Windows 8: Set Up Extra Passwords

 

Unlike the previous versions of Windows, Windows 8 let user have more than one password option per account. By setting up additional password techniques, users can prevent getting locked our of their systems if the password is forgotten. This tutorial will describe how to set up and use a gesture-based password and PIN code in Windows 8.

 

Setting up extra password methods in Windows 8 has saved me several times when I forgot my primary password. In fact, one of the most popular searches on tech-recipes is how to log into a Windows system if the password is forgotten. By establishing these additional password methods, Microsoft is trying to avoid this problem in Windows 8.

1. Access the Charms bar. One way to do this is by pressing Winkey + C. Next, choose Settings.



2. Go to More PC settings.



3. From the left side of the PC settings screen, choose the Users section.


4. The right side of the Users section has three sign-in options for you to choose. The first one is the normal password that we probably set up right at the start. Other options available are picture password and PIN. First, let’s create a picture (or gesture) password.



5. In order to create a picture password, you have to verify your current password.



6. To set the picture password, click Choose picture.



7. When the image is loaded, you will be asked to draw three gestures on the picture. The gestures can be circles, straight lines or taps. Please remember the gestures’ positions carefully.



8. After you have drawn three gestures, you have to repeat them again to confirm. If succeed, you will be notified by a message like below. You can use your picture password right after that.



9. Creating a PIN password is simpler. All you have to do is enter a 4-digit code twice



10. When your new password is set up, you can use any method at the start screen to sign in.

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How Do I Use Two Monitors with Windows 7?

These days everybody has more than one monitor available. However, running a dual monitor setup can be tricky to get working correctly. This tech-recipes tutorial will get you started.

 

These directions are for Windows 7 although the directions for XP and Vista are very similar.
Dual monitors rule! First things first, make sure your computer can support two monitors. The box will need the right outputs for dual monitors. I use a higher end GPU which allows me multiple HDMI outputs; however, Windows 7 is smart enough to use outputs of different types. For example, if you computer has a DVI and VGA outputs, you still can get a dual setup working. Most laptops have an external monitor connection which can be used as your second monitor.

1. Open the Start button on your desktop and in the search bar type Display. Click on the Display option when it appears.



2. From this control panel screen select Adjust Resolution on the left.



3. Your second monitor should be detected. If it is not click Detect then Identify. My favorite thing to do is use both monitors as one big desktop. To do this, under Multiply Display select Extend these displays.

You will likely want to make sure your left monitor is set as the main display where your Windows task bar will appear.



4. You can also duplicate the display which clone the image one one monitor to the second one.



Hopefully, you are now running a two monitor setup. If you find yourself having trouble getting your second monitor to display, just post in the comments and I will help you out. Check out Jimmy’s dual monitor tricks for additional cool things to do with a two monitor configuration.

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How it works?

We make a online-store for you with ready to operate e-commerce solution. Your work is extremely easy; you have to submit material about your online-shop to the Internet sites. We will provide you with very easy step-by-step instruction how to do this. The typical instruction requests you to open a web page and fill in a form with material about your online-shop and software.
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Sony Playstation3 and PS3 Slim – How to backup your PS3 harddrive to an external harddrive / thumbdrive before upgrading

The Sony PS3 Phat and PS3 Slim are amazing gaming consoles and a great media center playback device too.  One thing that Sony has done right with the PS3 is that they allowed users to upgrade the harddrive using any normal SATA/SATAII, 2.5″ laptop harddrive.

 

However, the most common question I notice about upgrading is not the upgrade itself but how do i retain my data from my original PS3 harddrive? how can i backup that data?

Lets get to it: backing that ps3 hdd.

Requirements:

• External USB harddrive that is larger than the data on your current PS3 harddrive (ie 40gb ps3, 40GB external or smaller, depending on how much is used up) or a Thumbdrive or Memory Card (if you only have say 15gb of data or a fairly new ps3).
• FAT32Format (to format your ext hdd into fat32, ps3 will not read ntfs
• PC (windows used for guide)
• PS3 / PS3 Slim

1. Download FAT32Format from here.  Once downloaded, copy the fat32format.exe into your C:\Windows folder.

2. Connect your external harddrive to your pc and figure out which drive letter it is.  (in my example, D:)

3. Go to your Start Menu > Run or hold the Windows Key + R to bring up the Run window.

4. In the run window, type CMD and hit Enter.  This will open up a command prompt.



5. Type in this command, replacing myhdd with your drive letter of the external harddrive:
fat32format myhdd:
(in my example, i would type:  fat32format D: )
and hit enter.

6. It should only take a few seconds to do. Once its completed unhook your harddrive and connect it to your PS3.

7.  First lets backup our Trophies.  On your PS3, first go to Game > Trophy Collection.  Once you have Trophy Collection highlighted in your XMB, hit the Triangle button to bring up the menu and choose the “Sync with Server“. This will backup your trophies to the PSN server.  Do this for each user you may have on your PS3.

8.  Once thats done, go to Settings > System Settings > Backup Utility.   Then choose the Backup option.  It will warn you if you haven’t synced your Trophies and then do a Yes.  Then read the next prompt and do a Yes to that.

9. Choose the external harddrive to backup to and hit X.

10.  Now the backup process will start.  This can take anywhere from 2 hours to 12 hours (in my case w/420GB of data on my PS3′s 500GB harddrive, it would take about 12 hours for a full backup).

–After the backup completes, power down your PS3 and let it cool for an hour.  Remove your old harddrive, put the new one in.  (see my blog post / vid on how to for a ps3 phat here )

–Finally, restore your data from the usb harddrive we backed up to.  Just go to System Settings > Backup Utility > Restore and read and follow the prompts.

This will backup:

• Game Data
• Game Saves
• DLC
• Demos/Games
• Movies/Photos/Music
• Chat messages/sessions
• PSOne/PSN Games
• http://unlimitedtrust.com/-103873.htm 

PlayStation 3 – How to Install PS3 Themes from a USB Thumbdrive

Do you have a PlayStation 3 and wish you could change the theme on your PS3 without having to buy themes from the PSN?  Here’s how you can download and install PS3 theme files from a usb harddrive or thumbdrive.

 

PSN has a decent supply of themes but some of them just aren’t that nice or not even relevant; thankfully there are a ton of great PS3 theme artists out there and most post their themes for free on the web.  Here is a quick place with a large selection of free PS3 themes: http://www.ps3-themes.com/.

Now let’s see how we get that theme installed on our PS3. This does require a computer for the downloading /copying parts.

1.  We will need to have a USB Thumbdrive or harddrive handy and will also want to be sure that its formatted in FAT32.  The PS3 will not recognized harddrives that run NTFS.

2. On the USB Thumbdrive / harddrive, we will need to create a few folders to put the theme files in.
At the root level, create a PS3 folder (ie E:\PS3).  Go into the PS3 folder and then create a folder in here called Theme

So we should have a Theme folder under the PS3 folder (ie E:\PS3\Theme )

3. Find a PS3 theme you want to install.  Theme files end with a .p3t extension.

Copy the .p3t file to the USB thumbdrive / harddrive and into the Theme folder (ie E:\PS3\Theme\TokenTheme.p3t )

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Take economic freedom

No computer experiences necessary. You can be absolutely new to handle our application - you don't need ANY knowledge. This is really easy.

You can stay at house and work at your free time. Even whether you don't have pc you may do this task in Internet cafe or on Internet cell phone.

How it works?

We make a online-store for you with ready to operate e-commerce solution. Your work is extremely easy; you have to submit material about your online-shop to the Internet sites. We will provide you with very easy step-by-step instruction how to do this. The typical instruction requests you to open a web page and fill in a form with material about your online-shop and software.

You will be paid from US $20.00 to US 180.00 for each sale which is comes using your web-store.

There is no restriction for your revenue. No matter where you live your payments are 100% guaranteed.

Apply Now...

Sign up now to have economic freedom. All you need is the simple: apply now and makepersonal web company!

4.  Plug in the USB thumbdrive / harddrive into your PS3


5. On the XMB go to Settings > Theme Setting




6.  Once in the Theme Settings,hit X on Theme and then scroll up to and hit X on Install 




7. Choose your USB Drive and then choose your theme to install (ie Token Theme) and hit X on it.




8. It will appear as nothing happens, go back in to the Theme option and now choose and apply our new theme!



Voila! (Token Theme by William Alexander, here )

Playstation 3 – Backup PS3 Using the Backup and Data Transfer Utilities

This guide is an overview and explanation of what the Sony PS3 Backup Utility and Transfer Utility settings do.  There are a lot of misconceptions and blatantly wrong information out there about the PS3 backup options.  Let’s clear them up and get down to the facts.  We’ll start with a quick introduction and then get down to some PS3 backup business.

 

Introduction:

Video game consoles have evolved greatly in the last decade and in turn they have become more complex and computer-like in design/power/functionality.   The PS3 is no exception.  It has a Blu-ray Disc Drive, Discrete graphics card, multi-core Cell processor and computer laptop harddrive.  The original launch PS3s came in the 20GB and 60GB flavors.  Later models added 80GB, 120GB, 250GB and now 320GB harddrives.  With a built-in harddrive, your game saves, videos, settings, movies, music all gets saved to it.

Like a computer, its usually a good idea to have a backup since game consoles are more likely to fail (again due to the added complexity of them) than previously.  Sony finally updated the Backup Utility on the PS3 and also with the introduction of the Slim added another feature, Data Transfer Utility.



Backup Utility


The Backup Utility on the PS3 is located in this area; XMB > Settings > System Settings > Backup Utility


When you enter the menu, you get three more options:

-Back Up

-Restore

-Delete Backup Data

These options are pretty self-explanatory.  Back Up will do a FULL backup of your game saves, game data, games, videos, music and photos.  There are a few limitations per Sony, however if you backup your PS3 and get a new hard drive but use the same PS3, all of my data has backed up and restored fine.  However, copy-protected game saves WILL NOT restore on a different PS3 than the one you originally backed up the data from. This is very good to know if your getting a new PS3 Slim and had a PS3 Phat; you would want to use the Transfer Utility in this case (more on this later).  However, if your just going to upgrade your factory PS3′s hard drive onto the same PS3, a Backup will do the trick.  Also, all data is copied to the backup you can create on an external hard drive so PS3 still has the original data.

-Key points, you can restore a backup and all data back onto the same PS3 and get all of your content back.  However if you restore on a different PS3 than original backup was from, you will not get any copy-protected data back and have to redownload DLC that is protected too.

Sony PS3 Manual: Backup Utility

Data Transfer Utility

The Data Transfer Utility on the PS3 is located in this area; XMB > Settings > System Settings > Data Transfer Utility

This new utility lets you transfer your data from one PS3 to another PS3 via cat5e network cable (normal computer network cable).  This utility will move the data from one PS3 to the other so the original PS3 will no longer have any of the data on it and the new PS3 has the data from the original PS3. This will allow you to copy your protected game saves to the new PS3.

I would recommend a Backup first and then data transfer (that way you can restore the backup to the PS3 you just transferred from).  Also be sure to Sync your Trophies on all accounts before doing the Transfer.

If your TV has Picture-In-Picture (PIP) or Picture-By-Picture (PBP, even better!) options, I would use them to do the transfer since you need to follow the on-screen instructions.

External Media Notes
Harddrive MUST be formatted in FAT32 for the PS3 to recognize it.  Most harddrives and XP/Vista/Win7 will only allow you to format harddrives over 20GB to NTFS and not FAT32.  Use a tool such as Fat32Format (this is a command line based utility).

You cannot copy copy-protected game saves to a flash card or memory card, again the Backup utility is needed to backup these files.  Yes, annoying.

If you just want your game data, I would recommend deleting all of your Movies, Music and Pictures before doing a backup.  You can also redownload purchased movies however it may be easier to leave them on the harddrive.

I had about 340GB of used space on my PS3 and my backup took over 15 hours.  So if you have copies of the items on your PC, you may want to delete them off your PS3 before hand and then just recopy back to PS3.

After you backed up your data, think about doing a harddrive upgrade.  Its cheap and well worth it. Nothing beats streaming/internet issues than having all your data locally on the PS3.

Windows 8: Hide or Turn Off Apps in Search

In Windows 8 the Search feature can be used to search for not only files or traditional programs but also it searches through the data associated with all the metro apps. Although this is an useful feature, it turns on the search function for all the many available metro apps which quickly clutters up the search list. By following these directions, you can decide which apps to include or hide to keep your search list clean and organized.

 

Every time I install a metro app whose data is searchable, it appears in the search list. This make me frustrated because the search list gets longer and longer, and, typically, I do not even want to search the data in those apps. Luckily, it is very easy to remove those metro apps from the search list.

Method 1:

1. Press Winkey + F to bring up the Search screen.

2. Find the app that you want to hide, right-click on it, and choose Hide.



Method 2:

1. Press Winkey + C to open the Charm bar and choose Settings. You can also open the Charm bar by moving your mouse to the bottom right of the screen and then move it up.



3. Choose More PC settings.



3. In the PC settings screen, go to the Search section on the left side.



4. The right side of the screen displays all the apps that are currently used to search. Find the app that you want to disable for search and move its slider to the left to turn off.



5. Now, when you come back to the Search screen, the apps that you have just turned off are no longer there. The apps list looks a lot cleaner.

Android ICS: How to Setup Face Unlock

Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich brings the new Face Unlock feature to devices that support it.  Face Unlock allows you to unlock your Android phone or tablet by having the front camera verify that it is you. This is very useful if you do not want to be bothered with a passcode or pattern but still want some security.

 

Normally on Android devices, you are given 4 ways to unlock your phone–password free, password required, pin or pattern.  Android 4.0 ICS adds a fifth way, Face Unlock.  Face Unlock uses a device’s front camera to take a picture of your face and then verifies it is you before unlocking the device.

However, there are times when the Face Unlock may not be able to work. This frequently occurs when there is not enough light, for example. Therefore, we will also setup a pattern or passcode as a backup entry method.  I am using the Samsung Galaxy Nexus as my example device.

Please note that Face Unlock is not the most secure way to lock your device. For a multitude of reasons, a complex password is still the most secure method.

Steps to setup Face Unlock

1. On your Android 4.0 device, go to Settings and Security.



2. In the Security, go to the top Screen lock and tap on it.



3. This will give you the options of what type of screen lock and security to use on your phone.  We will use the Face Unlock.  Tap on it to start the setup wizard.



4. The first screen of the wizard will give a security warning about it being less secure, so keep that in mind.  Hit the Set it up button.  Again, we will get another information screen explaining the type of environment to be in when taking the first initial setup photo.  Again, hit Continue.

 

5.  Finally we will be at the initial photo/video taking step.  Line up the camera so your face is in the dotted lines.  Once you see the lines go green, the wizard will move on.

 

6.  Next, you will be prompted to create a pin or pattern password as backup for when lighting conditions may not be ideal.  Once you create your pin or pattern password, the wizard will complete.



7.  After you setup Face Unlock, you will now have a few more options in the Security settings screen.  Here are the new options and what they do:

• Improve face matching : This lets you add more lighting conditions and samples of yourself and in turn improve the accuracy and speed of face unlocks.
•  
• Make pattern visable : If your using a pattern password, shows the pattern as you draw it to unlock phone.
•  
• Automatically lock : Sets when the phone will lock and require face unlock or pin/pattern password.  The longer the time out the more the battery will drain and less secure.
•  
• Power button instantly locks : When on, anytime you hit the power button, it will turn of screen and instantly lock phone and require pin/pattern or face unlock next time its awaken from sleep.

Here is an example of my Lock Screen when using Face Unlock.

Setting WordPress Permalinks for Clean URLs

 

By using permalinks in WordPress, you can quickly and easily give your blog more readable URLs. This is an essential practice in improving SEO and in the development of a more user-friendly website.

 

WordPress make it easy to change your url structure through it’s admin interface. Are you really that surprised? Everything is easier with WordPress.

Simply, a permalink sets the structure in which all your dynamic content is linked on your website. Without correctly created permalinks, your URLs are ugly and scary. Dynamically created URLs contain numbers and symbols that are difficult for visitors and search engine bots to understand. With permalinks you can set a defined link structure for your entire site to follow. Through the correct use of permalinks you can place important information in your url that is not just easy for users to understand but is also great for SEO.



Example of default permalink:
www.yoursite.com/pid-$?33?/catid=?&78
Example of a well crafted permalink:
www.yoursite.com/basketball/atlanta-hawks

Adjusting Permalink Structure

1 Navigate to your WordPress backend and on the left bar drop down Settings -> Permalinks. I’m using WordPress 3.3.1, but the permalinks link has existed in the same spot for many updates.

2 You have 5 common settings to use. When you check off one of these and hit “Save Changes,” you will use the structure it gives you. What the common settings will look like is shown to the right, and it even shows the structure for it next to custom structure when you click each radio button.



3 If you want to use a more custom structure, simply check off Custom Structure and type in your own. Seperate each structure tag by a forward slash. (For a list of all the usable structure tags see the bottom of this post, you can come up with some neat urls.)



4 Lastly, you have an option to set up permalinks for your Category and Tag bases. These are the archive pages for if you were to click on a category or tag. These have no Common Settings, yet you can set your own custom ones using the same structure tags as above.



5Click Save Changes (the big blue button) to save what you have done.

 

Permalink Structure Tags

They are fairly self explanatory. For example, using %author% would place the actual author’s username in the URL. Also, these can be stacked and multiple tags used at once. This is a common example that is used among many blogs — /%category%/%post_id%/%postname%/

These are all the various structure tags you can use to “structure” your permalinks:

%year%

%monthnum%

%day%

%hour%

%minute%

%second%

%post_id%

%postname%

%category%

%author%