How To Make a Youtube Video Into an Animated GIF..???

You’ve likely seen webpages and picdumps everywhere, with goofy, ridiculous, and funny animated GIFs. Here’s how you can have some fun by making your own in a matter of minutes, using your favorite Youtube videos and Photoshop.
While animated GIFs may be pretty useless, they can be funny and fun to make. See what you can do with your favorite Youtube videos and Photoshop, and a surprisingly little time.

How to Create Progress Bars in Excel With Conditional Formatting

Progress bars are pretty much ubiquitous these days; we’ve even seen them on some water coolers. A progress bar provides instant feedback on a given process, so why not bring some of that graphical pizzazz into your spreadsheet, using Excel’s Conditional Formatting feature?

Progress Bars in Excel 2010

“Bar-type” conditional formatting has been around since Excel 2007. But Excel 2007 would only make bars with a gradient – the bar would get paler and paler towards the end, so even at 100% it wouldn’t really look like 100%. Excel 2010 addresses this by adding Solid Fill bars that maintain one color all throughout. These are ideal for creating progress bars.

So Why Do Artists Really Love Apple? Macs Don’t Make You Creative!

Chances are you have at least one “creative” friend who’s a Mac advocate. Ever wondered how Apple got a reputation as the “creative company,” or why artists are so drawn to them? Surely, computers can’t make you creative, can they?
Maybe you’re an avid Mac Hater, or maybe you’re an Apple advocate—chances are you’ve heard of this myth and wonder why people all seem to think this way. Take a look through the history of Apple, and see why Macintosh has become so synonymous with desktop publishing, photography, creativity, and design industries.

What You Said: Malware Fighting Tips and Tricks

Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite malware fighting tricks. Now we’re back to highlight some of the tips and tricks you shared.
Our Ask the Readers series gives our awesome and technologically literate readers a chance to show off their know-how. Today we’re rounding up some of the tips and tricks from Wednesday’s Ask the Reader post What Are Your Best Malware Fighting Tricks and highlighting them here.

Sandbox Your Browsing and File Sharing Activity

Multiple readers used software sandboxing as a tool for isolating harmful malware. Most used free Windows application Sandboxie and some used virtual machine applications like VMware and VirtualBox. Sandboxing your internet connected applications, especially web browsers and file sharing applications, create an extra layer between your operating system and malicious code.

Avoid Browsing as a Root User

While this tip applies across operating systems it’s most critical for Windows users. Most people (if not 99% of them) use Windows every day as an Administrator/root user. If malware finds its way onto the machine it’s simple for it to take over since the account it’s active on has full access to the machine. Second only to sandboxing your applications in popularity was restricting the user account and browsing only on limited access accounts instead of as an administrator.

Windows 7 Service Pack 1 is Released: But Should You Install It?

Microsoft has just released the final version of Service Pack 1 for Windows 7, but should you drop everything and go through the process of installing it? Where can you get it? We’ve got the answers for you.
If you’ve never installed a service pack before, it’s just a big collection of fixes and changes for your operating system, bundled into a big fat download to make it more convenient if you reinstall—if you’ve kept Windows updated, it should have most of the fixes already installed through Windows Update.

How Do Noise Reducing Headphones Work?

Passive noise reduction, active noise cancellation, sound isolation… The world of headphones has become quite advanced in giving you your own private sound bubble. Here’s how these different technologies work.

What Are Computer Algorithms and How Do They Work?

Unless you’re into math or programming, the word “algorithm” might be Greek to you, but it’s one of the building blocks of everything you’re using to read this article. Here’s a quick explanation of what they are, and how they work.
Disclaimer: I’m not a math or computer science teacher, so not all of the terms I use are technical. That’s because I’m trying to explain everything in plain English for people aren’t quite comfortable with math. That being said, there is some math involved, and that’s unavoidable. Math geeks, feel free to correct or better explain in the comments, but please, keep it simple for the mathematically disinclined among us.
Image by Ian Ruotsala

How To Make Hundreds of Complex Photo Edits in Seconds With Photoshop Actions

Have a huge folder of images needing tweaks? A few hundred adjustments may seem like a big, time consuming job—but read one to see how Photoshop can do repetitive tasks automatically, even if you don’t know how to program!
Photoshop Actions are a simple way to program simple routines in Photoshop, and are a great time saver, allowing you to re-perform tasks over and over, saving you minutes or hours, depending on the job you have to work on. See how any bunch of images and even some fairly complicated photo tweaking can be done automatically to even hundreds of images at once.

How to Get AirVideo Features in Android for Free

AirVideo makes it possible for iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch users to stream any video format on their devices. If you’re an Android user, then you are in luck, because you can get AirVideo’s features for free with VLC-Share.
In today’s tutorial, we will start off by giving you an instruction on how to install VLC-Share, followed by configuring firewall and port forwarding, and we complete the tutorial with a walk through of VLC-Share features.
Wallpaper available from our Naruto Customization set.

Maus Trap

In Maus Trap your objective is to help poor Peanut escape from the lab she is trapped in. It will be a journey fraught with danger and terror for our little mouse.

The rules for playing are simple and straightforward…move as quickly as you can without touching the walls or machinery that are set up as traps. Either of these can quickly injure or kill Peanut.

How to Enable User-Specific Wireless Networks in Windows 7

Wireless network settings in Windows 7 are global across all users, but there’s a little-known option that lets you switch them to per-user, so each user has access to only the networks they are allowed to connect to. Here’s how it all works.
How is this useful? Maybe you want to prevent a particular user from accessing the internet—if you don’t give them the wireless password, they won’t be able to get online. This could be very useful if you’ve got mini-people playing games on the family PC, but you don’t want them getting online.

How To Remove People and Objects From Photographs In Photoshop

You might think that it’s a complicated process to remove objects from photographs. But really Photoshop makes it quite simple, even when removing all traces of a person from digital photographs. Read on to see just how easy it is.
Photoshop was originally created to be an image editing program, and it excels at it. With hardly any Photoshop experience, any beginner can begin removing objects or people from their photos. Have some friends that photobombed an otherwise great pic? Tell them to say their farewells, because here’s how to get rid of them with Photoshop!

How to Monitor the Bandwidth Consumption of Individual Applications

Yesterday we showed you how to monitor and track your total bandwidth usage, today we’re back to show you how to keep tabs on individual applications and how much bandwidth they’re gobbling up.
We’ve received several reader requests, both by email and in the aforementioned post about bandwidth tracking, for a good way to track the data consumption of individual applications. How-To Geek reader Oaken noted that he used NetWorx to track his total bandwidth usage but another application, NetBalancer, to keep tabs on individual applications. We took NetBalancer for a spin and it’s a great solution for monitoring bandwidth at the application level. Let’s take it for a spin and start monitoring our applications.

How to Use Google Chrome as Your Default PDF Reader (the Easy Way)

If you’re anything like 99% of everybody, you have some sort of PDF viewing software installed on your PC—but did you realize that you can use Google Chrome to view PDFs from your PC? It’s easy!
We’re showing off how to do this in Windows, but theoretically it would work for OS X or Linux as well. If you’ve tried it, let us know in the comments.

How to Stream Media Files From any PC to Your PlayStation 3

Have you ever wished that you could stream video files from your computer over to your TV without actually hooking the two directly together? If you’ve got a PlayStation 3, you’re in luck, because that’s today’s geek lesson.

If you’re wondering how to rip dvds to your PC, we’ve got you covered with an article on the subject, but you can stream video files that you’ve recorded yourself, or downloaded from somewhere.
Image by playstation-themes

HTG Explains: The Best and Worst Ways to Send a Resume

With so many people looking for jobs, the slightest edge in your resume presentation has potential to make or break your chances. But not all filetypes or methods are created equal—read on to see the potential pitfalls your resume faces.
In this article, we’ll explore what can go wrong in a resume submission, what can be done to counteract it, and also go into why a prospective employer might ignore your resume based on your method of sending a resume. Finally, we’ll cover the best filetypes and methods that can help get you that new job you’ve been looking for.

Ask How-To Geek: Dropbox in the Start Menu, Understanding Symlinks, and Ripping TV Series DVDs

This week we take a look at how to incorporate Dropbox into your Windows Start Menu, understanding and using symbolic links, and how to rip your TV series DVDs right to unique and high-quality episode files.
Once a week we dip into our reader mailbag and help readers solve their problems, sharing the useful solutions with you in the process. Read on to see our fixes for this week’s reader dilemmas.

How to Get MacBook-Style Finger Gestures on Ubuntu Linux

Apple users have been swiping, pinching, and rotating Mac’s user interfaces to their fingers’ content. In today’s article, we’ll show you how to do groovy things like expanding and reducing windows, and changing desktops using finger gestures.
To accomplish this, we’ll use a piece of software called TouchEgg, which enhances Ubuntu’s multi touch capability by allowing us to configure actions to the finger gestures that TouchEgg supports.
If you’re a Windows user and like the idea of finger-gestures, we also wrote a tutorial on how to enable MacBook-Style finger gestures on Windows.

Gmail Goes Public, Deep Blue Wins at Chess, and the Birth of Thomas Edison

Every week we bring you a snapshot of the week in Geek History. This week we’re taking a peek at the public release of Gmail, the first time a computer won against a chess champion, and the birth of prolific inventor Thomas Edison.

Gmail Goes Public

It’s hard to believe that Gmail has only been around for seven years and that for the first three years of its life it was invite only. In 2007 Gmail dropped the invite only requirement (although they would hold onto the “beta” tag for another two years) and opened its doors for anyone to grab a username @gmail. For what seemed like an entire epoch in internet history Gmail had the slickest web-based email around with constant innovations and features rolling out from Gmail Labs. Only in the last year or so have major overhauls at competitors like Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail brought other services up to speed. Can’t stand reading a Week in Geek History entry without a random fact? Here you go: gmail.com was originally owned by the Garfield franchise and ran a service that delivered Garfield comics to your email inbox. No, we’re not kidding.

Internet Explorer 9 RC Now Available: Here’s the Most Interesting New Stuff

Yesterday Microsoft announced the release candidate of Internet Explorer 9, which is very close to the final product. Here’s a screenshot tour of the most interesting new stuff, as well as answers to your questions.
The most important question is should you install this version? And the answer is absolutely yes. Even if you don’t use IE, it’s better to have a newer, more secure version on your PC.