable Safe Mode. You have to manually enable it. This article shows you how to enable Safe Mode, boot into it, and then disable it. To enable Safe Mode, you must open the Command Prompt window....

Once a week we round up three excellent reader tips and share them with the greater How-To Geek audience. This week we’re looking at how to run an ebook server from the command line, scoring cheap HDDs, and tweaking Windows 8 menus. Run Calibre From the Command Line for Corruption Free Sharing This tip actually comes to us courtesy of a great reader comment. In response to our guide How to Access Your Ebook Collection Anywhere in the World, James shared his technique for using Calibre:...

Why Use Co-Pilot Mode? The main intended use of Co-pilot mode is to help a struggling player get through difficult parts of a game. For example, if you have young children who are having a hard time with a game, you can be the co-pilot and help them get past hard sections. Co-pilot mode also has an accessibility purpose. Some players may have mobility, coordination, or other issues that make some parts of a game difficult for them....

The docker CLI program is independent of the Docker daemon which runs your containers. Although both components usually run on your local machine, you can run docker commands against a remote Docker host. Using a remote host can be helpful in a few scenarios. You might set up a shared Docker Engine installation for a small development team. Each developer could then connect to the remote containers with their local docker exec command....

Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader Arulappan doesn’t use Chrome’s built-in sync tool and would like to manually sync his extensions without using the Chrome Store. He writes: Is it as simple as copying the file or is there more involved in moving extensions from one system to another?...

Do you have an OS installed on your USB thumb drive? Booting from it in a VM is now possible, you’ll just have to use a simple trick to get it to work. Last week we showed you how to put Ubuntu on a USB drive in a separate partition, and we also discussed working with VMware Player (our favourite VM Client). But have you ever tried booting from a USB drive in VMWare?...

When you first install Ubuntu or another Linux distribution on Windows 10, you’re asked to create a UNIX username and password. Bash automatically signs into that user account when you launch the shell, but you can change those credentials if you need to. How User Accounts Work in the Linux Environment RELATED: How to Install and Use the Linux Bash Shell on Windows 10 When you set up a new Linux distribution by launching it after installing it, you’re be asked to create a user account for the Bash shell....

While the Linux command ls can display the sizes of files, it doesn’t work properly with directories, which will always be displayed as 4096 bytes. You’ll need to use the du command to recurse into subdirectories and print out a total. Using The du Command The best replacement for ls is to use du with a couple flags: The -h flag stands for “human readable,” and will format the sizes in KB, MB, and GB for you rather than making you fetch a calculator....

Over the years, some of us accumulate lots and lots of music files. Since these come from a variety of sources, they’re not always as neat as they could be. If your music library is in a bit of a jumble with tags missing, oddly named files and incomplete albums, read on to see how easy it is to make it neat once and for all. MusicBrainz is an online database that uses audio “fingerprints” to identify music tracks even when they’re incorrectly labelled....

Containers running in Kubernetes Pods are meant to be self-contained compute units that you don’t need to manually interact with. Sometimes you might have to copy files to or from a Pod’s filesystem though, perhaps because you’re debugging a problem and want to archive logs, config files, or caches stored in a container. Here’s how to move files between your machine and containers in a Pod, using Kubectl’s built-in transfer feature or a manual alternative....

Almost anyone knows how to make a “hidden” folder in Windows, most people also know how to make Explorer show hidden folders. Instead, if your folder looked like an innocent shortcut no one would know you have data in there. Using Command Prompt to Disguise a Folder In this example I have an ordinary folder on the root of my drive called How-To-Geek. To disguise it, I need to open a command prompt and navigate to the directory where its resides, since it is on the root of my drive I can use:...

Every time you open a Microsoft Office application, you have to wait for the splash screen to disappear. If you want this to go away, here’s how you can disable the startup screen. Note: Since we are creating a shortcut this will only disable the splash screens when creating a new document, but it will not be disabled when you open a document by double-clicking on it. This guide assumes you have the x86 version of Office 2010 installed on a x64 edition of Windows....

Dokku is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) implementation, which you can self-host on your own hardware. Dokku uses Docker to automatically deploy your code when you git push from your terminal. Setting up a Dokku server lets you quickly deploy new applications using the familiar Git workflow. Hosting costs can be much lower than commercial PaaS solutions and managed Kubernetes offerings. Once your Dokku server’s up and running, launching a new application should only take a few moments....

Running out of disk space is one of the most common VM guest issues. You might have started out with an intentionally small disk while you tested a new VM. Over time you accumulate files until the virtual disk is almost full. Here’s how to resize your disk in-place, without having to copy files to a separate larger drive. Shut Down Your VM Begin by shutting down your virtual machine....

You might be surprised to know there are over 3,000 emoji at your disposal. Everything from a simple smile to the mysterious “Person in Suit Levitating” has been emoji-fied. But what do they all mean? It’s great that we have so many emoji to choose from these days, but it does cause some confusion. It’s not clear what some of the emoji are supposed to represent. The good news is every emoji has some sort of “title” that explains what it is....

We’ve all been a part of an email chain that just won’t quit, and on a long enough timeline it really starts to get annoying. Even if you delete it, boom—it returns again with another reply. Fortunately, you can use the Mute feature in Gmail to permanently silence the chatter. What Is “Muting” in Gmail? Just like on your TV, “muting” an email basically silences it. This means that all replies, forwards, and the like from that particular thread will no longer notify you or even hit your inbox—they’ll automatically be archived....

The Microsoft evaluation releases of their products are incredibly valuable and useful tools as they allow you to have an unlimited number of test, demo and development environments to work with at no cost. The only catch is evaluation releases are time limited, so the more time you can squeeze out of them, the more useful they can be. Here we are going to show you how to extend the usage time of the Windows Server 2008 R2 evaluation release to its maximum....

For your security, Microsoft already requires a minimum password length for all Microsoft accounts. Should you want to reinforce all local accounts, you can set a minimum password length for each user on Windows 10. Here’s how. By default, when you create a new local user on Windows 10, the account doesn’t require a password. However, if you want to implement a minimum password length for everyone, there are a couple of ways to apply this prerequisite for the safety of your computer....

grep is a Linux utility for searching text files. By default, it will print out the results of the search, but it can also be used to match and print file names that contain the search result, which can be useful when connecting it with other scripts. Using grep To Print Filenames grep is commonly used alongside other commands in bash scripts as a general text search utility. However, by default, it doesn’t print anything about the filenames, which you might need if you’re passing the output to another utility....

By default the Start Menu will automatically arrange your installed programs alphabetically, while this may be the behavior you desire, I know a lot of people who are irritated by it. Here’s how to disable it. Disable Alphabetic Sorting Of Programs Right-click on the Start Orb and select Properties from the context menu. When the Properties dialog loads, make sure your on the Start Menu tab and hit the Customize button....