Auto-playing videos have become a thing. Websites like Facebook and YouTube will automatically play the next, suggested video for you in a bid to keep you engaged (and unproductive). With YouTube, you can turn off auto-play for the next video but there’s no way to disable the up next video on Facebook. You can turn off auto-play but once you’re watching a video, and you watch it to the end, the up next box will pop up and start playing the next video after a brief countdown.
Disable up next video
To stop auto-play for the next video on Facebook, you need an add-on called Stop next video. At present, this add-on is only available for Firefox and there doesn’t seem to be a Chrome version of it available. This means that everyone has a very good reason to abandon Chrome and switch to Firefox. The add-on makes it worth it.
Install the add-on, go to Facebook, watch any video of your choice and the ‘Up next’ box will never show up. There’s nothing you have to do to invoke it. When the video ends, you will see the same collage of suggested videos on the video player but the Up Next box will not appear and no videos will play automatically.
This is perhaps one of the most annoying things about Facebook and it isn’t limited to just the web interface. The Facebook iOS and Android apps act the same way except the count down before the next video starts is even shorter on the apps. The video player on Facebook isn’t designed to be easy or convenient to use. It’s meant to send users down a rabbit hole of never ending videos. It’s possibly the only video player that, when clicked in the timeline, will maximize instead of pausing the video and there’s still no add-on or extension that can disable it.
Facebook responded to the initial user outrage about auto-playing videos by adding an option to disable them but that option applies only to the videos on your timeline. If you’re already watching a video, the next one, and the one after that, will automatically play. What’s worse is that Facebook’s algorithm and subsequently its suggested videos are garbage. Often, they’re unreleated to what you are currently watching and include videos related to something you may have watched days or even weeks ago. This is a feature that needs an off switch, and this add-on needs a Chrome port.
Windows 10 lets you enable Spotlight for the images shown on your lock screen. Spotlight downloads images from Bing images and displays them as the wallpaper for your lock screen. Some of the Spotlight images are nice while others are not that great. If you want to set custom rotating images for the lock screen, you can do so pretty easily.
Custom rotating images for lock screen
When you change the desktop background on Windows 10, you have one of three options to choose from; a static image i.e., the Picture option, a slideshow, and a solid color. These options, minus the solid color one, are also available for the lock screen.
The first thing you need to do is create a new folder and put all the images that you want to use for the lock screen background in it. You can add more images to this folder whenever you want. In fact, if you have a script that downloads the images you want to use, you can direct it to save them to this folder.
Open the Settings app and go to the Personalization group of settings. Select the Lock Screen tab. Open the dropdown under Background and select Slideshow. You will see at least one folder listed under the dropdown and that will be the Pictures folder. Click the ‘Add a folder’ option and then select the folder that you created with all the images you want to use. That’s about it.
The lock screen will now cycle through the images in the folder. Unfortunately, you cannot select how often the images change but it is highly likely that they will change, at the very least, after 24 hours, if not longer.
Spotlight doesn’t fetch a new image everyday so it is highly likely that the slideshow for the lock screen will follow the same pattern.
There are some things you can change though. Click the Additional Slideshow settings option under the list of folders that are added for it. On the next screen, you should disable ‘Only use pictures that fit my screen’ if the images need to be scaled to fit it. You should also change the ‘Turn off screen after slideshow has played for’ option to 30 minutes (lowest time). You should also consider disabling the ‘When my PC is inactive, show the lock screen instead of turning off the screen’ option. This will allow the screen to be turned off as opposed to staying awake to display the slideshow.
Are you running Fedora as your Linux distribution of choice? Do you have a spotty internet connection or slow downloads? If so, it’s a good idea to learn how to use the offline feature included in the DNF package manager.
DNF’s offline mode is known as “download only,” and when used, can make installing large amounts of programs much easier. Here’s how to use this feature on your Fedora system.
Download apps with DNF
The DNF package management tool on Fedora Linux has a lot of useful functions, but “download” is one of the best things that it can do. By using this command-line argument while installing an RPM package from the Fedora software repositories, it’s very easy to download any app for using offline at a later date, on any Fedora Linux PC of your choosing.
To make use of this feature, open up a terminal window by pressing Ctrl + Alt + T or Ctrl + Shift + T on the keyboard. Then, once you’ve got a terminal window open, use the dnf search command below to search for the name of an app you’d like to install offline.
So, for example, if you’re looking to install the Chromium open-source browser offline, or on a Linux PC with slow internet, you’d enter the command-line arguments below.
sudo dnf download chromium
The above command will quickly grab the latest release of the Chromium open-source browser and place it in Fedora’s package cache directory, “/var/cache/dnf.”
To gain access to this package cache directory, use the CD command and move the terminal session from the home directory (~) to the package cache folder.
cd /var/cache/dnf
From here, look through the various sub-directories and copy your files to a removable device to be installed offline on other computers.
Download apps to a specific directory
It can be pretty annoying sorting through Fedora’s package cache directory. There are folders everywhere, and it makes taking your downloaded packages much harder than it should be. Luckily, there’s a way to force the DNF package manager to save offline apps to wherever the user specifies, using the “downloaddir” command-line switch.
So, for example, to download the Chromium web browser RPM package from the Fedora software repositories to a folder in your home directory labeled “offline-apps,” you’d enter the command below.
Note: please change "/home/username/offline-apps" in the command below with the username you use on your Linux PC.
Once the downloading is complete, update the permissions of the “offline-apps” directory in the home folder, so that you can safely access the directory. Changing the permissions for this folder is required, as its permissions are set to root only.
sudo chmod 777 -R ~/offline-apps
With the permissions of the folder updated, copy the folder to a flash drive for installation on other Fedora Linux computers offline.
Download apps with dependencies
Using the download command examples above will download an RPM package from the Fedora Linux repository, and for the most part that works for computers that have limited internet access. However, if you also need to get the dependencies for an app, as there is no possible way to access the internet, you’ll need to use the “resolve” command-line switch.
With “resolve,” the Fedora DNF package manager will not only download the app itself but every single library, dependency and important piece of software required to run the app on your system.
To download Kodi for example, along with all of its software dependencies, run the command-line operation below.
sudo dnf download kodi --resolve
The command above will download Kodi, along with all of its dependencies in the Fedora package cache directory (/var/cache/dnf), which you can access with:
cd /var/cache/dnf
Alternatively, download your app, along with all of its dependencies to the home directory (~) by entering the following command-line operation.
Note: be sure to replace "/home/username/offline-apps" section of the command below with the username you use on your Linux system.
Update the permissions of the folder with the chmod command.
sudo chmod 777 -R ~/offline-apps
Then, feel free to copy “offline-apps” to a USB device for offline installation at a later time.
Other ways to install apps offline on Fedora
DNF’s download feature is a great way to ensure even offline instances of Fedora Linux can get the latest apps. However, if you’re looking for ways of getting apps on an offline Fedora system, this isn’t the only way. Introducing AppImage, it’s a technology that allows entire applications to be contained in a simple, downloadable file that is perfect for offline systems. If you’re interested in getting your hands on AppImage apps, head over to BinTray. It’s an excellent website that catalogs tons of apps in the AppImage format.
The Start Menu is a core part of Windows. While you can run apps from their folders directly, via desktop shortcuts, or even the run box, the Start Menu is much quicker way to do it. If nothing else, it was one of the leading reasons Windows 8 was so poorly received. The Start Menu has improved on Windows 10, and small subtle changes are still being made to make it better however, it’s also one of the features that tend to break a lot. Here’s how you can fix the Start Menu button not working on Windows 10.
Fix Start Menu button not working
Make sure that you try to open the Start menu by clicking on the button with your mouse. It may not respond to the Win button on your keyboard but it may open when you click on it with a mouse. You should also restart your system at least once to see if that fixes the problem.
If it doesn’t, proceed with the fixes below.
Windows 10 1903 fix
This fix is exclusive to the Windows 10 1903 version. It still hasn’t rolled out to the stable release channel but if you’re running it on the Release Ring, you can give this fix a try. In fact, it should be the first thing you try before you do anything else.
The Start Menu is now a separate process that you can restart much like you can restart Explorer.exe. Open the Task manager and on the Processes tab, look for Start. Select it, and click the Restart button at the bottom.
Remove third-party apps
Many Windows 10 users still do not like the look and functionality of the Start Menu which is why they tend to use apps to modify it. For the most part, these apps are stable and rarely break anything but, you should remove them if your Start menu button stops working.
On that same note, if you have any apps installed that modify how your keyboard works e.g., an app that remaps keyboard keys, disable it.
Enable XAML
XAML is the language modern Windows 10 apps are written in and the Start Menu is an XAML app that requires UAC access. Normally, UAC access for it is enabled by default however, you may have accidentally disabled it, or enabling it again might fix the problem. You can do this from either PowerShell, or from the Command Prompt.
PowerShell
Open PowerShell with admin rights and run the following command;
Open a new Notepad file and paste the following in it. Save the file with the CMD extension and run it with admin rights. It will make a modification to the Windows Registry that will enable XAML.
If you’re not on Windows 10 1903, the Start menu, Search, and Cortana are still tightly integrated with each other which is why deleting files related to Cortana might solve the problem.
Open Command Prompt with admin rights and run the following commands, one after the other.
There should be a value called EnableXamlStartMenu here. If it isn’t present, right-click Advanced and select New>DWORD (32-bit) value and create it. It’s value should be set to 0 by default.
Restart your system after making changes to the registry.
Disable sign in information
This solution is somewhat obscure but it has worked for some users. Open the Settings app and go to the Accounts group of settings. Select the Sign In options tab and disable the ‘Use my sign in info to automatically finish setting up my device and reopen my apps after an update or restart’ option. Restart your system.
If all else fails
Run Windows 10 in safe mode and check if the Start menu button works or not. If it doesn’t, your final course of action is to create a new user account and delete the one where the Start menu button won’t work. It may not be the greatest solution but it is better than doing a fresh install of the OS and installing your apps again.
Picture in picture is a feature found in both Chrome and Safari. The feature doesn’t work for every single media player and Chrome has an extension to make up for most players that won’t switch to PiP mode. If you don’t use Chrome, or you want a non-browser tool that gives you Picture in Picture for websites, you can use a free app called Helium.
Picture in Picture for websites
Helium is a free app available in the Mac App Store. Install the app and run it. From the menu bar, go to Location and select Enter Destination URL. A slider will open where you can enter the URL for the website you want to view in Picture in Picture mode.The entire website will load in Helium.
You will be able to navigate the website like you can in a browser and if you choose to play a video, you can switch over to full screen mode and it will fill the app’s window. The window itself will float on your desktop. You can move it around wherever you like and resize it.
For media players, you will get the full set of controls that they have. The screenshot below features the Netflix player.
Any time you want to navigate to a different website, you can go to the Location item in the menu bar and enter a new destination URL. Helium doesn’t store any sort of history so you will have to enter the URL for a website each time you want to open it in the app.
Helium is meant to give you the ability to watch any web based video in a floating window on your screen but it loads entire websites so there’s nothing stopping you from using it to monitor a live feed of any sort, or pinning a website to the top of your desktop.
The picture in picture mode that browsers have been adding as a feature are geared towards media players e.g., when you want to watch a YouTube video but you’re also working in a different tab. Helium works with apps that are in full screen mode too i.e., the floating window will persist even if you’ve got an app open in full screen mode.
To quit Helium, select its Dock icon and from the Menu bar, select the quit option under the app’s name.
Looking for something similar for Windows 10? Give Compact View a try. It works more or less the same way that Helium does on macOS.
Safari is very different from both Chrome and Firefox in terms of UI. It certainly has features that these other browsers do not but over the years, it hasn’t switched over to a minimal UI like Firefox has. You will find that, as far as UI is concerned, the browser still has its own unique look. One major difference is that by default, Safari doesn’t display the full URL. It only displays the domain. If you want to view the full URL in Safari, you can do so by changing a setting.
View full URL in Safari
Open Safari and go to Safari>Preferences from the menu bar. On the Preferences window, go to the Advanced tab. You will see an option at the top called ‘Smart Search Field’. Enable the ‘Show full website address’ option and you will get full URLs in Safari for all websites.
In many cases, the domain of a website is really all you need to know about a link once you have it open however, if you have lot of pages from the same website open, the full URL might be more useful.
Safari’s URL bar, by design, isn’t meant to show you the complete URL. When you change this setting in Safari, it doesn’t change the size of the URL bar. This means that if the URL is too long to fit, it will nevertheless be cut off.
If you’re wondering how many characters the URL bar can show, it’s 60. This includes the “www” at the start of the domain however, it does not include HTTPS or HTTP at the start. Other browsers skip the ‘www’ part but show HTTP/HTTP in the URL bar however, since they aren’t limited by the length of the URL bar, it really doesn’t matter.
Safari doesn’t let users customize the UI. There used to be a way, on older versions of the browser/macOS, where the address bar could be enlarged/made bigger by clicking and dragging. That option was removed in Sierra which was released a few years ago. The option never returned so, in Mojave, you have to work with the URL bar that you have. It’s also highly unlikely that there is an extension out there that can change this. Even clicking inside the URL bar won’t reveal all of it however, it does auto-select the complete URL and if you use the Command+C shortcut, you can copy all of it.
When you boot your Mac, the image that greets you on the login screen behind the user profile image is the default Mojave image. Once you’re signed in though, the login screen will always show you the same image that is set as your desktop background. You only see the Mojave image for the first boot but if you don’t want to, you can change the default Mojave login screen image by replacing one file.
Change Mojave login screen image
Pick out the image you want to use and resize it to fit your screen’s exact resolution. To check your screen’s resolution, click the Apple menu and select ‘About This Mac’. Go to the Displays tab and it will tell you what your screen resolution is.
To resize the image, open it in Preview and go to Tools>Adjust Size. Change the Width to match that of your screen, and save it. If the height doesn’t match your screen i.e., it’s too big, you can crop it with Preview. Drag out the part of the image you want to keep, and use the Command+K keyboard shortcut to crop it.
When you save it, you should rename it to Mojave and save it in the HEIC file format. Preview will allow you to convert an image to HEIC.
Replace default image
Open Finder and go to the following location;
/Library/Desktop Pictures/
Look for a folder called Desktop Pictures. Inside this folder, look for an image called Mojave.heic. Back this image up somewhere. You will need this in case you ever want the default image back.
Once you’ve backed the image up, replace it with the resized, cropped, and renamed image that you created earlier. You will need to authenticate it with the admin password.
Once you’ve replaced the image, open the System Preferences app and go to the Users & Groups preference. Click the Login options button, and change any one of the options on the screen e.g., you can enable or disable the password hint on the login screen.
Restart Mac and this time, you will see the default Mojave image replaced with the image you set. Unfortunately, there’s no easier way to make this change or to automate it so that the image you set as your desktop wallpaper is automatically set as boot screen background.
If you have multiple users configured on a single Mac, they will all see the same image that you’ve set since there is no way to set it on a per-user basis when no user is logged in.
Driver updates are fairly common on any desktop operating system. Some driver updates are bundled with major and/or minor OS updates while others download individually whenever they’re available. Driver updates aren’t as critical as security updates so it’s okay if you skip them or don’t install them immediately. In some cases though, a driver might actually break your system. The only problem is, it’s rather difficult to block a driver update on Windows 10 since they tend to download and install in the background.
That said, Microsoft does know that not all drivers, or driver updates are going to work on a system. On some systems, a certain driver may not work very well which is why there’s an app that can block a driver update from installing.
Block a driver update
If the driver has already been installed, open Device manager, look for the device the driver is for, right-click it, and select the uninstall driver option. If you need to use an older version of the driver and not necessarily remove it, you can roll it back to an older version.
Next, you need to block the driver/update. Download the wushowhide app and run it. Click Next on the first screen you see and then when prompted to, select the Hide updates option.
The app will then search for available updates however, this includes all updates that are delivered via Windows Updates. Look through the list and select only the driver update that you want to block. Do not block anything else. Click Next and the app will hide the update effectively blocking it.
This will work for drivers installed, or driver updates that are delivered via Windows updates however you might have other apps/utilities on your system that install drivers and updates. If you do, you should either uninstall them or revoke their right to download and install updates.
Often on systems manufactured by Dell or hp, there is a utility installed that will help you find drivers and get support. While they can be helpful, they will also install driver updates often without asking you. In some cases, the app might even tell you a normal driver update is critical when it isn’t. You can uninstall most of these apps as they aren’t critical.
You should know that newer updates, or an overall update to Windows 10 might unblock the blocked drivers. In this case, you should run the app again and block them.
Editing a video is easy if all you want to do is trim it a bit, or extract a frame from it. For other more complicated edits such as cropping a video, or even flipping it, your average video editor won’t do the job. Fortunately, there’s Handbrake. It’s feature rich, it’s free, and if you need to flip a video, it’s more than up to the job.
Flip a video with Handbrake
Open Handbrake and add the video that you want to flip.
Once the video has been added, go to the Filters tab and select the ‘Flip’ option. Set a place to save the output file and click ‘Start Encode’ at the top. The video will be flipped however, the process will take more time if the video is longer and in higher quality.
Flipping a video does change it however, it can be reversed. All you have to do is flip the video over again and it will be back the way it was. Much like flipping an image is reversible, so is this.
The flip is along the x-axis and there isn’t a setting that lets you flip it along the y-axis. If you need to flip a video along the y-axis, try rotating it first. You can do that in Handbrake from the Filters tab. Rotate it by 180 degrees and select the flip option to see if that does the trick. You may or may not be satisfied with the results though. This is a hack way to flip a video along the y-axis so you won’t always get the same results as you would get when you flip along the x-axis.
It’s important to know that there’s a difference between flipping and rotating a video. Rotation has to do with its orientation or what angle the video is. Flipping is mirroring and it’s easiest to understand if you flip a video that has some text in it. In the screenshot of the flipped video above, you can see that the text is now backwards.
If you still have trouble with the concept of flipping a video, try one that is either all text or one with a pattern that isn’t symmetrical and it will be easier to tell. If you intend to both rotate a video and flip it, it’s a good idea to rotate it first and then flip. Assuming you’re using Handbrake to do the job, it has a neat live preview feature that you can use to see what the video will look like before you convert the whole thing.
The XFCE desktop environment, for as good as it is, still fundamentally is built on older technology than ones like Gnome Shell or KDE Plasma 5. This fact especially shows with its choice to go with screensavers, rather than a modern, lock-screen way of doing things. Still, though using a screensaver may be considered outdated, XFCE4 does it well by offering users Xscreensaver, an easily configurable and customizable screensaver tool.
Change the screensaver
To tweak your screensaver options on the XFCE desktop, you’ll need to access the main settings window. To gain access to this area, open up the application menu, and click on the settings icon. Alternatively, press Alt + F2 on the keyboard to bring up the quick-launch menu. Then, write “xfce4-settings-manager” and press Enter to open up settings instantly.
With the main settings window open on the XFCE desktop, scroll through the list of options on the screen until you find “Screensaver.” Double-click on the “Screensaver” icon to access the configuration area for XFCE and Xscreensaver.
In the screensaver settings for XFCE, you’ll see a whole lot of different options to choose from. Ignore all of the options and look for the list on the right. In this list, there are several different screensavers to choose from. Feel free to uncheck boxes to screensavers for ones you don’t want.
Or, to set Xscreensaver only to use one screensaver, find the “Mode” menu and click on the drop-down arrow. From here, look through the menu and change it from “Random Screen Saver,” to “Only One Screensaver.”
Once the Xscreensaver system is set to “Only One Screensaver,” go through the list of different screensavers on the left and select the screensaver you’d like to use on XFCE with the Xscreensaver system.
Change screensaver triggers
By default, the XFCE screensaver is configured to activate after about 10 minutes of inactivity. For a lot of users, 10 minutes is too soon, as many often sit at their computers, reading something only to be interrupted by a screensaver.
If the default time limit annoys you, you’ll be happy to know that it’s possible to tweak and change the time that Xscreensaver activates. To do this, open up the screensaver settings in XFCE, and make your way to “Blank After” area at the bottom left portion of the window.
To set the screensaver activation time, click the text-box, and change it from 10 minutes to a higher number. Then, close the window as the settings will apply themselves to the system automatically.
Screensaver change interval
If you’re using XScreensaver on XFCE and you have “Random Screensaver” enabled, but don’t like how quickly the system cycles between individual screensavers, you can change it by going to the “Cycle After” settings for Xscreensaver.
To access the “Cycle After” settings, open up the XFCE settings on your Linux desktop and go to the Xscreensaver settings and look for “Cycle After” at the bottom of the window, under the “Blank After” area.
The default settings for Xscreensaver to change from one screensaver to another is about 10 minutes. If you want the system to do this quicker, change the number to something lower than 10 minutes. Or, to have it change slower, change it to a number higher than 10 minutes.
Once the new number is added to “Cycle After” in the Xscreensaver settings, the system should automatically adopt the latest changes.
Disable the screensaver
You may want to disable the Xscreensaver system altogether from your XFCE desktop environment if you hate screensavers, and don’t want to see weird shapes and videos playing when your computer goes into idle mode. It’s understandable; screensavers aren’t for everyone.
There are two ways to shut off the Xscreensaver system on XFCE. In this section, we’ll show you both ways to do it.
Method 1 – Turn off Xscreensaver entirely
To shut off Xscreensaver so that the system doesn’t go into effect ever, open up the screensaver settings in XFCE. Then, from there, locate the “Mode” drop-down menu button and click it with the mouse to reveal options.
In the options menu, find “Disable Screen Saver” and select it to shut off Xscreensaver for your XFCE desktop environment permanently.
When you’ve set it to “Disable Screen Saver,” close the window to finish applying the settings.
Method 2 – Disable animations but keep Xscreensaver
Want to disable the weird animations that Xscreensaver plays when your PC is idle but maintain the locking function? If so, here’s what to do. First, open up the Screensaver settings for XFCE and click on the “Mode” drop-down menu with the mouse.
Look through the “Mode” drop-down menu for “Blank Screen Only” and set Xscreensaver to it, so that the system will lock your screen but not play animations.
Once Xscreensaver is set to “Blank Screen Only,” close the window.
Next Generation Portal Hi-tech, android, iOS, Mac OS, linux, windows, games, security
![how to disable up next video on facebook How to disable up next video on Facebook [Firefox]](https://14um.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/how-to-disable-up-next-video-on-facebook-firefox.jpg "How to disable up next video on Facebook [Firefox] 1")
