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Ever leave your Android phone around the house while doing some work only to find missed calls and text messages? With Android Notifier, your phone’s alerts will pop up on your computer. It’s free and it even supports Growl! Two-Part Installation Android Notifier has two components: one is the Notifier app for your computer, and the other is the Remote Notifier app for you Android phone. Both are easy to configure and are absolutely free....

Everything in Linux is stored in directories, and when writing bash scripts, it’s often useful to search for directories by name. Luckily, you can use the find command to recursively search directory names and display matches. Searching Directories The find command is used to search through directories in Linux. By default, it’s fully recursive, so it will search through all sub-directories to find matches. If you use the -type d flag, find will operate in “directory mode,” and only search for directories, not matching any files....

Use Black Frame Insertion Black Frame Insertion (BFI) is a feature that inserts a perfect black frame between every frame of your content. This defeats a type of blur particular to flat panel displays known as “sample and hold” blur. A sample-and-hold display displays each frame perfectly until the next refresh and the snaps to the new frame. This blur is apparently caused by the motion of our eyes tracking moving objects across the screen, smearing the image across the retina....

AWS Lambda is a serverless platform for running code without managing the underlying hardware. It’s very flexible, and can run many different workloads, including full C# APIs using ASP.NET Core. Wait, You Can Do This On Lambda? Yep! Not only can you run functions based on .NET runtimes, you can respond to requests using all the tools provided to you from ASP.NET. You can create APIs that talk to databases, like AWS’s managed RDS database, all while being perfectly scalable running on serverless functions....

In previous versions of Windows, you could simply hold the Shift key and right-click on an application to run it as a different user, which was useful for running multiple versions of an application at once. In Windows 8, it works a little different. Enabling the Run as Different User Option Press the Windows + R key combination to bring up a run box, type gpedit.msc and hit enter....

Favicons are the tiny icons that you see on browser tabs. They’re usually just simple ICO files, but in recent years they’ve become like an icon for your website, with numerous competing sizes and types. How Do You Use a Favicon? Most browsers will support multiple different types of favicons. Most of the time, your browser will automatically fetch favicons in the likely locations without you even telling it to, but you can manually add them to your website as well....

Is Word behaving sluggishly, slowing you down? There are a various reasons why Word may be slowing down, but you can easily change some settings to speed it up. Turn off Background Repagination The background repagination option allows Word to repaginate the document when the program is idle. This allows the page numbers displayed on the status bar to be updated and stay current. However, this can slow down other operations in Word....

Let’s say you start a big download, then go to bed. When you wake up, you realize your Mac went to sleep before finishing its job. Isn’t there some way to stop this? You probably know you can go into your Mac’s System Preferences > Energy Saver and change how often it goes to sleep. RELATED: How to Prevent Your Mac from Sleeping with No Additional Software But occasionally, you want to keep it awake indefinitely, or for a different amount of time than what you have set in System Preferences....

Google announced their new Chrome Web Store today, with loads of web sites and games that can be installed as applications in your browser, synced across every PC, and customized to launch the way you want them to. Here’s how it all works. Note: this guide really isn’t aimed at expert geeks, though you’re more than welcome to leave your thoughts in the comments. What Are Chrome Web Apps Again?...

When Google introduced Google Drive in April 24, 2012, they promised Linux support “coming soon.” That was nearly five years ago. Google still hasn’t released an official version of Google Drive for Linux, but there are other tools to fill the gap. There’s also the Google Drive website, which will work in any modern browser. Google officially recommends using the website on Linux, but if you want something on the desktop, here are your options....

Learn how to use the lsusb tool in Linux with a practical example. The lsusb will list all USB devices in a system and USB hubs and provide detailed information on each of them. What Is lsusb? lsusb is a command-line tool in Linux, installed by default as part of your (modern) Linux Operating System, which can list and enumerate all USB devices, including USB hubs found within the system on which it is being executed....

Developers and IT administrators have, no doubt, the need the deploy some website through HTTPS using an SSL certificate. While this process is pretty straightforward for a production site, for the purposes of development and testing you may find the need to use an SSL certificate here as well. As an alternate to purchasing and renewing a yearly certificate, you can leverage your Windows Server’s ability to generate a self signed certificate which is convenient, easy and should meet these types of needs perfectly....

If you’re looking for a great book to help you learn more about Windows home networking, there’s a new book on the market by our good friend Ciprian, and published by none other than Microsoft Press. Note: our friend Ciprian has been a guest contributor here on How-To Geek in the past, and he’s not only a geek that knows what he’s talking about, he’s also one of the more honest and decent people I’ve worked with....

Obviously this isn’t terribly useful, which is exactly what makes it a Stupid Geek Trick. Either way, it’s a good learning experience to better understand how your OS works. Adding the Windows Version to the Desktop The trick is really simple, you just have to edit a key in the registry and you are done. Let’s start by opening the “Start Menu”, type “regedit” then hit Enter. When the Registry window open, from the left pane, navigate to this key:...

In a number of Tesla Model 3 vehicles ranging from 2020 to 2023, as well as on the 2023 Model Y, the rear lights may “intermittently illuminate” due to an issue that can cause “false fault detections during the vehicle wake-up process.” This issue is affecting over 321,000 cars, and according to the NHTSA, it can “increase the risk of collisions” in dark conditions, since the taillights are not functioning properly as a result of it....

This week we have a list of fun websites for you. Playing games can help relieve stress and provide a break from work. The following are some websites we found offering free online games, freeware games for download, or games you can purchase. Play Solitaire or Minesweeper in Your Browser We’ve put up completely free Solitaire and Minesweeper games on URLs that anybody can access in a desktop browser. And there are no ads....

How Social Engineering Works From birth, we’re programmed to be helpful and polite. If someone asks you a question it takes a conscious effort not to answer it—especially if it seems innocuous. This is one of the behaviors that social engineers manipulate to achieve what they want. They do it subtly and slowly, winkling information out of their victim piece by piece. They’ll intersperse harmless questions with the ones that nudge you closer to revealing what they want to know....

Lens Hoods Block Unwanted Light When you take a photo of something, the light reflecting off of it enters the camera through the front of the lens. The light rays pass through the different lens elements, which work together to focus it onto the camera’s sensor. If you’ve got everything set up correctly, you’ll get a great looking photo. But a lot is going on inside the camera. Modern lenses aren’t simple convex or concave pieces of glass....

Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite remote desktop access tools and tips; now we’re back to highlight your favorite tools and how you use them. The two prevailing themes among all the tools suggested were pricing and ease of deployment. On that front, LogMeIn had a strong following. Mtech writes: TrinaryOC uses LogMeIn with an additional layer: What a company. Teamviewer is great but prohibitive price wise for my humble salary....

Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite Windows customization tricks and now we’re back to highlight some of the tips, tricks, and tweaks you shared. Your customization tips ranged from cosmetic to behind the scenes tweaks and offered a wide variety of ways to customize the Windows experience. Ted Lilley’s favorite must-have tweak involves Windows Explorer: Robin sets up virtual desktops: Swelfy adjust the focus-sensitivity with a third party app:...