With Christmas and the holiday season approaching, the will to kick back and relax is certainly increasing as the news cycle gradually takes its brief (but much appreciated) moment of slowdown. Still, even as we all prepare for a much needed break, there are still a few key headlines that have hit our news desk this week. Gamers have had a lot to rejoice about – following last week’s announcements at The Game Awards, we now know that the long-awaited Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 will arrive in autumn 2023....

Installation and First Contact Zorin OS is at least as easy, if not more so, as the easiest-to-install Linux distribution available today. Its installation is almost identical to Ubuntu’s. Some highlights worth mentioning would be: Option to test it in a live environment or install it, as the industry norm does.Option to install third-party driver and codecs.Allows you to share data with its developers to count you as an active user, but it’s opt-in and disabled by default....

Connecting the Sensors For your prototyping and electronics projects, I would advise using breadboards and jumper cables to connect the sensors to your Arduino. There are also extension prototype shield boards that generally fit on top of the Arduino to give it more functionality and allow for more sensors to be connected. Typically, you would need to connect the sensor to the Arduino’s 5V pin, ground, and another pin; however, this depends on the sensor....

Choose Wisely When choosing a portable drive to use, there are a couple things to think about. Not every portable drive will work well for running an application. The write and read speed is crucial here. If the flash drive has a low speed, it will not work for running Firefox portable for example. Too much data is going back and forth so the program will freeze up or crash. I’m not saying you need to spend a lot of money on a drive, just take a look at the specifications before you buy....

Sync for iCloud Contacts One of the easiest ways to sync and transfer your contacts to an Android device is the Sync for iCloud Contacts app which doesn’t require you to register or create a new account but rather the iCloud credentials (username and password), and it will make a query to the server after a few seconds. A successful sign-in will bring you to the next screen that will ask which collections shall be synchronized....

1. Process Explorer Microsoft has some of the best tools in their Sysinternals Suite and Process Explorer is one of them. Process Explorer is much more powerful than the regular Windows task manager and hosts a variety of powerful features to handle all the background Windows processes more efficiently. Being a portable application, you can download it and start using it without any actual installation. As you can see from the user interface, all the processes are arranged in a nice tree format and give you the information like Process ID, Process Description, etc....

1. Defragmentation is a no-no SSD optimization has caught a lot of hype among users that don’t really understand how the drives work. Since they use flash memory, there’s a limited amount of times that data can be written to a particular cell before it expires, meaning it’s no longer usable. This is called “write endurance.” Limitations on this type of flash means that you have to be as conservative as possible with what data gets written onto the drive....

1. Duolingo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OebgtUjLg4 Learning a new language can be fun. That’s the idea behind Duolingo anyway. This app takes mobile gamification trends and applies them to the act of speaking a new tongue, awarding you with badges when you do well and letting you compare yourself with others on the leaderboard. Lessons consist of questions that grant you XP when you answer them correctly and cost you hearts when you get them wrong....

Here are some of the best Internet history tracking apps you can use. 1. History Viewer History Viewer is a nicely-rated freeware which offers basic website and application tracking on Internet Explorer, Firefox and Google Chrome. Available only with Windows, the software is extremely lightweight at less than 2 MB. With this, you can easily view every website, its cookies and your file histories. History Viewer works quietly in the background, so it is best to install if someone else is using your computer....

This fast-paced progress has created a few challenges that have been particularly hard on the U.S. government, which in September 2016 has decided to appoint a retired general as its first cybersecurity chief. While there are many areas in which the U.S. government has very powerful technology working for it, there are also a lot of things that appear out of place in a country that boasts the world’s highest GDP....

In this article we will list five Chrome extensions that will let you customize your Facebook account and make it a better place for you. 1. Flatbook If you are tired of Facebook’s design, then you should definitely give Flatbook a try. Flatbook is a simple extension that overhauls Facebook’s design and makes it very attractive and clear. It removes all the ads, changes the font, makes content easier to read, gets rid of distractive recommendations, sorts the news feed by categories and completely changes the left sidebar and adds useful shortcuts there....

And just when we thought we’d seen it all, rumor has it that the next generation of iPhones will have support for augmented reality. So what does the future hold for Android? I don’t want to steer towards a debate of who is king between Android and iOS (of course I will be biased; I love Android), so I will get straight to the point: these are the top five features we want every flagship Android phone to have in 2017....

Turn Yourself Into an Anime Avatar Manga.com gives you the opportunity to turn yourself into an Anime avatar. As you can see in the image above, that would be the closest I would ever be to looking like an anime avatar. The web app allows you to edit your eyes, eyebrows, hair, and mouth, and add a ponytail, hats, facial hair, and accessories (limited selection). The app only lets you create an anime avatar from the neck up, but if that’s what you’re looking for, then this is your app....

1. Rename Email Chrome Extension It’s happened to everyone. You get an email with a subject line that says something like “Tell Me What You Think” or “Read This.” These types of subject lines are not very helpful and don’t tell you what the email is about. With the Rename Email Chrome extension you can change those vague subject lines to something that tells you about the email’s content. That way when you need to search for it, it’s easier to find....

1. Blue Light Filter – Night Mode Eye Care Not only does Night Mode have an attractive design, but it also offers various night mode options. For example, you can choose from different filter intensities such as 3200k, 1800k, 2000k, 2700k, and 3400k. The app also has a slider where you can adjust the filter intensity manually. You can also dim your device’s display directly from the app with the built-in slider....

Swift Playgrounds More and more kids are being taught the importance of starting to code at an early age to make more connections in their brains and to give them an edge in their future professional lives. Swift Playgrounds is a free app available for iPads running iOS 10 or later that teaches kids the ins and outs of learning to code – all while keeping a game-like look and feel....

1. Asphalt 8 When it comes to racing games, the only name that hits my mind is Asphalt 8. With over a dozen cars to choose from, you can play games on various tracks and challenge your friends to join you and show what they have got. Not only can you race in the game, but you can enjoy doing a number of tricks with your cars that the developer has integrated within the game....

Let’s take a look at the best USB desk fans you can get. 1. OPOLAR USB Desk Fan First up is the OPOLAR USB desk fan. If you’re looking for raw power, this model is the best you can get. Users often report that they never get past the “Low” setting on the fan because it’s powerful enough at the lowest setting. Despite being a powerful tool, it comes in at a really agreeable price tag....

1: For The App Developer: Java And Swift At this point, Java has become the end-all programming language for most mobile applications on the marketplace. Android’s apps are almost exclusively programmed with it. I am not a very big fan of it because it offers less control over low-level (direct-to-hardware) communication, but without learning this language, you are missing out on a vast amount of opportunities. If you don’t plan to develop anything in Java, I would still suggest you dabble in it a little bit since so many desktop and mobile applications are written in it....

Despite that, it is possible to introduce new features to dwm by patching its source code, as dwm is source-based. Just to do basic configurations, we need to modify config.h, which is a part of dwm’s source code. While that may seem complex at first, patching dwm is simple once we understand a few things about the process. This article aims to teach the necessary skill set to successfully patch your own dwm installation and provide five useful patches....