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Thirty years ago—on January 15, 1991—an American college student named Tim Sweeney released ZZT, a low-key adventure game with a revolutionary element: It shipped with a free, built-in game editor. ZZT’s success spawned Epic Games, Unreal Engine, and most recently, Fortnite. Here’s why ZZT was special. What’s a “ZZT,” Anyway? Tim Sweeney’s passion for programming began on his Apple II when he was a kid. After getting his first IBM PC in 1989 during his freshman year of college, he dove head-first into programming the new machine....

Microsoft Word’s mail merge is an excellent productivity tool. Knowing how to create personalized subject lines and attachments that Word’s mail merge basic feature doesn’t support can be a life saver when you have to write emails in bulk. In today’s article, you’ll learn how to use Word’s 2010 Mail Merge Wizard, write personalized email subjects, and setup different attachments for each of your email recipient. Image by M!R...

If there’s one complaint you can expect to hear when a new version of Windows rolls out, it’s “What did they do to the Start Menu?” If you just want the start menu in Windows 10 to look and function the way the Windows 7 Start Menu did, we’re here to help. Why Do I Want To Do This? Maybe you love the Windows 10 Start Menu, which is essentially an extension and revision of the Windows 8 Start Menu....

Rather than only restricting certain people, the Archive function on Facebook effectively reduces the audience that can see the post to just you. Even if someone else has the direct URL to a post you are made, the content will be inaccessible. Conveniently, the instructions for doing this are virtually identical whether you’re using Facebook on the web or via a mobile app. RELATED: How to Restrict Someone on Facebook...

Some applications come with a boatload of keyboard shortcuts; these can make you very fast, but can be difficult to remember, especially if you customized some of them. What if you could have your own little cheat sheet that would pop up next to the application every time your ran it? Read on to see how you can make one. We’re going to be using an excellent (and free) application called Stickies....

If the Gmail scare earlier this week has you thinking about backing up your Gmail or other web-based email account, we’re here to help. Read on to learn how to backup your web-based email using open source email application Thunderbird. In case you missed it, earlier this week Gmail suffered an unusual series of glitches that led to 0.02% of Gmail users finding their inboxes totally empty. The good news is that the glitch was fixed and no actual data was lost (they restored the missing email from tape backups that were unaffected by the issue)....

Windows redesigned its screenshot feature in Windows 8, and you no longer need to launch the Snipping Tool or run any third-party screenshot tool, such as Greenshot. You can easily capture everything on the screen using one key combination. By default, the screenshots taken with the newly designed screenshot tool are saved in the C:\Users<user name>\Pictures\Screenshots directory. However, you may want to move the default location to a different folder to make it simpler to backup, for example....

What You Need to Know So what’s the problem with using these tools? Well, there are a few problems, but the most important one is that the sites that are and aren’t blocked are constantly changing. Whether this is because some official has changed their mind about what’s allowed, or because some shadowy algorithm has given the green light on a web page, is unclear. The upshot is that the only way to find out for sure whether a site is accessible from the People’s Republic is to go there and check for yourself....

Formatting a hard drive or SSD in Windows 11 erases any existing data on a drive and prepares the disk for use. Luckily, formatting is very easy to do directly from File Explorer. Here’s how. First, open File Explorer. You can usually do this by clicking the folder icon in your taskbar. Or you can right-click the Start button and select “File Explorer.” In any File Explorer window, browse to “This PC....

Every now and then, you come across something that sounds way too good to be true, but against the odds, it actually works. Buying cheap external hard drives, cracking them open, and getting more expensive hard drives for your effort is one of those things. What Is Shucking (and Why Bother)? The original meaning of “shucking” is to remove the shuck, or outer protective layer, from food like corn and shellfish with the ultimate goal of getting to the delicious stuff inside....

Conditional formatting lets you format cells in an Excel spreadsheet based on the cells’ content. For example, you could have a cell turn red when it contains a number lower than 100. You can also use conditional formatting to highlight an entire row? RELATED: Using Conditional Cell Formatting in Excel 2007 If you’ve never used Conditional Formatting before, you might want to look at Using Conditional Cell Formatting in Excel 2007....

If you’ve ever played Portal, then you know just how delightfully creepy GlaDOS’s voice can be. Here’s how to create your own GlaDOS-themed sound clips so you can spread the Portal-based horror. Image by Digital Sextant What You’ll Need Audacity, to record, clean up, export audio. Check out the How-To Geek Guide to Audio Editing: The Basics to get started. Melodyne Studio, to create the actual effect. It runs on Windows and Mac OS, and you can use the demo version if you meet the next requirement, otherwise you may have to buy it....

In our previous article we told you what LVM is and what you may want to use it for, and today we are going to walk you through some of the key management tools of LVM so you will be confident when setting up or expanding your installation. As stated before, LVM is a abstraction layer between your operating system and physical hard drives. What that means is your physical hard drives and partitions are no longer tied to the hard drives and partitions they reside on....

If thoughts of playing Maniac Mansion, The Secret of Monkey Island, Kings Quest, and other classic point-and-click adventures sends tingles of nostalgia to your mouse hand, read on as we show you how to enjoy the classics on your computer with ScummVM. As any fan of old-school point-and-click adventures can tell you, installing and running the retro classics from the 1980s and 90s on a modern computer is a complete and utter crapshot....

VLC is full of powerful features, including the ability to record your desktop. VLC is great for quick captures, although it doesn’t necessarily have the more advanced features of a dedicated screencasting application. We’ve already covered transcoding (saving media to a file) with VLC and streaming with VLC. To record your desktop to a file or stream it, perform the normal transcoding or streaming process with your desktop as the capture device....

If you’d like to maintain tighter control over what appears in your Facebook timeline (and thus to everyone you’re Facebook friends with), there’s a simple, but underused, mechanism built right into Facebook to give you approval rights over everything people tag you in. Why You’d Want to Do This Let’s face it, we’ve all got at least one of the following people in our stable of Facebook friends: the person who tags everyone in their [political/event/multi-level-marketing] posts, the person who likes to post random (and often inappropriate) content and tag everyone they think might find it funny, the person that takes a million photos at every event and tags every person present in every one of them, or any other number of people who abuse Facebook’s friend tagging function....

Keen to try out Windows 8, but aren’t quite ready to give up on Windows 7 just yet? Follow this fun easy guide to get the best of both worlds. Creating The VHD To create the VHD, go to a run prompt by pressing Win+R, and type diskmgmt.msc. An MMC console will appear, and will have the Disk Management snap-in pre-loaded. To create a new VHD, click on the action button in the menu bar, and select Create VHD....

If you have iTunes, and you don’t have an iPhone – but an Android phone instead, syncing iTunes to your phone can be frustrating. So here are some tips to sync iTunes and make sure your cover art works well on your Android phone. Syncing iTunes Salling Media offers a complete solution for syncing your iTunes media to Android. On top of that it is really user friendly and super fast....

If you no longer wish to be the owner of your Discord server, you can pass your server ownership to another user on the server. We’ll show you how to perform this ownership transfer process in Discord on desktop and mobile. What Happens When You Pass Ownership of a Discord Server? When you transfer ownership of a server to someone, that user becomes the owner of the server. You remain part of the server until you manually leave it....

There’s no doubt that a dash cam can really come in handy in your car–not just to record meteors and flying cars, but more practical events like collisions and aggressive driving. But instead of buying one, you can just use equipment you already have and a freely available app. By now, everyone probably has an old smartphone stashed away in a desk drawer. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could put that device to good use?...