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If your taskbar, system tray, or Start menu acts up, you might be tempted to restart your PC. Instead, you can usually just restart Windows Explorer. Windows makes it pretty easy whether you’re using Windows 11, Windows 10, Windows 8, or Windows 7. Windows Explorer (Explorer.exe) is a program manager process that provides the graphical interface you use to interact with most of Windows—the Start menu, taskbar, notification area, and File Explorer....

Windows normally can’t read Time Machine backups — in fact, it doesn’t even understand the HFS+ file system format Macs require on their Time Machine drives. But you can recover all the files from your Time Machine backup on your Windows computer. This won’t allow you to easily restore settings and applications, which are generally Mac-specific. However, you can extract all your important personal files from the Time Machine backup....

Windows 8 ships with built-in apps available on the Modern UI screen (formerly the Metro or Start screen), such as Mail, Calendar, Photos, Music, Maps, and Weather. Installing additional Modern UI apps is easy using the Windows Store, and uninstalling apps is just as easy. What if you accidentally uninstall a built-in app? It can be easily restored with a few clicks of your mouse. To begin, access the Modern UI screen by moving your mouse to the extreme, lower, left corner of the screen and click the Start screen button that displays....

Smartphones are handy when you’re navigating a new city. Sometimes, though, a computer is a better place to start. On Waze’s web interface, you can start a trip on your computer, and then send it to your phone. Before we get started, make sure you have the Waze app installed on your iPhone, iPad, or Android device, and that you’re signed in. Then, on your computer, open a web browser and navigate to Waze’s website....

All browsers support keywords, which you can type into your address bar to quickly search or visit websites. Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Internet Explorer all have their own methods of setting keywords, some more hidden than others. Internet Explorer’s keyword features are particularly hard to find, relying on a registry hack and a little-known bookmark feature. Google Chrome makes this easier, although setting a bookmark keyword requires a trick....

Sure, you could just right-click the Skype tray icon and close it, but it’ll come right back the next time you boot your PC. Disable Skype Autostart via the Task Manager Thankfully, the latest versions of Skype now function like a normal Windows application again. You can’t use Skype’s built-in option to disable automatic startup without signing in first, but there’s a way around it: Disable it with the Task Manager....

By default, Ubuntu uses a two-finger tap for right-click and a three-finger tap for middle-click on laptop touchpads. You can swap this behavior, but Ubuntu doesn’t provide a graphical utility for configuring it. Swapping this behavior is simple and only involves running a command or two — however, making your changes persistent requires creating a script and telling GNOME to automatically run it when the system boots or resumes from suspend....

Google Cloud Sync will sync a lot of things, unfortunately the one thing it doesn’t yet sync is your open tabs, lets take a look at how to change this using a custom flag and get your tabs syncing across machines in no time. Open up chrome and type chrome://flags/ into the omnibar. Scroll down and look for a flag called “Enable syncing open tabs” and enable it. Now close chrome and re-launch it....

If you currently have a subscription to Office 365, you’ll be pleased to know you can upgrade to Office 2016 right now in just a matter of a few minutes. Today we’ll quickly show you how to do that on a Windows PC and Apple Mac. RELATED: How to Completely Uninstall Office 2011 for Mac OS X Office 2016 is a much welcome upgrade for any existing Office installation, particularly for Mac users who’ve been suffering under the rather awful Office 2011 with its ugly, clunky interface....

Windows 10 includes a “Battery Saver” mode that’s designed to extend your laptop or tablet’s battery life. Windows will automatically enable Battery Saver when your PC’s battery runs low, but you can control this–and choose exactly what Battery Saver does. What Exactly Does Battery Saver Mode Do? RELATED: How to Manage Windows 10’s New “Power Throttling” to Save Battery Life Battery Saver is similar to Low Power Mode on an iPhone, or Battery Saver on Android....

If you’re anything like 99% of everybody, you have some sort of PDF viewing software installed on your PC—but did you realize that you can use Google Chrome to view PDFs from your PC? It’s easy! We’re showing off how to do this in Windows, but theoretically it would work for OS X or Linux as well. If you’ve tried it, let us know in the comments. Enabling Google Chrome as Your Default PDF Reader Start off by right-clicking on any PDF file, and heading to the “Open with” item on the menu....

Every file on your computer has a timestamp, which contains the access and modification time for a file, but did you know that you can change that timestamp? Here’s how to do it. Using the Touch Command The “touch” command is available pretty much anywhere that you can get the Bash shell, which includes Linux or Windows with Cygwin installed. Here’s the options for the command: If you want to check the file timestamp, you can do so with this command:...

Kubernetes supports several ways of getting external traffic into your cluster. ClusterIPs, NodePorts, and Ingresses are three widely used resources that all have a role in routing traffic. Each one lets you expose services with a unique set of features and trade-offs. The Basics Kubernetes workloads aren’t network-visible by default. You make containers available to the outside world by creating a service. Service resources route traffic into the containers within pods....

Telephone scams are on the upswing, and they’re often enabled by caller ID spoofing. That name and number that appears when someone calls you can be faked, so you can’t place all your trust in it. Caller ID is more of a convenience feature. If a friend, family member, or business is calling you, you can easily see who it is before you answer. It’s not a security feature, and scammers can appear as any phone number and name they like....

NVIDIA’s line of SHIELD products is a great example of what Android can do when put in the right hands—SHIELD Tablet is still one of the best Android tablets around, and SHIELD Android TV is the top Android TV box you can buy. RELATED: What Is NVIDIA SHIELD? Both products are incredibly powerful and versatile, but we all know at its core NVIDIA is a gaming company—not necessarily a company that makes games, but a company that is passionate about giving users the best experience from the games they play....

We’ve covered the manual methods of some fun Photoshop effects—now here’s they are in automatic. Download the How-To Geek Photoshop Action Pack, and get those effects in seconds with the touch of a button. While there’s a lot of learning and satisfaction that goes into doing something the long way, sometimes the easy way is best. Why go through all the steps when you simply want to apply an effect to 50 of your photographs?...

Google has confirmed that Fiber service is coming to Lakewood, Colorado, the first city in Colorado to receive fiber-to-home network connectivity — the previous rollout in Colorado’s capital, Denver, uses a partially-wireless infrastructure. Google Fiber said in a blog post, “Residents in Lakewood have been asking for more competition and options for internet service. We are grateful to the City for working with us on a non-exclusive right-of-way use agreement that enables us to deploy the network efficiently....

What better way to kick off your summer than building something to dazzle your neighbors with a symphony of booms, zaps, thumps, and other assorted better-call-the-ambulance noises? Read on as we highlight 10 geeky and dangerous projects. While geeky projects of all stripes are fun there’s just something about projects that require safety goggles, protective clothing, and potentially a blast shelter, that make us pine for a youth spent with chemistry sets and willing neighbors as test subjects....

React 18 will be the next major version of the popular JavaScript component library. Now available as a release candidate, it introduces several changes to improve data fetches, performance and server-side rendering. To take advantage of all the features, you’ll need to upgrade your project and may encounter some breaking changes. React 18 is still generally backwards compatible with older code though. You should be able to bump the release version in your package....

When you’re shopping does it always seem like your line is the slowest? You’re not entirely imagining things, statistically your line is slower more often than not. Watch this interesting video to see how research on telephone trunk lines explains holiday shopping queues. Bill Hammack, the guy behind Engineer Guy Video, takes a moment to explain how research in the early days of the telephone industry applies to the queuing systems used in modern stores....