What Is God Mode? God Mode consolidates all of the settings and administrative tools available on your Windows PC into one folder. Putting all of your options directly in front of you can be great if you don’t have all of the settings memorized — it is way easier to find something by scrolling up and down a bit than by digging through layers of menus. If you already know all of the tools at your disposal within Windows, then the God Mode folder probably won’t save you time....

Embedding a video in your slideshow can be beneficial for showing instructions, a screen recording, or even something emotional. In Google Slides, you can customize the playback options to display the video exactly as you want. Maybe you only want to play a certain clip rather than the full video. Or perhaps you want to start playing the video automatically. You can easily format the playback of your videos in Google Slides to fit your needs....

If you’re collaborating on a spreadsheet, you may want to break down a formula someone entered. While many times this easy, there are others where the formula is more complicated. Excel provides a tool to evaluate formulas step-by-step. For nested or lengthy formulas, you can see how they work one step at a time from the inside out. This not only helps you to understand the formula and its arguments but can also assist you in troubleshooting formula errors....

Google Maps on iPhone, iPad, Android, and the web can not only navigate you to the nearest gas station, but also tell you how much gas costs there. It’s super easy to check and you don’t need any specialized apps for it. First, open the Google Maps app or website and search for “gas near me” or tap the “Gas” shortcut. The mobile apps display the gas prices right on the map....

To start the diagnostic, click on Start \ Run and type in “dxdiag” and click OK. If this is the first time your running this diagnostic windows will ask you for permission to check for WHQL Digital Signatures. Click Yes to this. You will then get the DirectX Diagnostic Tool. The default tab will be System, where it lists the general information about your system and most importantly what version of DirectX you currently have installed....

The ultimate solution is of course to use the mouse as little as possible within your lush, translucent-window-bordered environment. And since launching applications is a key part of anyone’s workflow, the ability to accomplish this task mouse-less is a big step in the right direction. Fortunately, every major operating system now offers a way to do this easily and quickly. In fact, these mechanisms are flexible enough to even launch documents, pictures and even emails (depending on settings)....

Open up a terminal window, and go to the Edit \ Current Profile menu: Click on the Effects tab, and then check the Transparent background radio button. The slider will let you control how transparent the background is. All the way to the left is fully transparent. I left it a little bit shaded, here’s what it looks like over the default Ubuntu background: This trick is most useful when you have a very dark or very light background....

To configure this feature, you’ll need to update the mysql user table to allow access from any remote host, using the % wildcard. Open the command-line mysql client on the server using the root account. Then you will want to run the following two commands, to see what the root user host is set to already: Here’s an example of the output on my database, which is pretty much the default settings....

Microsoft’s service health dashboard reports that Outlook.com is currently having problems, with the company saying “users may be unable to access or use outlook.com services or features.” Downdetector, a popular service for tracking when popular apps and services go down, has received a spike of reports for Outlook.com, Office 365, and Microsoft accounts. Some people are reporting general issues with Office 365, but most of the comments are related to slow or broken synchronization for Outlook, and messages taking much longer to send than normal....

Roborock E4 Robot Vacuum and Mop For $199.99 ($180 Off) Spring is here, which means it’s time to give your home its annual spring cleaning treatment. Instead of vacuuming and scrubbing your floors by hand, why not automate the job instead? For a limited time, you can get this Roborock E4 robotic vacuum and mop for just $199.99 ($180.00 off). The Roborock E4 is a 2-in-1 robotic vacuum and mop that is capable of cleaning both carpeted floors and hard surfaces, like tile, linoleum, and hardwood....

There are many choices for anti-virus, like commercial applications Norton and Trend Micro, which are definitely effective and provide an almost overwhelming amount of features, but if you’re looking to save money, free personal anti-virus applications are a very sound choice as well. Over the next few weeks we will take a look at a few of the reliable free options. Avira AntiVir Personal Avira’s AntiVir Personal Edition is a popular and well rounded anti-virus solution....

If you’re in the habit of completely shutting down your Windows PC on a regular basis, you might be inconveniencing yourself unnecessarily. Windows 10 and Windows 11 include more effective methods of saving power—and they also save you time. Here’s what to do instead. If You Want to Save Power, Sleep or Hibernate Instead Some people shut down their PC at the end of the day when they’re done using it....

Showing all the applications installed on this computer. Quickly scan your network to find the clients currently connected with IP information and MAC address. One of the cooler features I use a lot is finding the BIOS information without having to go into setup. With this application you can find out basically anything you want to know about your system. Also, there are a lot of handy network monitoring tools as well....

This comes hot on the heels of Microsoft announcing that it has purchased Activision Blizzard for the tidy sum of $68.7 billion. While Bungie’s catalog might be substantially smaller than that of Activision Blizzard, the company still makes Destiny, a successful multiplatform franchise that’s been around since 2014 (Destiny 2 since 2017). The second sentence of Sony’s announcement answers one of the biggest questions gamers will have, and that’s whether they’ll still be able to play Destiny on Xbox and PC....

One of the most irritating beeps happens when you use the Volume control… but there are other beeps, such as on error dialogs or when you hit the wrong key. Disable Beep in Device Manager Open up Device Manager by right-clicking on Computer and choosing Properties, then on the Hardware tab you’ll find the button for Device Manager. Select View \ Show hidden devices from the menu. Find Non-Plug and Play Drivers in the list, and then right-click on “Beep” and disable it:...

Using the “Defer” rule in outlook, we can setup a rule that essentially pauses all message delivery for a few minutes after you click the Send button, to give you a chance to recover. Select Rules and Alerts from the Tools menu, and then click on the New Rule button. Under “Start from a blank rule”, choose Check messages after sending, and then click Next. Click the Next button again on the “Which conditions do you want to check” screen, and you’ll be prompted with this dialog informing you that the rule will apply to all messages....

The keyboard shortcut is Shift+Alt + Up/Down, and it’s used to move items up or down. To use this feature, you don’t even have to select the row or item that you want to move… just make sure your cursor is focused on the element or row you want to move: Use the Shift+Alt+Up key, and the row where the cursor is will immediately move up: This also works for other elements, such as paragraphs…...

The first thing you want to do is download Tweak UI from Microsoft’s batch of PowerToys. Installation is very straight forward. Launch Tweak UI and from the lefthand menu expand Logon and highlight Autologon. Enter in your username the click Set Password. Type the correct password in twice and click OK. Now, once you restart your machine the login password is automatically inserted so the login screen is bypassed....

If you encounter the same problem I did, you’ll have to also turn it on through the Windows Features menu. We’ll run through the entire installation just to be safe. Installing in Windows Update Open up Windows Update through the start menu, and you should see “There are Windows Ultimate Extras available for download”, so click on the “View available Extras” link. Check all the updates (I already installed it before I remembered to screenshot it), and then click on the Install button....

CBDCs: Coming to a Country Near You According to the Atlantic Council, an independent organization based in Washington, D.C. that tracks CBDCs, as of April 2022, 91 countries are considering issuing a CBDC. The Biden administration signed an executive order on digital assets on March 9, 2022 which contained a stipulation to research what a government-wide approach to deploying a CBDC would look like in the United States. The important thing you need to know is that CBDCs are different from Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies because they are created and governed by a centralized authority—in this case, a nation-state....