Title | IT newspaper

Why you can’t find your product key after upgrading to Windows 10

August 22nd, 2015 | Edited by Zoran Stosic | software

Aug
22

With Windows 10, Microsoft is doing away with the conventional product key for digital installs. You may never have to manage product keys again.
A funny thing happens when you look for a product key in Windows 10 after doing the free upgrade: You won’t find them.
In Windows 10, utilities like Magical Jelly Bean KeyFinder or Belarc Advisor return generic product keys instead of authentic ones. Don’t believe me? This is the key Windows 10 Pro users will see in KeyFinder or Belarc Advisor: VK7JG-NPHTM-C97JM-9MPGT-3V66T.
Let’s try this PowerShell script from the Hexus forums on Windows 10 Pro. You should get this: T44CG-JDJH7-VJ2WF-DY4X9-HCFC6. That’s the generic key for build 10240.
Not a real product key to be seen anywhere.
The reason for this is that Windows 10 changes Microsoft’s traditional product key model, and if you ask me it’s for the better.

Entitlements, not product keys

When you use the free upgrade to Windows 10 or pay for a digital retail version, you don’t get a product key. Instead, your computer uses what Microsoft calls a digital entitlement.
“Upon upgrading to Windows 10, the activation state from a prior version of Windows (be it Windows 7, Windows 8 or a prior build of Windows 10) is seamlessly carried over,” a Microsoft spokesperson told PCWorld. “Once activated, a digital entitlement for your PC’s hardware is created in the Windows 10 activation service.This entitlement can be used by the same PC again for re-activation of the same Edition of Windows 10 in the future.”
It looks like the product key is on its way out, at least as far as users are concerned. After installation, your version of Windows 10 should just activate in the background in a few moments or a few days at the most. You can check your activation status by going toSettings > Update & Security > Activation.

Clean installs all the way down

Once your Windows 10 upgrade activates, you can grab a Windows 10 install image, do a clean install, skip the screen asking for product keys, and you should just re-activate again after the install is complete. I say should, because even in this brave new world without product keys I find it hard to believe there won’t be a few installation horror stories involving product activation.
That said, I can vouch from personal experience that a post-upgrade clean install of Windows 10 just works. Shortly after I installed Windows 10 on my laptop, I swapped out my old spinning hard drive for an SSD. When I was done with the installation Windows activated right away.
For longtime Windows users the absence of product keys in Windows 10 digital installs is a relief and at the same time a little worrying. Based on the long history of activation horror stories, some of you out there may be a little suspicious of this new process. Although the notion of never having to use a product key ever again sounds great.

Well, almost…

There are still situations where you’ll run into product keys with Windows 10. If you buy a physical retail edition such as on a USB stick or DVD, you’ll still get a product key. Microsoft told us that “your activation product key stays with your PC.” We’re not clear if that means product keys work as digital entitlements, or whether you’ll be managing product keys the old fashioned way—by stashing that product key somewhere safe for later use. We’re double-checking this with Microsoft and will update this article should the company respond.
One sticking point with digital entitlements is that because it’s dependent on your hardware configuration, making a significant change can wipe out the entitlement. If you swap out your motherboard, for example, your digital entitlement will likely disappear and Windows 10 won’t activate. If that happens, you’ll have to make a call to Microsoft’s customer support line to re-activate your copy of Windows.
Keep in mind we’re talking significant hardware changes here. If you swap out your hard drive for an SSD or add more RAM, you shouldn’t see any problems.
I don’t know about you, but if I ever have to look at a product key again it’ll be too soon.

Source: www.pcworld.com

15 new iOS 9 features that are rocking our world

July 28th, 2015 | Edited by Zoran Stosic | software

Jul
28

Get excited about the little things

Apple’s newest iOS is far from a drastic overhaul, and that’s OK. Sometimes it’s the most subtle tweaks that have the biggest impact. And iOS 9 proves that. Now that we’ve had the chance to play with the iOS 9 public beta, here are some of our favorite features—both big and small—that have changed our lives for the better. What iOS 9 features are you most excited about?

Low Power Mode to squeeze extra battery life

I can’t say enough good things about Low Power mode. I love that it asks at 20 percent and again at 10, and then turns itself back off automatically once you’re charged up to 80 percent. And you can still use almost all the functions of your phone: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Location Services, GPS, everything. The screen goes to sleep a little quicker than before (which means I have to keep tapping idly in Alphabears while I’m staring at the screen contemplating my next move), and you can’t use AirDrop or Continuity… but who cares when it means my phone no longer needs a mandatory topping-off every day at around 7 p.m.

Automatically organize your selfies in Photos

A new small tweak to the Photos app in iOS 9 has made it easier to keep all your pics organized, especially if you’re a selfie enthusiast. Photos taken with the front-facing camera get automatically placed ins a “Selfies” folder, while screenshots taken by pressing the Home button and the power button get their own dedicated folder as well.

The sophisticated new San Francisco font

The custom Apple-designed font that was first used on the Apple Watch interface comes to iOS 9. This new San Francisco font is used in Settings, Spotlight search, and in the native apps. You can even choose it as the default font for your iBooks collection. The sophisticated yet easy-to-read font may be subtle, but I sure did notice it from the first time I swiped open the lock screen.

Finally, an intuitive Shift key

I’m really loving the subtitle tweaks made to the standard iOS keyboard—especially the new Shift key. I know, this is far from revolutionary, but it makes it much easier to tell if the caps is turned off or on when your entire keyboard displays the letters in uppercase or lowercase letters.

Go back to previous apps with tiny, new Back button

The Back button rocks my world. If I am in, say, Twitter, and I get a notification from Instagram, I can tap that notification, switch to Instagram, tap all around inside Instagram, and still get back to Twitter with one tap. Sure, I could do that before with the application switcher, but the back button is a lot more obvious.

Sharing content into Notes is a game-changer

The Notes share sheet is a game-changer, letting you embed websites, maps, and photos in a to-do list. Once third-party apps support the share sheet, your notes will become richer and more useful than ever before.

Siri is now your new personal DJ

In iOS 9, Siri’s gotten a lot smarter. Not only does Siri serve up information about the weather or different directions, but she can answer complex queries now like, “Show me photos from last summer.” The most exciting part, however, is how well she knows my Apple Music collection. You can ask Siri to play a specific artist, playlist, or “the hottest songs from 1986.”

Want to change your Settings? Just search!

A searchable Settings app is another new feature that’s so small, yet so incredibly helpful that I don’t know why Apple hadn’t included it before! Instead of pouring through each individual setting to find what I want to adjust, I can now just do a quick Spotlight-esque search to find what i need.

Drive, walk or take public transportation

For years, Maps users had to rely on third-party apps to get reliable public transportation directions. Now anymore. Finally iOS 9 includes Transit view which incorporates subway and bus schedules/routes. Transit, however, is only available in select cities: Baltimore, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Mexico City, London, Berlin, Toronto and 300 cities in China.

Spotlight is better (but beta)

I’m feeling the new Spotlight screen, but it needs to get a little more reliable. I use search to launch apps quite frequently, so I love that the screen is starting to guess which app I might be about to search for—and it does seem to give me different apps for different places and times. (Twitter, HipChat, Pocket Casts, and transit apps during the day. Instagram, Kindle, Two Dots, and Music in the evenings.) It doesn’t always surface the thing I’m looking for on the first try: I searched for Apple to find the Apple Store app, and it wasn’t in the results at all—no Apple apps were. But then I did the search again, and Apple Store was the first result. That’s livin’ la vida beta for you, but I’m optimistic that it’ll keep improving over time and with more use.

iPad only: Easy editing of long chunks of text

With iOS 9, you can place two fingers down on the keyboard and it instantly becomes a trackpad, letting you select large chunks of text with one swipe. The new tools on the QuickType bar help you format the text or cut/copy/paste it with one tap. I’ve never thought of the iPad as a viable replacement to my MacBook—until now.

Integration with Apple Watch Activity achievements

For Apple Watch wearers only: It’s pretty neat how the achievement medals in the Activity app are engraved with the date you earned them. Just swipe one with your finger to flip it over! It’s a tiny change, but I got a kick out of it.

Cool-looking articles are easy to find in News

A few publishers are adopting Apple News Format to create really cool articles in the News app with big images, animations, and videos. Luckily, it’s easy to find all these articles by subscribing to the Apple News Selections channel. So far in public beta, there are only a handful of articles in this format, but I’m expecting this section to blow up come the official release of iOS 9 in the fall.

iPad only: Picture-in-picture offers much-needed distractions

Back in school did you ever hide a comic book inside a textbook to give the impression you were studying? iOS 9 gives the iPad a similar function withpicture-in-picture. Now you can research a work project while watching Cartoon Network at the same time.

Feedback app makes it easy to report beta bugs

Beta users automatically get a Feedback app for submitting bug reports to Apple. That’s awesome, but can it please stick around when the beta is over? It’s easy to use, and since the reports are sent with crash logs and other device-specific info, they’re probably more useful to Apple than whatever we could submit through thebugreport.apple.com site.

Source: www.apple.com

How to download audio from any streaming video

December 13th, 2014 | Edited by Zoran Stosic | software

Dec
13

Streaming video is great, but sometimes it’s more than you need—or more than you canrun, if you’re away from an Internet connection. If you like to listen to podcasts, lectures, or other audio while you drive, work, or exercise, you should be able to take advantage of the huge amount of content published online every day.
In this article, we’ll show you how easy it is to download just the audio file from any streaming video and save it to your hard drive for offline listening.

Option One: Audio from YouTube videos

If the stream you want to capture is on YouTube (and let’s be honest: most of the time it will be), you can save time and use a tool designed specifically for that platform. There are a number of apps that will do what you want, but a great, free choice is Peggo.co, a web app that makes it easy to capture audio from a YouTube video.

The interface at Peggo.co is about as simple as you could hope for—there’s nothing but a big address bar, where you can copy the URL of the YouTube Video you want to capture and hit enter. You’ll now see an embedded view of the video, along with a few simple controls:

From and To: Drag the sliders if you don’t want to record the entire video.
Title and Artist: Use these two input boxes to choose a filename for your download, as well as to set the artist metadata—very useful for any software that organized media files.
Remove Silence: This option just clips any silence from the beginning or end of the video. A lot of YouTube videos have a splash screen at the beginning or end that won’t come across well in an audio-only file, so it’s worth leaving this checked.
Normalize: Keeps the volume of the video in a consistent range, so it won’t sound out of the place with other audio files.

And that’s about it—click on the Record MP3 button to save the audio stream to your disk. Incidentally, if you want to record a video, you can do that from the same Peggo.co interface. Just click on one of the video links directly below the video window.
Note: I was having difficulty getting Peggo.co to correctly download files in Chrome until I temporarily disabled my extensions. This fixed the problem, and I had no issues with either Internet Explorer or Firefox.

Option Two: Audio from anything else

If you want to grab audio from a source other than YouTube, your options are a little more limited. I haven’t found a good audio-only downloader for non-YouTube videos (if you have, please share in the comments), but there are several general-purpose FLV ripper extensions that install into your browser and easily save streaming video as a file on your disk. If you use Chrome, a good option is Video Downloader. And if you use Firefox, tryDownloadHelper.
Once you have the video file saved to your machine, you can use any number of programs to save out the audio track. For reference, here’s how you would do that with the popular VLC player:

Open VLC
Click Media -> Convert/Save
In the next menu, click on the Addbutton next to the File Selection box and browse to your downloaded FLV file. Click Ok.
Next, click Browse next to the Destination box, and choose a location and file name for your completed audio file.
Click on the dropdown box marked Profile and choose “Audio – MP3”
Click Start

VLC will open a new playback window, with the progress bar displaying how far along the transcode is. When it’s complete, you’ll find your finished MP3 on your hard drive wherever you told VLC to save it.

Source: www.pcworld.com

Apple mum as Mac owners tussle with Yosemite over Wi-Fi problems

November 15th, 2014 | Edited by Zoran Stosic | software

Nov
15

The cries for help from frazzled Mac owners whose Wi-Fi connections went haywire after upgrading to OS X Yosemite are being met by Apple with stone-faced silence.
Affected users have been filing a steady stream of complaints about the problem in discussion forums, blogs, and social media sites since Apple released the latest version of the operating system a week ago.
Attempts by users to isolate the cause of the issue have been fruitless so far. The problem affects a variety of Macs with dissimilar configurations and linked to many different routers. What’s clear is that the problem hit these users after installing Yosemite. In most cases, Wi-Fi becomes unstable, with connections dropping every few minutes, irritatingly slow or simply unusable.
The lucky few people who have managed to get their Wi-Fi working properly again have done so with one of at least 20 unique and unofficial “fixes” scattered among thousands of discussion forum postings. None of them seems to be a universal fix for the problem.
On Friday morning, a user identified as “Hevelius” in a Mac Rumors forum vented his frustration with the situation. “There must be about two dozen so-called fixes now on this forum. I’ve tried every single one of them and none of them work,” this person wrote, adding that until there is a fix that works for everyone, the best option is to revert to Mavericks, the previous version of the OS.

Some of the most active forum threads about this topic are in the official Apple Support site, including the ones titled “OSX Yosemite Wifi issues” with almost 400 comments and close to 34,000 views; “Yosemite (OS X 10.10) killed my WiFi :(“ with almost 150 comments and 18,000 views; and “wifi keeps dropping since Yosemite upgrade”, which is approaching 100 comments and 6,000 views.
Even technologists are among the affected, including Eugene Wei, Flipboard’s head of product, who tweeted on Friday: “After upgrade to Yosemite, my MBP [MacBook Pro] drops my wifi network at home seemingly every 20 seconds.”
Sophos’ security expert Paul Ducklin took to the company’s Naked Security blog on Wednesday to request help from its readers in troubleshooting the problem and figuring out workarounds.
In his post, which has generated 84 comments, Ducklin refrains from convicting Apple, saying that while the cause could be a Yosemite bug, it could also be due to latent flaws in third-party hardware and software exposed by the upgrade. However, he does acknowledge that, whatever the cause, the common trigger is a Yosemite installation.
“No one seems to know what’s wrong, and without a scientific explanation it’s hard to know where to lay the blame,” wrote Ducklin, whose Wi-Fi connection works fine for no longer than 10 minutes at a time, and then starts to melt down. He wrote a script that automates the manual process of turning his Wi-Fi off and then on after a connection disruption is detected.
Apple hasn’t responded to multiple requests for comment from the IDG News Service.

Source: www.macworld.com

Apple patents solar-powered MacBook

February 22nd, 2014 | Edited by Zoran Stosic | hardware

Feb
22

Apple was awarded a patent for a MacBook that would be powered with solar cells (photovoltaics), meaning your laptop could be powered or at least recharged through light.
The patent, titled “Electronic device display module” describes a two-sided display for the lid of a portable computer, such as Apple’s MacBook. The front of the lid facing the user would still sport the typical display screen but the rear would serve as more than just a cover.
The patent describes a rear plate made of “electrochromic glass” also known as “ smart glass” or “switchable glass.”
”Electrochromic glass, which is sometimes referred to as electrically switchable glass, may receive control signals (e.g., voltage control signals) from control circuitry,” the patent submission states. “The control signals can be used to place electrochromic glass in either a transparent (light-passing) state or a translucent (light-blocking) state.”

A sketch of the proposed laptop, which uses an electrochromic glass back panel that can be made opaque or translucent through a small electrical charge. The back panel would have solar cells embedded in it to collect power from light.
In the light-blocking state, the interior of the MacBook’s display would be hidden from the exterior view; the rear panel would appear opaque or translucent.
In the light-passing state, the rear panel would appear clear and allow images or other light output from status light-emitting diodes or other light sources, Apple stated.
The solar cells would be placed under the electrochromic glass layer on the rear plate.
”For example, photovoltaic cells may be interposed between a glass layer (rear plate) and liquid crystal display structures for display,” the patent states. Photo voltaic cells produce electricity when exposed to light.
When the laptop is near a light source, the light rays would pass through the electrochromic glass that forms the rear plate.
The solar cells would take in light as it passed through the glass, converting it into electrical power at a rate of 10 milliwatts or more.
Apple proposed that the solar cells would be capable of producing from 100 milliwatts to 1 watt “or even more” in order to charge the laptop’s battery or power the computer while it is in use.
The rear smart glass could also be used to display Apple’s logo by incorporating an additional light emitting diode layer as well as backlighting.
”To ensure that display is evenly illuminated, the back light unit that provides backlight for display… may be provided with light-emitting diodes that are arranged along more than one of the edges of the light guide layer in the back light unit,” Apple stated.

Source: www.pcworld.com

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