How to dim the light on your PS4 Controller when connected to Steam
The PS4 light at the front is a nice gimmick, but it drains the battery and when set too bright really annoys me when I play at night. It’s not an issue when I connect the controller via DS4 Windows, but many games on Steam (and increasable EPIC) support the PS4 controller natively. This means even if I’d be able to dim it with DS4 Windows, the native PS4 controller is as bright as daylight – at least by default. Thankfully we can change this in the Steam Settings, and we don’t even need to change into Big Picture mode...
read moreDiscord Announcement Channels and how to make them work
A bunch of us wanted to make these fabled Discord Announcement channels work. It’s a feature available on Community Servers that lets you follow a channel from another server, so that that server’s announcements appear in your own server (and vice versa). In essence a way of subscribing to another server’s notifications. You may have seen the “Follow Button” in some servers, letting you follow a channel. It’s this intimidating feature I’m going to explain in this article. By the end of it we’ll...
read moreRemoving an EFI Partition on an external drive in Windows 10
I often format drives with operating systems other than Windows. When I want to re-use those drives for something Windows related, I have trouble formatting them because there’s a protected EFI Partition that Disk Management can’t get get rid of. Here’s such an example: all options are greyed out, and I’m left with a 200MB partition. The question is: how can we get rid of it without having to transfer the drive to another operating system? The answer is diskpart. It’s a command line utility in Windows...
read moreFixed: I’ve accidentally moved my Windows Videos Library to the root C drive – and now it’s stuck
In moving around some video footage, I had accidentally moved my Videos Library to the root C drive, then moved existing content over. I had foolishly assumed that it would create a folder, but alas it just dumped all existing folders and videos into the root directory of my system drive. That’s not what I wanted! When it was time to put it back, it turned out that Windows now assumed the whole contents of the C drive was part of the Videos library, and trying to move existing content to a new location didn’t work due to file...
read moreSamsung NVMe M.2 Drive too slow? Check your PCIe slot
I have two of these wonderful Samsung EVO 970 Plus drives. I bought one for video editing and couldn’t believe just how much of a game changer it was. Read and write speed was staggering compared to the other EVO 860 and 870 SSDs I had been using for years. Premiere is flying at multiple playback speeds in full HD without proxies – it’s a serious pleasure to use these NVMe M.2 drives compared to regular SSDs. The Problem I’ve recently switched computers and slotted my M.2 drives into whatever was free on the new...
read moreHow to place an existing folder under Version Control in Github for Desktop
I love version control, and I really like Github for Desktop. One thing I wish it had was the ability to place an existing folder under version control, but alas it’s not to be. We can create new repositories in empty folders, we can check out projects that are stored elsewhere, but GitHub for Desktop refuses to create repositories in folders that already have data in them. Granted, there are messy workarounds: you could simply create a new empty folder with version control, then paste all your existing data into it. That might upset...
read moreHow to create a Scheduled Task from the Command Line in Fedora
I don’t do this every day, especially not on Fedora, so here’s a quick refresher on how to setup a Cron Job or Scheduled Task from the command line. While other tools will work (like anacron), crontab is going to do a fine job for something you want to execute repeatedly. In my case a daily backup script. To invoke, we can type crontab -e and a Nano window will open by default. That’s the other reason why I’m taking this note: I usually don’t use nano (I’m a vi guy). The window may display existing cron...
read moreHow to download older versions of iMovie (or any Mac AppStore app)
Apple seriously dislike it when we use hardware that hasn’t been purchased in the last 5 minutes. Ideally we’d get a new iPhone every week and throw away our Macs every 12 months. That’s the least we can do for them, and the environment. Apple remind us of this when we try to install an app that demands the very latest operating system, which of course doesn’t run on older hardware. On iOS it’s very refreshing to see a dialogue that says “you can download the latest compatibel version of this app”,...
read moreHow to access your Mac files from Windows
I have a Mac and a PC on my internal network. Frequently I need to access files from either machine, depending which machines I’m working on. I have previously explained how to access Windows files from a Mac, so this article describes the other way round: how to access your Mac files while you’re working in Windows. On the Mac We need to enable File Sharing on the Mac so that paths can be shared. It’s disabled by default for security purposes. Head over to System Preferences and search for File Sharing and you’ll get...
read moreHow to setup a Facebook Live Event in advance
Facebook have one of the worst UIs ever. The interface changes every week, and I can never remember how to setup a live event there because it’s to unintuitive. Here’s how a quick step-by-step process to make my life: head over to https://facebook.com/creatorstudioclick Go Live at the top (next to the search bar)pick the page in question on the rightselect Schedule Live Event fill out the details and create the event Next time you stream, it’ll automatically go to that event.
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