Category: Windows

Link: How to Set Up WiFi Hotspot in Windows 8

Last year, my roommate moved out of my apartment and ended up taking our wireless router. I didn’t want to wait for twenty-four hours for Amazon to send me my new router, so I decided to turn my PC into a wireless router (or hotspot). My PC, which was wired directly to my modem, turned out to be a great replacement for my router and allowed me to hook up to the internet via WiFi with my laptop and mobile devices.

There are two ways of turning your Windows 8 PC into a wireless router, and I will walk you through both.

Full article here:
How to Set Up WiFi Hotspot in Windows 8 (Make Tech Easier)

Link: Power of Linux wget Command to Downloand Files from Internet

Wget is the command line, non interative , free utility in Unix like Operating systems not excluding Microsoft Windows, for downloading files from the internet. Most of the web browsers require user’s presence for the file download to be completed. But wget allows users to start the file retrieval and disconnect from the system. It will download the files in the background. The user’s presence can be a great hindrance when downloading large files.

Full article here:
Power of Linux wget Command to Downloand Files from Internet (LinOxide)
Related:
Wget. Resume, limit rate and run it in background (G. Garron)
Download an entire website with wget (ugly duck)

Link: Easily Run Windows Applications on Mac OS X

If you are using Mac OS X and want to run Windows applications, the most popular option is to install Windows OS using Bootcamp, or run Windows in a virtual machine. Linux users will know that you can use Wine to install and run Windows applications natively. The good news is that Mac users can run Wine to install Windows applications as well. Wineskin is a Wine-tool ported over to the Mac platform. Check out how you can run Windows applications on Mac OS X.

Wineskin is simply an implementation of Wine at its core. For those who are not sure what Wine (an acronym for “Wine Is Not an Emulator”) is, it is a compatibility layer capable of running Windows applications on several POSIX-compliant operating systems, including Linux and Mac OS X.

Full article here:
Easily Run Windows Applications on Mac OS X (Make Tech Easier)
Related:
Wineskin: Run Windows Software On Mac OS X Without An Emulator [Mac] (MakeUseOf)

Hate Windows 8? Classic Shell™ is free software that may restore your sanity!

We’ve not been forced to deal with Windows 8 yet, but from the chatter we’ve seen, it seems like everybody pretty much hates it, except maybe for Apple and the people who create Linux distros. From some of the comments we’ve read, Microsoft has done a great job of encouraging people to try OS X or Linux! 🙂

But if you have somehow got stuck with using Windows 8 and you simply hate it, and would much rather it worked like the previous versions of Windows that you are used to, then take a look at this free software that might at least make it tolerable again:

Classic Shell™ is free software that improves your productivity, enhances the usability of Windows and empowers you to use the computer the way you like it. The main features are:

  • Highly customizable start menu with multiple styles and skins
  • Quick access to recent, frequently-used, or pinned programs
  • Find programs, settings, files and documents
  • Start button for Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1
  • Toolbar and status bar for Windows Explorer
  • Caption and status bar for Internet Explorer

Classic Shell has been in active development for 4 years and has over 10 million downloads.

To obtain this software, visit the Classic Shell™ web site, or you can get it at Download.com (where it currently has a 5 star rating as we’re writing this).  And did we mention that it’s free?  The author accepts donations, but you don’t have to pay one red cent to download and use it, which is more than can be said for some other software that only offers some of the features included in Classic Shell.

Link: How to Reset the Password on Any Windows Version, Including 8.1, From Linux

If you have a Windows operating system and you find yourself locked out, Linux is there for the rescue with a very handy tool, ntpasswd.

ntpasswd can be described as an “Offline NT Password & Registry Editor” and it’s a tool that can be used to reset the password of any user that has a valid account on a Windows system.

Full article here:
How to Reset the Password on Any Windows Version, Including 8.1, From Linux (Softpedia)
Related:
Resetting Windows administrator password using Linux (Techie News)

Link: How to Clear Spotify Cache

If you have been a regular user of Spotify (on desktop), you should know that it caches your playlist in the local hard disk so it can quickly playback the songs without having to stream from their server again. However, if you are running low on hard disk space, you might want to clear the cache to make way for more important documents. The Spotify desktop client doesn’t come with a way to clear the cache. Here is how you can clear Spotify cache in Windows, Mac and Linux.

Full article here:
How to Clear Spotify Cache (Make Tech Easier)

Link: Linux Terminal: Poor Man’s Spotify (actually works with Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X)

While I was looking some video related to Linux I’ve found this video of gotbletu an user that I follow on Youtube, related to a small player to listen music directly from the terminal: pms AKA Poor Man’s Spotify.

I like lightweight clients, and so I’ve gave it a try, these are the results.

Note that this is a Python script, and therefore should run on any platform that has Python 2.7 or 3 installed.

Full article here:
Linux Terminal: Poor Man’s Spotify (Linuxaria)

Link: Do More, Faster In The Linux Terminal With Midnight Commander

This is the program we always install first in any new Linux-based installation, and if for some reason we can’t install it, that system tends to get blown away and replaced by a different version of Linux (or whatever) almost immediately. Not being able to install Midnight Commander is kind of a deal-breaker around here.

File browsing in a Linux terminal is alright, but it could be so much better. Midnight Commander is the program you’re looking for –  it gives you a two-paned file browser that makes working in the terminal so much easier. And the best part? It’s simple to get and use.

Full article here:
Do More, Faster In The Linux Terminal With Midnight Commander (MakeUseOf)

We’ll just add that even some Mac OS X users are apparently lost without Midnight Commander, since an older article on installing it under OS X is still one of the most popular on this site, even though for day-to-day use, we would think that most OS X users would be happier with the more recent versions of XtraFinder, which now includes dual pane functionality (and it’s free!). As for Windows users, there is always the venerable Total Commander.

Link: How to Recover Accidentally Deleted Files Without Paying Outrageous Fees

You can’t always blame data loss on hardware failure. A clumsy user can be just as harmful. PhotoRec is a nifty little command-line based tool that can recover accidentally deleted files.

To use PhotoRec effectively you need to understand how the filesystem handles files. When you delete a file, it isn’t actually zapped into oblivion. Rather the file system just marks it as deleted, and makes the space the file occupies available to other files.

This means that until another app uses that recently freed-up space, the original file is still there, and can be retrieved by a file recovery tool. For this very reason, it’s very important that you immediately stop using the computer as soon as you realize that you have accidentally deleted files in order to minimize the interactions with the hard disk.

Note: PhotoRec is cross-platform compatible. For this tutorial, we will use a Linux (Ubuntu) system for illustration.

Full article here:
How to Recover Accidentally Deleted Files Without Paying Outrageous Fees (Make Tech Easier)