How to Record Your Desktop to a File or Stream It Over the Internet with VLC

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.

How to Make Any Computer Boot Up or Shut Down on a Schedule

Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux all allow you to schedule boot-ups, shut-downs, and wake-ups. You can have your computer automatically power up in the morning and automatically shut down at night, if you’d like.

This is less necessary than ever thanks to sleep mode — a typical laptop just enters low-power sleep mode it can quickly resume from when it’s not being used — but may still be useful for desktop PCs.

How To Monitor File And Folder Changes in Windows

If someone else is using your computer or if you need to see what changes were made to your files and folders during a specific time, you can use Nirsoft’s handy FolderChangesView application. Nirsoft is a great freeware provider that produces amazing little tools for your PC, and the best part is that they never bundle crapware with their programs like so many other software vendors do.

5 Ways to Type Faster on Your Smartphone’s Touch Keyboard

For those of us who didn’t grow up with smartphones, typing on a touch keyboard can feel awfully slow. But there are tricks you can use to speed up typing on a touch keyboard, just like a physical one.

These tips apply to any smartphone with a touch keyboard, from iPhones and Android phones to Windows phones and BlackBerries. They all work in a fairly similar way.

Most Ugly People In The World

This is just for your weekend laugh, check out these amazing people around the world

How Can I Tell What is Listening on a TCP/IP Port in Windows?

Whenever an application wants to make itself accessible over the network, it claims a TCP/IP port, which means that port can’t be used by anything else. So if you need to use an in-use port, how do you tell what application is holding it?

There’s a number of ways to tell what application has the port locked, but we’ll walk through the built-in way using the command line and Task Manager, and then a great freeware application that does it all in one utility.

Set up your own wireless hotspot

Public Wi-Fi is something people are coming to expect. Cafés and restaurants offer wireless internet access for customers; offices provide a connection for visitors, so that guests can check their email while they’re on-site.
If you manage IT for any business, it’s worth considering running your own hotspot – either as a commercial venture, which people pay to use, or as a complimentary service to visitors. Even within your own home, hosting a hotspot can be a useful service for neighbours and guests. There are, however, numerous technical and legal issues to consider.

How to Connect Your Android Phone to Your TV

A decade ago the idea that you’d want to mirror the screen of your mobile phone to your television would seem silly but now that there is so much content on our mobile devices from games to HD video, it’s downright useful to blow up your phone’s tiny display to television size. Read on as we show you how.

How to Block SMS Text or Calls from Contacts on Your iPhone

If somebody keeps spamming your phone with unwanted texts, or calling you when you don’t want it, you might be interested to know that you can easily block contacts from texting, calling, or even trying to FaceTime you in iOS even if they aren’t actually a contact.

11 Essential Tweaks for Your New Samsung Galaxy S5

The Galaxy S5 debuts new hardware and software from Samsung. Even those who have owned a Galaxy phone before are sure to find a few unexpected treats in this device. Samsung has traditionally engineered one of the more extreme Android skins, but TouchWiz has come a long way since its early days of iPhone cloning.

How To Install and Test Windows Without Affecting The Currently Installed OS

Most of you will have heard by now that Microsoft’s latest operating system, Windows 10, is now in testing phase and begins the long road to a final release sometime in 2015. This will please a lot of people because many of the changes in Windows 8 that made it so unpopular are being scaled back or even reversed completely. For Windows 8 or 8.1 users, this may be good news if you’re currently one of the many not entirely happy with features like the Start Screen or the heavy reliance on the Modern UI.

How to Encrypt Your DNS for More Secure Browsing

We’ve been touting the benefits of third-party DNS servers for a while now, but one additional benefit that might be of interest is the ability to encrypt all of your DNS requests, further protecting you from anybody spying on you in the middle.

How to Create Encrypted Zip or 7z Archives on Any Operating System

Zip files can be password-protected, but the standard Zip encryption scheme is extremely weak. If your operating system has a built-in way to encrypt zip files, you probably shouldn’t use it.

To gain the actual benefits of encryption, you should use AES-256 encryption. 7z archives support this natively, but you can also encrypt Zip files with AES-256 encryption.

3 Alternatives to the Now-Defunct TrueCrypt for Your Encryption Needs

TrueCrypt’s dramatic shutdown in May, 2014 left everyone shocked. TrueCrypt was the go-to recommendation for full-disk encryption software, and the developers suddenly said the code was “not secure” and halted development.

We still don’t know exactly why TrueCrypt was shut down — perhaps the developers were being pressured by a government, or perhaps they were simply sick of maintaining it. But here’s what you can use instead.

How to Create Fillable Forms with MS Word 2010

Creating forms with Microsoft Word is easy, but the challenge comes in when you decide to create fillable forms with options that you can send to people and have them fill out digitally. Whether you need a form for gathering information about people or if you are trying to take a survey to test out user response to software or a new product, MS Word has the solution for you.

Unprotecting Excel Spreadsheets Without The Password

 

Spreadsheets and Microsoft Excel in particular are great tools for any kind of numerical analysis, but they’re good for handling and storing other data as well. I seem to recall a survey a few years ago that Excel was the #1 database in the world with Access, Oracle and SQL Server lagging very far behind. Of course, it all depends on your definition of a database but the point is made.