If you’re lucky you enjoy wide open internet access with out restriction (or restrictions so high you would have to work all month to meet them). If you’re not so lucky, you’ve got an ISP with heavy caps. Today we help out a reader working under such a cap. Dear Ireland, I’m having some trouble with my ISP and I hope you can help. The problem is that my ISP imposes a 250GB a month cap and the connection is shared between myself and four other roommates....

By default, even if you are on a touch enabled PC, Office 2013 doesn’t open with a touch optimized interface. This makes it hard to use because the interfaces elements are too close together. Here’s how to fix that. Note: this was based on our testing, but it’s likely they will iron out any problems in the final release. Enabling or disabling touch mode will likely stay the same, so if you wanted to disable it, this would work in reverse....

Reinstalling Windows is one of the easiest ways to fix software problems on your computer, whether it’s running slow or infected by viruses. You should also reinstall Windows before you get rid of an old PC. Depending on your version of Windows and how you installed it — or whether it came with your computer — there are a number of different ways to reinstall Windows. Before Reinstalling Windows The process of reinstalling Windows will erase all the data on your computer....

The firmware we’ll be using today is called Tomato, and it’s an alternative to the DD-WRT firmware we’ve already covered in a previous article. What is Tomato? It’s a delicious fruit you eat that can help prevent cancer due to its high levels of Lycopene. Some people enjoy tomatoes on hamburgers and in salads. Oh! You wanted to know about Tomato as in the powerful, user friendly, full-of-features, alternative router firmware?...

Drag a tab off the tab bar in Google Chrome and it turns into a brand new window. Is there any way to replicate that trick with multiple tabs to easily break a grouping of tabs off into a new Chrome window? 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 RLH wants to move tabs more efficiently in Chrome:...

You might’ve heard of the LinkedIn and last.fm security breaches that took place recently. Not to mention the thousands of websites that have been hacked till now. Nothing is invulnerable to hacking. And when something like that happens, passwords are leaked. Choosing a good password is essential. A good password generator can give you the best blend of alphanumeric and symbolic characters, making up a strong password. There are a variety of password generators out there, but not many people know that there’s one built right into Mac OS X Lion....

Sure, when you buy a premium flashlight you’re paying extra for a nicely machined body, water tight seals, and other features. What if you just want a really bright flashlight? Watch the following video to see how you can hack apart a cheap Eveready flashlight to be as bright as premium $95 police flashlight. You’ll still have the old plastic body and bezel but with a radically brighter bulb....

The PlayStation 5 introduces some big improvements over the previous generation, while maintaining compatibility with most PS4 games. Unfortunately “most” isn’t “all,” so here’s what you need to know about playing older games on your PS5. Most PS4 Games Will Work on PS5 Sony has promised that 99% of PlayStation 4 titles will work on the PlayStation 5, including the top 100 games. This means almost every game you probably want to play will work out-of-the-box on the new console....

Sometimes you need to know the particular version of a program you have installed without all the hassle of automatic updates or other “problems” getting in the way. Is there an easy way to do it? Today’s SuperUser Q&A post helps a reader check Google Chrome’s version without the updating issues. 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....

Typing text in a Google Sheets cell is simple. But what if you want to edit that text to include more and apply it to multiple cells? Using a couple of different methods, you can add text using a formula. If you search the web, you’ll find that there are multiple ways to substitute, change, or replace text in Google Sheets. But if you want to simply add to existing text there are a few quick and easy formulas....

By default there is no way to easily access the old Control Panel in Windows 8, in order to get to it you have to go through the new Metro Control Panel or switch to Explorer. Here’s how to create your own tile for it. To get started you need to create a shortcut, so right-click on the desktop, and choose New –> Shortcut. When you are asked for the location of the item, type the following:...

If your background image is drawing unnecessary attention, or you need to blur part of an image that contains sensitive information, you can do so directly in PowerPoint. We’ll show you how. Blur an Entire Image First, open PowerPoint and navigate to the slide containing the image you want to blur. Select the image, and that automatically opens the “Picture Format” tab. Next, select “Artistic Effects” from the “Adjust” group....

Are you developing a multi-threaded application? Sooner or later, you will likely need to use a Semaphore. In this article, you will learn what a Semaphore is, how to create/implement one in Bash, and more. What Is a Semaphore? A semaphore is a programming construct that is used in computer programs that employ multiple processing threads (computer processing threads which each execute source code from the same program or same suite of programs) to achieve exclusive use of a common resource at a given point in time....

Firefox themes — also known as “personas” — can change the way your browser looks, making it more personal. If you like theming the applications you use, there’s no better application to theme than your browser. This isn’t too hard — all you need to do is find a background image or two and crop them to the correct proportions. Chrome users can use Google’s easy Chrome theme creator to make their own browser themes....

Docker Compose lets you define stacks of containers that you can manage collectively. It’s a relatively simple tool that originally focused on local Docker installations. Kubernetes is a container orchestrator that comes with its own toolchain and manifest files. It’s usually seen as more complex than a regular Docker workflow, but its capabilities facilitate scalable container deployments in production. Kompose is a tool that lets you take Docker Compose files and deploy them to Kubernetes clusters....

If you like to use your iPhone’s camera for than mere selfies and portraits, then you probably want to make sure you frame everything as straight as possible. This is much easier if you enable iOS’ camera grid. A grid is a fairly typical feature on most digital cameras and phones. It simply overlays a grid over the top of the display, which then lets you better line up your photos so they’re straight, thus saving you time later straightening them in post-processing (if you even get around to that)....

If you’re stuck using a three-button mouse, this doesn’t mean you have to give up on the comfort of Back and Forward browser buttons. Using a simple AutoHotkey script, you could set your mouse up so that you can hold the right mouse button and scroll the wheel to emulate these all-important buttons. Getting The Script First of all, here’s the script itself. You can just copy/paste these lines into a local AHK file and run it by double-clicking on the script file....

Are you one of the many people frustrated with the way the search utility changed in Windows 7? Handy features from previous versions have been moved or removed and it can be very slow for a lot of files. You can tweak the Windows 7 search utility to speed it up and you can even disable the search tool in Windows 7 so you can use a third party program, such as Everything, to search for files....

Functions is one of the newest additions to the DigitalOcean cloud platform. It provides a first-class method for developing serverless functions without leaving DigitalOcean. Your code’s executed on-demand when it’s called, eliminating manual server provisioning and maintenance. In this article we’ll explain what DigitalOcean Functions supports and walkthrough a demonstration of creating your own simple function. Functions has a free tier that provides 25 GiB-hours per month, with a GiB-second calculated as the memory consumption multiplied by the execution time of each function call....

GitLab is one of the leading source control and CI/CD solutions for modern software delivery teams. It provides a comprehensive set of features for planning, building, and delivering your software projects. GitLab’s normally interacted with using its web UI or API. Neither of these options are particularly appealing to terminal-centric developers. Fortunately GitLab also has a CLI that provides direct access to your issues, merge requests, pipelines, and other resources, right alongside your code and other shell commands....