Windows command-line tools have advanced a lot with PowerShell, but Linux has had a much more usable terminal for many years. Here’s how you can get the best of both worlds with Cygwin, a ‘nix-style terminal for Windows PCs. In today’s lesson, we’ll explain how to get Cygwin running, but stay tuned for future articles where we’ll explain how to use it for all sorts of different things. Install Cygwin Cygwin comes with a normal setup....

If you’re familiar with using the IF function in Excel, then you might be ready to check out the IFS function. With it, you can test multiple conditions at once, instead of using nested IF statements. Using IFS, you can test up to 127 conditions in a single Excel formula. Although this number of tests is probably much more than you need, the function is ideal for checking several conditions....

Syncing files between your computer and your iOS device via iTunes can be tedious and requires that you tether to your computer. Break free and enjoy wireless access to shared files from anywhere on your network—and beyond. One of the great things about the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad is how portable they. As a result, however, it’s really easy to find yourself upstairs, out in the backyard, or somewhere far from your computer when you want access to files that are elsewhere on your network....

What Is Zelle? Zelle is a peer-to-peer (P2P) payment service that makes it easy to send money from one bank account to another. The service is (at the time of writing) only available in the US, having been set up by some of the country’s largest financial institutions. The fact that Zelle charges users no fees to send money has seen the service grow hugely in popularity over the last few years....

We have just shown you that you can upgrade your Windows Home Server for free by choosing the open source Amahi server. Now that it’s installed, here’s how to manage your drives, shares, and storage pool. Add Hard Drive The first step to adding storage is to add more drives. To do that, shutdown the server and plug in the additional hard drives you would like to add. We will need to format the new drive so make sure you have a backup of anything you may need....

GNOME Shell has been criticized for lacking many familiar features found in GNOME 2, but you can add them yourself with extensions. If you’ve installed GNOME Shell and didn’t like it, don’t write it off until you try some extensions. If you’re using Ubuntu, check out our guide to installing GNOME Shell and getting started. GNOME Shell is the default desktop on Fedora and should be available in most distribution’s package repositories....

If you’re a Linux user who likes the look of the dark mode coming in macOS Mojave, you’re in luck: there’s a GTK theme just for you. The theme is available on Gnome-Look.org alongside several other macOS inspired themes. You’re looking for the one titled McOS-MJV-Dark-mode, but feel free to download more if you think you might want to switch it up later. Installing is a little tricky: you need to create a ....

If you’re looking for a versatile battery booster, this DIY 3-in-1 solar/usb/wall current charger known as the MightyMintyBoost will top of your phone, mp3 player, and other gadgets with ease. Instructables user Honus didn’t just build the MightMintyBoost to geek out and show off his electronics project skills (although it’s certainly a nifty little project to do so), he’s serious about solar power and the impact clean energy has:...

While tools like the Magic Eraser can sometimes remove your backgrounds, the fact is you’re going to have to get your hands dirty with the eraser if you have images with complex backgrounds that need removing. While this can be time consuming, you can save yourself a lot of time with a little Photoshop wizardry. Let’s take a look. Right click your Background Layer in your Layers Palette, and choose “Layer from Background…” It automatically renames as Layer 0....

The Raspberry Pi started out as an inexpensive device to help students learn about computing, but the Raspberry Pi also makes for an inexpensive test server. With a server operating system on a Raspberry Pi, you can quickly set up a test server at home. I recently decided to reinstall my Raspberry Pi 3B+ to use as test server for new web projects. My production environment is an Intel rack server running Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and so doesn’t really match the Raspberry Pi at the hardware level....

Are you a writer? Or a word geek? If you write anything or play word games, dictionaries, thesauruses, and other reference tools can come in handy. We’ve found some useful offline and online tools for looking up words, finding synonym, or building words in Scrabble. Dictionary and thesaurus programs and websites allow us to go beyond the dated, printed dictionary. You can find so much more up-to-date information on the web without having to buy dictionaries and other reference books....

Email has become a standard method of communication and we all use it often. We’ve gathered some tips and tricks for using email programs and tools and for learning more about email terms and how email works. Gmail Gmail is one of the most popular free email services, and many people have at least one Gmail address, if not more. The following articles show you how to backup your Gmail emails, how to use Gmail’s advanced search features and create filters, and how to enable and use Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts and create your own custom shortcuts....

One of the new features in Windows 8 is the improved Task Manager, which provides access to more information and settings. If you don’t want to upgrade, there is a way you can use a simple Windows 8-like Task Manager in Windows 7, Vista, or XP. The Windows 8 Metro Task Manager does not need to be installed. Simply download the .zip file (see the download link at the end of this article), extract the files, and double-click the Windows 8 Task Manager....

All PCs Are “Gaming” PCs Gaming can be awesome even on modest hardware. All PCs are gaming PCs. In other words, whatever computer you have in front of you is capable of playing some subset of all the PC games that are out there. On top of this, most PC games have settings that let you scale them from low-end visuals all the way to “ultra” quality settings designed for computers that did not yet exist when the game was released....

Prometheus is an open-source monitoring solution for collecting and aggregating metrics as time series data. Put more simply, each item in a Prometheus store is a metric event accompanied by the timestamp it occurred. Prometheus was originally developed at Soundcloud but is now a community project backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). It’s rapidly grown to prominence over the past decade as its combination of querying features and cloud-native architecture have made it the ideal monitoring stack for modern applications....

Linux’s grep utility is a favorite among many sysadmins for its simple searching ability and familiar syntax. It’s not available on Windows however, so you’ll have to either use alternatives, or install third-party grep tools to emulate it. dnGrep grep has many third-party implementations for Windows, and while it’s not exactly Linux grep, it will function largely the same. If you want a native Windows solution using CMD and Powershell, you can use other tools like FindStr, covered down below....

With an increasing amount of our lives stored in digital format—financial documents, family photos, work projects—it is increasingly important to backup. This week we take a look at your backup strategies. Earlier this week we asked you to share your backup strategy. Hundreds of replies later we have a pretty solid spread of techniques and tricks. Redundancy Is Key We were pleased to see how many of you really had a lock on the core principles of backing up your data....

Every week we dip into our reader mailbag to answer your pressing tech questions. This week we’re taking a look at how to check your Android version, use the speaker and headphone port simultaneously, and load files on your iPad. Checking Your Android OS Version Number Dear Version Curious, I feel like I should be sent back to newbie school for even having to ask this, but I can’t (for the life of me!...

What Should I Backup On My Windows Machine? Dear Backup Confused, I understand the concept for backing up files and the importance of having a duplicate file if anything happens to my originals, but I’m not so clear on exactly what files I’m supposed to be backing up? Stuff like family photos and tax returns seems obvious, but there is so much other stuff on the computer! Surely some of it needs to be backed up to, right?...

Creating greeting cards can be a lot of DIY fun around the holidays, but printing them can often be a nightmare. This simple How-To will show you how to figure out how to perfectly print your half fold card. Last week we showed you how to create a simple, attractive greeting card in Microsoft Word using Creative Commons images and basic fonts. If you missed out, it is still available, and the Word template used here can still be downloaded....