Ever wanted to shop on Amazon.com with bitcoin? Well, now you can. AMZ Bitcoin is a service that lets you buy Amazon.com gift cards in exchange for bitcoins – any value, any time.
Unlike some of the other bitcoin websites around, AMZ Bitcoin does not rely on arbitrage or a peer-to-peer purchasing system to facilitate purchases on Amazon with bitcoin. Instead, AMZ Bitcoin allows users to instantly purchase Amazon vouchers of any value, which can then be redeemed online at Amazon.com like cash.
With Windows 10 just around the corner, we’re mighty happy to report that our award-winning Easy Recovery Essentials for Windows is now currently available for absolutely free to all Windows 10 preview and RTM users.
Easy Recovery Essentials® for Windows, for those that haven’t tried it before, is a one-click disaster recovery CD for Windows that features 100% automated diagnostics and repair for Windows PCs. It’ll automatically go through an extensive battery of tests and diagnostics to solve all problems as it finds them (very quickly, too!) – all you have to do is boot from an EasyRE CD or USB stick, and select the OS you want to repair.
Have you ever wondered just what is it, exactly, that happens when you press that simple “power” button on your PC? How does your computer go from electricity reaching the power supply to the BIOS power-up sequence on your screen, how the computer checks attached disks and devices, and how it decides which to load from?
Or perhaps you’ve wondered what happens next, after your computer’s BIOS has chosen a drive and wants to pass control of your PC on to the target disk? What role does the MBR play in this process, and how does the core bootloader – a simple, single file sitting, forlorn, all on its lonesome in a plain-jane directory on your PC – wind up being executed and put in control of the madness that is the boot process?
Most people that have had iPhones for more than a year or two have accumulated a massive amount of photos, at least several gigabytes in size. With iPhones still only shipping with a puny 16 GiB of storage by default (unless you pony up the $100 for a huge jump to the 64 GiB model with the iPhone 6/6+), Apple has been making a lot of money off of people looking to keep their photos and still have room to take more. But there’s another option: you can optimize and compress your existing photos to make them take up less space, and recover free space for your use.
Using the right tools and depending on the nature of your photos and images, you’ll be able to recover anywhere from 5% to 20% of your photo album size with these instructions!
We’re proud to introduce the immediate release of our newest utility for Windows users: the NeoSmart Technologies Embedded Product Key Tool. Designed for users of Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 10, our embedded product key tool will retrieve and display the Windows setup product key embedded in the BIOS or EFI, allowing you to store it for safe-keeping or use it to reinstall Windows with an official Windows setup image.
Ever notice that image galleries on WordPress.com load faster than those on your own? WordPress.com can serve dynamically-resized images on-the-fly to improve page load speeds and create pretty-looking image galleries. You can achieve this on your own server too, with a few simple tricks in your nginx.conf, taking advantage of URL parameters WordPress appends to image uploads and the nginx libgd-based ngx_http_image_filter_module.
WordPress’ dynamic image sizes serve two main purposes: aside from resizing the source images to a smaller size, it also lets you crop rectangular images to a thumbnail without completely skewing the aspect ratio and butchering the result.
Please welcome the newest member of our Easy suite of system utilities: Easy USB Creator!
Joining the ranks of EasyBCD and Easy Recovery Essentials is our newest utility, designed to convert ISO files intended for burning to a CD or DVD into bootable USB sticks, USB flash drives, USB jump drives, or external USB drives with just a single click. Easy USB Creator has been designed to be as straight-forward and easy to use as possible, and has been tested for maximum compatibility with all PCs in various configurations.
Did you skip Windows 8? Interested in upgrading your PC from Windows 7 to Windows 10, but not planning on installing Windows 8 in between? You’re in luck. The next version of Windows, Windows 10, aka Windows codename “Threshold” will let you upgrade to Windows 10 from Windows 7 just fine.
Questions about upgrading or activating Windows 10?
Read everything there is to know about Windows 10 licensing, free upgrade eligibility, and more in our exposé on the topic: Windows 10 activation and licensing explained.
Yesterday, Microsoft somewhat unexpectedly made available1 a preview of the next version of Windows – official Windows 10 and codenamed Windows “Threshold” – on its website for immediate download to the general public.
Today, we take a quick look at some of changes and new features that have made their way into Windows 10. As various “leaks” from within Microsoft had made clear, the biggest changes are going to be in the areas of UX and UI, as Windows is toned-down to become less alien for its long-term userbase that has clung on to Windows 7 for dear life, looking in utmost horror at the completely foreign landscape that is the Windows 8 metro desktop. Microsoft had previously made some steps to assuage these fears and boost adoption of Windows 8 with Windows 8.1, going so far as to make it possible to (finally!) disable the metro desktop on startup but refusing to bring back the start menu. Well, don’t let it be said that people can’t make a stand by boycotting with their wallet – the lackluster adoption of Windows 8 and then Windows 8.1 has thoroughly convinced Microsoft (and its new head, Satya Nadella) to release a somewhat more-sane Windows.
The release yesterday of the Windows “Threshold” Technical Preview itself was not unexpected, but the sudden springing of the entire Windows 10 affair on the tech community this week most certainly was! ↩
Google Voice, once a very promising voice over IP (VoIP) service with lots of potential and nowhere to go but up, has languished untapped and unmaintained for years. It seems that today — and apparently thanks to Google’s focus on the Google+ social network — Google Voice is finally being revisited and possibly even revived from its years in slumber as Google explores the integration of voice calls into its Google+ Hangouts feature.
Google Voice, originally known as GrandCentral, was first created in 2005 and existed as a standalone VoIP solution until 2009, when GrandCentral was purchased by Google. The takeover by Google was short and sad: GrandCentral was rebranded Google Voice and launched with much hoopla and fanfare, even debuting on NBC’s Today Show on June 25, 2009. From there, the only changes GrandCentral saw as it was turned into Google Voice was a name change and constant reduction in features, remaining yet another awkward step-child in the ever-growing portfolio of startups Google purchased and could not decide what to do with.