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You can change the default search provider in the Modern version of Internet Explorer 10, but Microsoft hides this option well. You won’t find it in IE’s Settings charm – you’ll have to change this setting from the desktop. After you change this setting on the desktop, both versions of Internet Explorer will use your preferred search engine. You’ll have to use the desktop to change certain settings on Windows tablets — even Windows RT includes a limited desktop....

Bluetooth is a short-range communications protocol that allows wireless file transfers and wireless accessory connections between your iPhone or iPad and other devices like speakers, keyboards, or mice. If you’d like to change your iPhone or iPad’s Bluetooth name, you’ll need to change the device’s name in Settings. Here’s how to do it. First, open “Settings” on your iPhone or iPad. In Settings, navigate to General, then tap “About.”...

Running CCleaner on a Remote Machine Head over to the Piriform website and grab a copy of the portable version of CCleaner. Once the download has completed, extract the archive. Now we need to create a self-extracting archive–this is going to help us automatically execute CCleaner when it is copied to the remote machine. Our tool of choice is WinRAR, although other self-extracting archive builders may work. To do this select all the extracted files and add them to a new archive....

Google Now, new in Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, is Google’s attempt to be smarter. It includes cards that automatically provide you with information and voice search integrated with Google’s knowledge graph to provide direct answers to your questions. Google is adamant that you shouldn’t have to configure Google Now – it will learn about you and the information you want over timeas you go through your commute and perform searches....

Have you ever started adding text to your document only to discover it would be better suited in a table? After all, a table provides a solid structure and appearance. In Word, you can simply convert text to table. Whether you have text separated by tabs or commas or a list in a numbered or bulleted format, converting it to table is easy enough. Plus, it takes less time than creating a table and manually moving all that text into the cells....

Ubuntu and Linux Mint come with a “Guest Session” account, which anyone can log into from the login screen – no password required. If you’d rather restrict access to your computer, you can disable the guest account. This guest account is locked down and changes to it don’t persist between sessions – everyone that logs in gets a fresh desktop. Still, you may want to disable it to prevent other people from using your computer....

Windows 8 comes with a new Hybrid Boot feature, which decreases boot times. But from time to time you may find you need to do a classic, full shutdown. Here’s how to do just that without disabling Hybrid Boot. What is Hybrid Boot? Hybrid Boot is a new feature in Windows 8 that takes the Hibernate feature we all know and love and improves upon it to bring us faster boot times....

VirtualBox’s experimental 3D acceleration allows you to use Windows 7’s Aero interface in a virtual machine. You can also run older 3D games in a virtual machine – newer ones probably won’t run very well. If you installed Windows 7 in VirtualBox, you may have been disappointed to see the Windows 7 Basic interface instead of Aero – but you can enable Aero with a few quick tweaks. Adjust Virtual Machine Settings First, power your Windows 7 virtual machine off – you won’t be able to change its settings if the virtual machine is running or if it’s suspended (also known as “saved”)....

The Trinity Desktop Environment is KDE 3, actively developed and updated. It’s ideal for KDE fans that never took to KDE 4 or anyone interested in what KDE was like. Trinity isn’t included in Ubuntu’s software repositories, but the developers maintain official repositories for Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat, Fedora and Slackware. Trinity Live CD You can try Trinity without installing it on your system by downloading a live CD. The live CD is based on Kubuntu, but it has Trinity installed instead of KDE 4....

Ubuntu’s sound menu contains Rhythmbox by default. Any other media players you install will also appear in the menu, assuming they support the MPRIS2 specification. You can hide media players in the menu or add any application you like. Media players you add won’t have integrated playback controls, but you can easily launch them from the sound menu. You can add any application’s shortcut to the sound menu, as long as the application has a desktop file....

For those of you of the artistic persuasion, you might be using Photoshop or GIMP to color your scanned drawings. Fortunately, putting the line art in a transparent layer is very easy with this slick technique. This technique is a standard for any Photoshop user’s bag of tricks, and one that is useful lots of different situations. It can work on rough drawings, tight, inked line art, or even layers you’ve accidently drawn into or merged while working....

Kubernetes support for stateful applications has considerably matured over the past few years. Now it’s viable to locate your database inside your cluster, allowing it to benefit from the same scalability as your other workloads. MySQL is one of the most popular relational database engines and it’s now augmented by an official Kubernetes operator. The Oracle-led open-source project provides a simple way to create managed MySQL clusters within Kubernetes....

Docker is a developer-oriented containerization platform that lets you package applications as standalone containers. They’ll run anywhere a compatible container runtime is available. Docker’s popularity has made it almost synonymous with containers, yet it’s not the perfect technology for all use cases. Using Docker as-is presents challenges in production as its CLI is only equipped to manage individual containers. Kubernetes is an orchestration platform that manages stacks of containers and scales them across multiple servers....

Google offers a pretty comprehensive set of online applications which many of you probably take advantage of. Here is how to easily configure Firefox to use Google’s online offerings for email, RSS, PDF and office documents as your default in-browser viewer without the need for a pesky toolbar. Gmail for Email Firefox has the native ability to use Gmail for email. Open the Options dialog and go to the Applications tab and for the content type “mailto”, select “Use Gmail”....

Limit Who Can Add You to Groups In our experience, the vast majority of Telegram spammers use large established groups to cast a wide net for potential victims. Telegram groups can hold up to 200,000 members, so the platform is ripe for exploitation in this way. By default, Telegram allows anyone to add you to a group, even if you don’t know them. By changing this one setting, you can dramatically cut down on the number of spam messages you are exposed to....

Important to managing data is updating it if things change. When you’re working with a text string in Google Sheets, you have a few ways to substitute that text without manually changing the string. Along with the built-in Find and Replace tool in Google Sheets, you can use a function to substitute text in your spreadsheet, and there’s more than one to get the job done. Let’s take a look at your options for replacing text in your sheet....

Microsoft launched its new SkyDrive desktop app which is set to compete head-to-head with Dropbox and Google Drive. Here’s how to sync folders that are outside of your SkyDrive folder. Using a Reparse Point Known as the Soft Link to some, a Symbolic Link is the most common form of reparse point. Luckily for us Windows Vista and later include a command line utility, called mklink, which can be used to manage symbolic links....

Menu bar clutter on Macs is real, but Bartender helps by hiding everything you don’t need and surfacing it when you do. Here’s how to use it to declutter your menu bar for good without losing functionality. Why Bartender Is So Useful It sometimes seems like every app adds a menu bar item. Over time, the number of items in our menu bar grows. The problem is Apple’s solution to decluttering this area isn’t very useful....

You just got a shiny new Oculus Go headset to play games and watch VR movies, but how do you get those movies onto the VR headset in the first place? Here’s how to move videos from your PC or Mac to your Oculus Go. It’s not just full VR movies that you can play on your Oculus headset—it can be any movie that you’ve got stored as a local file....

If you have a single wired Internet connection – say, in a hotel room – you can create an ad-hoc wireless network with Ubuntu and share the Internet connection among multiple devices. Ubuntu includes an easy, graphical setup tool. Unfortunately, there are some limitations. Some devices may not support ad-hoc wireless networks and Ubuntu can only create wireless hotspots with weak WEP encryption, not strong WPA encryption. Setup To get started, click the gear icon on the panel and select System Settings....