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This week we take a look at how to automate your Flickr backups, knock out repetitive tasks with automation, and normalize your MP3 collection’s wild volume levels. Once a week we dip into our reader mailbag and help readers solve their problems, sharing the useful solutions with you in the process. Read on to see our fixes for this week’s reader dilemmas. Automatically Backup Your Photos to Flickr Dear Photo OCD,...

Once a week we dip into the reader mailbag and answer your tech questions. This week we’re looking at mobile credit card processing for Android, resizing hard drive partitions, and tethering your Android phone to your laptop. Mobile Credit Card Processing for Android Dear Seeking, I am an independent business owner that does all of my work in the field. I currently can only accept cash and checks as payment from my clients....

Launching with Steve Jobs’ NeXT Computer in 1988, the NeXTSTEP operating system represented the cutting edge of desktop software design. It became the technological bedrock for Apple’s macOS, iOS, and others. Let’s look at what was so special about NeXTSTEP. NeXTSTEP: Flexible and Elegant, with a Solid Foundation Amid heavyweight competition from Windows, Mac OS, OS/2, and BeOS in the 1990s, the NeXTSTEP operating system stood out. This was due to its elegant use of detailed icons and typography, its built-in networking support, the easy-to-program object-oriented windowing system, and its solid UNIX roots....

PlayOnLinux provides a point-and-click interface to automatically install and tweak Windows software on Linux. It’s like a package manager — but for Windows games and other applications on Linux. We’ve covered using Wine to run Windows software on Ubuntu and other Linux distributions in the past. PlayOnLinux automates this tedious process for the applications it supports. It provides a list of applications you can install and automates each installation process as much as possible....

Head to the link, and look in the first paragraph for the links to the EPUB and Kindle versions. You’ll need to connect your Kindle to your PC via the USB cable and drop the book in there that way. If you want to read the EPUB on your PC, you can use Calibre or a similar software. Free Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft for Nook and Kindle [Cthulhu Chick]

If you’re enjoying Windows 8 but you’re not a particularly big fan of the new MetroUI and/or the Ribbon interface, this reader tip will help you disable the features you don’t want. Angie writes in with a multi-part tip. The first part of her tip highlights a simple registry hack. The second part highlights a program that goes beyond the simple registry hack: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer Look for the entry RPEEnabled, then change the DWORD value to 0....

You’ve probably already been using hotkeys in Windows 7 and previous versions, so now that Windows 8 is out, all you need to learn are the new shortcut keys. Here are the important new keys in a short list that you can easily learn. New Windows 8 Shortcut Keys There might be a couple of new keys that aren’t included in this list, but as far as we know, these are the most important ones....

Why Use Online Study Groups? Studying often works best in a group setting, but it’s not always possible to get together with your friends. Libraries aren’t always open, and social distancing requirements might make meeting difficult depending on where you are in the world. Online study groups existed before the coronavirus pandemic, but they exploded in popularity throughout 2020. While many institutions switched to online learning using apps like Zoom, many others took matters into their own hands and established their own study groups....

Why Use Another IP Address? Having multiple addresses is great for a number of reasons. The main benefit is being able to have multiple applications running on the same port, but on different addresses. For example, you couldn’t run NGINX and Apache at the same time, as they’re both web servers that need to use port 80. However, if you ran NGINX bound to one IP address, and Apache bound to another, you could do so without any conflict....

A common use case for EC2 On-Demand and Spot Instances is using powerful machines for short-term, one-off tasks. However, if you were to leave these machines running on accident, you may end up with a very large bill. Luckily, AWS has tools to prevent that. Preventing Wallet Overflow This is a case of “cloud overflow,” where some of the more scalable services you run are dangerous to your wallet, and if not set up properly, can end up costing you orders of magnitude more money than you expected....

Lets face it, one of the messy sides of Windows is its right-click context menu system which seems to get more cluttered every time you install a new program. Here’s how to fix that, the easy way. Cleaning Your Context Menu With CCleaner Head over to the Piriform website and download the free version of CCleaner. Once downloaded, you will need to run through the install wizard which is a next, next, finish process....

Using a table in Excel allows you to enjoy helpful features for working with your data. But those features may interfere when manipulating your data the way you want. Luckily, you can convert a table to a range or vice versa. How to Convert a Table to a Range If you’ve already created a table and decided it’s not working for you, you can easily convert it to a normal range....

How Folding@home Works Folding@home is a distributed computing project that’s been around since the year 2000. It’s named after “protein folding.” If you install the software and join a project, it will run in the background and use spare graphics processing (GPU) power to run calculations. Your PC will be one of the hundreds of thousands of PCs running these calculations, all working together. The software has previously been used to help find cures to cancer, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, influenza, and many other diseases....

When you have a lot of Windows open on your PC, getting to the recycle bin can sometimes be a pain. Use this quick tip to create a fully functional recycle bin in your taskbar. Creating a Fully Functional Recycle Bin in the Taskbar Right-click on the taskbar, and choose Toolbars \ New Toolbar from the context menu. You should probably also unlock the taskbar at this point. When you are asked to select a folder click on the navigation bar and paste the following into it....

When you add a drive to your PC, by default it gets a drive letter, whether it is a removable drive or even a fixed hard drive inside of your PC. Lets take a look at how we can hide these drives. Note: This will completely hide the drive, even from you. You’ll have to open up disk management to un-hide it. To hide a drive you need to open a disk management snap-in, to do this right click on computer and select manage....

If you create slideshows often, whether for your company, charitable organization, or classroom, why start from scratch each time? You can import slides from other Google Slides presentations and reuse them. You might have a standard slide you include in all your presentations such as contact details, location information, or your organization’s mission statement. By importing one or more slides, you can easily reuse slides and cut the time it takes to build your slideshow....

Android and Apple have long given people a way to track and disable your gadgets remotely. Microsoft has also joined the club by letting you track and lock your Windows PC using the “Find My Device” on Windows 10. Find My Device uses your device’s location data to help you find it when it’s lost or stolen. You can use the same service to make sure that the device is locked so that no one can use it, and also to display information about how people can return it to you....

Docker volume and bind mounts are used to bind directories on the host OS to locations in the container’s file system. While they’re commonly used to mount entire directories, you can also use them to symlink individual files. Symlink to Docker From The Host Mounting entire directories works well if you’re overwriting a whole list of config files, but if you just want to target one, you’ll need to use a single-file mount....

Android forces you to agree to every permission an app wants, assuming you want to use the app. After rooting your device, you can manage permissions on a per-app basis. Restricting permissions allows you to protect your contacts and other private data from apps that demand access you’d rather not allow. Many apps will continue working properly after you revoke the permissions. App Options To restrict app permissions, you’ll have to root your Android phone or tablet....

Docker containers default to running without any resource constraints. Processes running in containers are free to utilize limitless amounts of memory, potentially impacting neighboring containers and other workloads on your host. This is hazardous in production environments. Each container should be configured with an appropriate memory limit to prevent runaway resource consumption. This helps reduce contention which will maximize overall system stability. How Docker Memory Limits Work Docker lets you set hard and soft memory limits on individual containers....