Exciting tips

If you’ve followed our theme guide for Ambiance Crunchy, you might be interested to know that the creator of that theme also has a Grub2 bootloader theme. It follows the same design style, and it’s a great addition if you’re trying to complete the Ambiance Crunchy look.

Installing the Ambiance Crunchy Grub2 theme is an involved process, and you’ll need to modify how your Linux PC boots. So, before we go over how to modify anything, please back up your Grub settings, and your PC as well!

Download Ambiance Crunchy

The Ambiance Crunchy Grub2 theme is on Gnome-look.org, so sadly, it’s not possible to call the wget command in to download it. Instead, head over to the theme’s page here, and look for the “Files” tab.

Inside of the “Files” tab, you’ll see two download links. Locate the one that is labeled “Crunchy-GRUB2-themes.tar.gz,” and click the blue download icon on the right.

Let the file download to your Linux PC. It’s only about 4.27 MB, so it won’t take long. Once the Ambiance Crunchy Grub2 theme pack is done downloading, launch a terminal window with Ctrl + Alt + T or Ctrl + Shift + T on the keyboard. From there, use the CD command to move into the “Downloads” folder.

cd ~/Downloads

Extract the Ambiance Crunchy TarGZ archive package using the tar command.

tar xvf Crunchy-GRUB2-themes.tar.gz

After the files are done extracting, all of the files will be stored inside of the “themes” folder in the “Downloads” directory. From here, move into the extracted folder with the CD command.

cd themes/

Install the themes

Installing the Ambiance Crunchy themes for Grub is best done with the command-line. This installation method is the way to go due to the developer of the theme explicitly suggesting it be done this way in the instructions.

To start the installation, open up a terminal window with Ctrl + Alt + T or Ctrl + Shift + T. Then, use the CD command to move into the Grub theme folder.

cd /boot/grub/themes/

Inside of the folder, use the sudo -s command to raise your terminal’s permission level from a standard user to root. Then, move the contents of the “theme” folder into the Grub theme folder.

sudo -s

Note: you must modify the commands below so that “username” is replaced with the username on your Linux PC.

mkdir -p /boot/grub/themes/

mv /home/username/Downloads/themes/* /boot/grub/themes/

If the above command doesn’t work, try installing with the one below instead.

mkdir -p /boot/grub2/themes/

mv /home/username/Downloads/themes/* /boot/grub2/themes/

Run the ls command to verify that all of the Ambiance Crunchy theme files are in the Grub theme folder.

ls

Assuming all files are in the correct place, move on to the next section of the guide.

Apply themes

Much like installing Grub themes on Linux, you’ll have to dig into the command-line. To get started, open up a terminal window and open up the default Grub configuration file in the Nano text editor with the command below.

sudo nano -w /etc/default/grub

Inside of the Nano text editor, go to the bottom of the text file using the Down Arrow. Once you’ve made it to the bottom of the file, look for the line that says "GRUB_THEME" and erase the code after the “=” sign. Alternatively, if there is no "GRUB_THEME" line, paste the code below into Nano.

GRUB_THEME"

With the code in the config file, follow the instructions below to enable one of the Ambiance Crunchy themes in the theme pack.

Crunchy-1024

Want to use the Crunchy-1024 theme on your Linux PC? Add the line below to the Grub configuration file in Nano.

GRUB_THEME="/boot/grub/themes/Crunchy-1024/theme-potatoes.txt"

Fedora, OpenSUSE:

GRUB_THEME="/boot/grub/themes/Crunchy-1024/theme-potatoes.txt"

Crunchy-distro-ish

Decide you want to check out the Crunchy-distro-ish theme on Linux? Add the following code to the Grub configuration file open inside of Nano.

GRUB_THEME="/boot/grub/themes/Crunchy-distro-ish/theme-mint.txt"

Fedora, OpenSUSE:

GRUB_THEME="/boot/grub2/themes/Crunchy-distro-ish/theme-mint.txt"

Crunchy-retro

Feel like trying out Crunchy-retro from the Ambiance Crunchy Grub2 theme pack? Paste the code below into the Nano text editor.

GRUB_THEME="/boot/grub/themes/Crunchy-retro/theme-Oregon.txt"

Fedora, OpenSUSE:

GRUB_THEME="/boot/grub2/themes/Crunchy-retro/theme-Oregon.txt"

Crunchy-simple

Need something simple to use inside of Grub? Try out Crunchy-simple with the Grub2 theme by pasting the code below into Nano.

GRUB_THEME="/boot/grub/themes/Crunchy-simple/theme-bridge.txt"

Fedora, OpenSUSE:

GRUB_THEME="/boot/grub2/themes/Crunchy-simple/theme-bridge.txt"

Crunchy-ubuntu

Are you an Ubuntu user and want to take the Crunchy-ubuntu Grub2 theme for a spin? Enable it with the code below in Nano.

GRUB_THEME="/boot/grub/themes/Crunchy-ubuntu/theme-orange.txt"

Fedora, OpenSUSE:

GRUB_THEME="/boot/grub2/themes/Crunchy-ubuntu/theme-orange.txt"

Crunchy-zen

Feeling Zen? Try out the Crunchy-zen Grub2 theme on your Linux PC by pasting the following code into Nano.

GRUB_THEME="/boot/grub/themes/Crunchy-zen/theme-stones.txt"

Fedora, OpenSUSE:

GRUB_THEME="/boot/grub2/themes/Crunchy-zen/theme-stones.txt"

Once you’re done editing, save with Ctrl + O, exit with Ctrl + X, and update Grub with the commands below.

Ubuntu/Debian

sudo update-grub

Fedora/OpenSUSE

sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

Arch Linux

sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg/

Reboot your PC after updating Grub. Upon reboot, you should see the Ambiance Crunchy Grub2 theme you applied!

In 1985, Commodore released the Amiga family of personal computers to the market. They were pretty successful in their time and sold quite a few units before ultimately being retired by Commodore in 1996.

These days, old computer emulation is as popular as old console emulation, especially on Linux. However, when it comes to emulating the Amiga line of computers, none do it better than FS-UAE, a cross-platform emulation application that allows users to experience Amiga video games and software.

Note: Addictivetips in no way encourages or condones the illegal downloading or distribution of ROM files for FS-UAE. If you want to play Amiga games on Linux with FS-UAE, please use your own game ROM files you’ve backed up to your PC, legally.

Install FS-UAE on Linux

Playing Amiga on Linux requires the FS-UAE emulator, as it’s the only known emulation tool out there that works on modern systems. FS-UAE is an excellent piece of software, and the developers support Linux distributions rather well, providing support for most mainstream Linux distributions.

To get your copy of FS-UAE working, open up a terminal window by pressing Ctrl + Alt + T or Ctrl + Shift + T on the keyboard. Then, from there, follow the detailed installation instructions that match up with the operating system you currently use.

Ubuntu

On Ubuntu Linux, you’ll need to use the dedicated PPA that the FS-UAE developers have available to install the software. To enable the PPA, start by using the add-apt-repository command below.

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:fengestad/stable

Following the add-apt-repository command, run an update to allow Ubuntu to refresh it’s software sources.

sudo apt update

Finally, install the FS-UAE packages on Ubuntu.

sudo apt install fs-uae fs-uae-launcher fs-uae-arcade

Debian

Debian has access to FS-UAE thanks to a third-party software repository. To add the repo, start by gaining root access and entering the following echo command in a terminal window.

Note: as of now, FS-UAE only supports Debian 9. 10 users should try their luck with one of these Deb packages on Launchpad.

su -

echo "deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/FrodeSolheim:/stable/Debian_9.0/ /" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/FrodeSolheim-stable.list

Next, download and install the FS-UAE release key using the wget command.

wget http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:FrodeSolheim:stable/Debian_9.0/Release.key
apt-key add - < Release.key

Run the update command to finish setting up the software repository on Debian.

apt-get update

Finally, install FS-UAE.

apt-get install fs-uae fs-uae-launcher fs-uae-arcade

Arch Linux

There isn’t a dedicated software repository or official package for FS-UAE on Arch. Instead, users must build from the AUR. The fastest way to do this is to use Trizen.

To start the process, install the Trizen package.

sudo pacman -S git base-devel

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/trizen.git

cd trizen

makepkg -sri

With the Trizen AUR helper installed on your Linux PC, it’ll be possible to install the FS-UAE software directly through the app. Using the trizen command below, start the installation.

trizen -S fs-uae

Fedora Linux

The developers of FS-UAE have dedicated repositories for nearly every release of Fedora Linux. To get the repo working on your Fedora PC, start by using the CD command and move it to the default repo folder.

cd /etc/yum.repos.d/

Next, wget the repo file. Be sure to change XX in the command below with the release number of the version of Fedora Linux you are using (like “30” for Fedora 30, etc.)

wget http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:FrodeSolheim:stable/Fedora_XX/home:FrodeSolheim:stable.repo

With the repo installed on Fedora, grab the latest FS-UAE packages.

sudo dnf install fs-uae fs-uae-launcher fs-uae-arcade kernel-modules-extra

OpenSUSE

FS-UAE is ready to install on every single release of OpenSUSE. To start the installation process, open up a terminal and use the Zypper command to add the third-party software repository to your system.

Tumbleweed

sudo zypper addrepo http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:FrodeSolheim:stable/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/home:FrodeSolheim:stable.repo

Leap 15.0

sudo zypper addrepo http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:FrodeSolheim:stable/openSUSE_Leap_15.0/home:FrodeSolheim:stable.repo

Leap 42.3

sudo zypper addrepo http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:FrodeSolheim:stable/openSUSE_Leap_42.3/home:FrodeSolheim:stable.repo

Following the repository, use the refresh command.

sudo zypper refresh

Finally, finish up by installing FS-UAE.

zypper install fs-uae fs-uae-launcher fs-uae-arcade

Configuring FS-UAE to load games

The FS-UAE app is pretty straight-forward and works out of the box quite well. However, you’ll still need to set up a configuration file manually, or nothing will work. Thankfully, the developers have a stock config file that can be downloaded with wget.

cd ~/Documents/FS-UAE/Configurations
wget https://fs-uae.net/files/Default.fs-uae

After setting up the configuration file, there should be no need to edit it. From here, open up the FS-UAE GUI window by pressing Alt + F2 and typing in the command below.

fs-uae-launcher

With the UI open, make your way to “Floppy Drives.” Then, click “Drive Count” and set it to the number of floppy drives you need for your ROM.

After setting up your floppy drives in the emulator, locate Amiga Model and change the default selection to the right model of Amiga that the ROM is compatible with. When everything looks good, press “Start” to run the game.

Further reading

The Amiga is a very involved system, and it may come off as very confusing if you don’t understand how everything works. For most, loading up a ROM and clicking “Start” should be enough. That said, some games are a bit more complicated, and may involve using special features in FS-UAE.

If you find yourself stuck figuring out some of the more advanced features in FS-UAE, do check out the official documentation. They cover how to create hard drives, and the ins-and-outs of the emulator that go far beyond the basics covered in this tutorial.

Windows users like to customize their desktop. The OS has generally had room for a lot of changes even if most of them are made via third-party apps. Rainmeter is one popular app that most people use to transform how their system works. Out of the box, Windows 10 lets you change the accent color to anything you want and if you want the cursor to match it, it’s pretty easy.

Set accent color to cursor color

You can change the cursor color with third-party apps. The trick is to install a different cursor but this method is very limited. You have to search for a cursor theme and it needs to sit well with the rest of your OS’ layout.

On Window 10 1903, you can change the cursor color to anything you like. You can use the feature to set the accent color as the cursor color.

Find accent color

Open the Settings app and go to the Personalization group of settings. Select the Color tab. Your accent color should already be set but if you need to change it, do that first. What you need next is the color code for the accent color.

At the bottom of the color palettes, click the ‘Custom color’ button.

In the window that opens, click the more button under the color picker and you will see the HEX code for the accent color. Copy it to your clipboard.

Set cursor color

In the Settings app, go to the Ease of Access group of settings. Select the Cursor & pointer tab. On the Cursor & pointer tab, select the mouse cursor button with the color wheel. Next, click the ‘Pick a custom pointer color’ option under the Suggested pointer colors.

In the window that opens, click More under the color picker and then enter the HEX code that you copied from the Color tab earlier.

Click Done, and the color will update to match the accent color. This trick is a bit clumsy given you have to change the cursor color manually each time the accent color changes. There’s no way to automatically change the cursor color. It is a native Windows 10 feature though so it’s going to work flawlessly.

If you like the idea of the cursor being a different color, but don’t think the accent color is the right one to go with it, you can always use a different one. The cursor gets a black or white outline around it (depending on the color you select) to make sure it is easy to see.

There’s a consensus that too much screen time is bad for you but it’s hard to get away from screens. If you aren’t looking at your phone, you’re probably on your desktop and not everyone has the option to simply turn it off and take a break. One recent method to lighten the load of constantly staring at a screen is to tint it a warmer color. This method was first introduced by an app named Flux but on macOS it’s now a feature called Night Shift. You can schedule Night Shift on macOS just like you can on iOS. Here’s how.

Schedule Night Shift

Night Shift was introduced in macOS Sierra so you must be running at least that version of the OS.

Open the System Preferences app and go to the Display preferences. You will see a Night Shift tab. Select it.

By default Night Shift is turned off. To turn it on per a schedule, open the ‘Schedule’ dropdown.

There are two ways to schedule Night Shift. You can schedule it to work with the sunrise and sunset times for your location, or you can set a custom schedule.

The sunrise/sunset schedule enables Night Shift on macOS when the sunsets in your area and turns it off when the sunrises. This means that as soon as it’s evening, your screen will be tinted a warmer color. When it’s morning, the screen will be returned to its natural blue.

The custom schedule allows you to set the start and end time for Night Shift to whatever you like. It isn’t bound to sunset/sunrise. You can set it to be enabled for any period of time.

Once you’ve enabled Night Shift on macOS either via the custom or the Sunset to Sunrise option, you can change how warm your screen gets when it’s enabled. Use the ‘Colour Temperature’ slider to set it to a warmer or cooler color.

We should mention that the screen tint does not have an impact on screenshots. If you take a screenshots often and are worried the orange tint of Night Shift will have an impact on them, don’t be. The screenshots all come out looking as though there is no tint whatsoever. The previous screenshot was taken with Night Shift turned on and there’s no orange in it.

If you’re on a much older version of macOS, one that doesn’t have Night Shift, consider using the popular Flux app. It’s also a good idea to consider upgrading to the latest version of macOS.

If you’re on Windows 10, there’s a similar feature built into it. Linux users can also tint their screens a warmer color.

Ulauncher is an excellent application launcher that when installed, makes it very easy to find and launch your files, quickly open websites, find programs to open, calculate math problems, and more.

This app isn’t the first app launcher for Linux we’ve covered on Addictivetips. In fact, in the past, we talked a few before. Still, Ulauncher stands out and is worth talking about due to how fast it is.

Install ULauncher on Linux

There are a few ways to install Ulauncher, depending on the Linux distribution you use. On Ubuntu, there is a dedicated PPA. For Arch, there’s an AUR package, while on Fedora and OpenSUSE there is a downloadable RPM package.

Ubuntu

As mentioned earlier, there’s a dedicated PPA available for Ubuntu users looking to install ULauncher. To enable this PPA, open up a terminal window by pressing Ctrl + Alt + T or Ctrl + Shift + T on the keyboard.  Then, use the add-apt-repository command to enable the new repo on your system.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:agornostal/ulauncher

Following adding the new PPA to your Ubuntu system, you’ll have to run the update command, as Ubuntu’s software must be refreshed for the new ULauncher PPA to work.

sudo apt update

After running the update command, go ahead and run the upgrade command to see if you have any pending software updates or patches.

sudo apt upgrade -y

Finally, use the apt install command to get the latest version of Ulauncher on Ubuntu.

sudo apt install ulauncher

Debian

ULauncher has support for Debian, though the PPA won’t work. Instead, if you want to use the app on your system, you must manually download the DEB package file from the developer’s website.

To grab the latest ULauncher package from the internet, open up a terminal window by pressing Ctrl + Alt + T or Ctrl + Shift + T on the keyboard. Then, use the wget downloader tool to start the download.

wget https://github.com/Ulauncher/Ulauncher/releases/download/4.4.0.r1/ulauncher_4.4.0.r1_all.deb

With the download complete, it’s time to install the software on Debian Linux with the dpkg command in the terminal.

sudo dpkg -i ulauncher_4.4.0.r1_all.deb

Finally, finish up the installation process by correcting and fixing any dependencies that may not have been set up correctly during the Dpkg process.

sudo apt install -f

Arch Linux

There’s an AUR package of ULauncher ready to install, however, in this guide, we’ll go over installing Trizen instead. The main reason to do this is that Trizen is an AUR helper, and will take care of the dependencies automatically.

To start the installation of Trizen, use the Pacman package manager to install the Git and Base-devel packages on Arch.

sudo pacman -S git base-devel

Following the installation of the two packages above with Pacman, use the Git tool to download the latest AUR build of Trizen to your Arch PC.

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/trizen.git

Install Trizen with makepkg.

cd trizen

makepkg -sri

Finally, use the Trizen tool to install ULauncher on your Arch Linux PC.

trizen -S ulauncher

Fedora

To get ULauncher on Fedora Linux, you can download the RPM package file directly from the website, with the wget downloader tool.

wget https://github.com/Ulauncher/Ulauncher/releases/download/4.4.0.r1/ulauncher_4.4.0.r1_fedora.rpm

With the package done downloading, you’ll be able to install the ULauncher application very quickly with the Dnf package manager.

sudo dnf install ulauncher_4.4.0.r1_fedora.rpm -y

OpenSUSE

Thanks to the RPM release, every OpenSUSE Linux release has the ability to install the latest version of ULauncher. To do this on your system, open up a terminal window and use the wget downloader to grab the newest package from the internet.

wget https://github.com/Ulauncher/Ulauncher/releases/download/4.4.0.r1/ulauncher_4.4.0.r1_fedora.rpm

After you’re done downloading the ULauncher package onto your OpenSUSE PC, it’s time to install it to the system. To do this, use the Zypper command below.

sudo zypper install ulauncher_4.4.0.r1_suse.rpm

Use ULauncher

To start using ULauncher, open up your application menu, search for “ulauncher” and open it up to start up the app. Immediately after it starts up, ULauncher will inform you that the shortcut to access it is Ctrl + Space.

Press the keyboard combination (Ctrl + Space) to bring up the ULauncher window. From there, start typing, and the app will show you results, such as installed applications, emoji, suggested websites, etc.

After you’re satisfied with the search result, press Enter to access it immediately. Or, use your arrow keys to sort through results.

Start ULauncher at login

Want to have access to ULauncher as soon as you log into your Linux PC? Here’s what to do. First, open up a terminal window. Then, use the CD command to move the session to the /usr/share/applications/ folder.

cd /usr/share/applications/

Make a copy of the ULauncher app and put it in your startup folder with the cp command.

cp ulauncher.desktop ~/.config/autostart/

Upon login, ULauncher should instantly start up!

Lots of people are using Gnome Shell these days, as many mainstream Linux projects are adopting the desktop environment as their default user interface. Overall, this is a good move, as Gnome is reliable, easy to use, and getting faster with every release. However, even great desktops like Gnome have issues.

Perhaps the most glaring and debilitating issue that Gnome suffers from (even with rapid patches improving the desktop with every release) is freezing. No matter what, sometimes, Gnome is destined to freeze and lock up. So, in this guide, we’ll show you what to do when you have a frozen Gnome desktop session. Let’s get started!

Method 1 – X11 restart fix

Gnome Shell has a built-in restart function that users can execute to restart a frozen desktop while in use quickly. The only catch is it doesn’t work with the new Wayland display protocol, so you need to be using the “Gnome on Xorg” session for this to work.

To restart the Gnome Shell session while everything is frozen, start by pressing Alt + F2 on the keyboard. Executing this keyboard combo will bring up a window in the center of the screen in which you’ll be able to enter commands.

In the command box, type in ‘r.’ This command will fully restart the session, re-launch the Gnome Shell, and even fix any window manager issues you may be having (though it mainly just restarts the session without logging you out).

r

Press enter to execute the command. Feel free to re-run this command more than once if a single restart doesn’t solve the problem. Usually, running the re-launch command a couple of times in a row fixes things.

Method 2 – Wayland restart fix

Wayland is the new modern display protocol for Linux, and Gnome Shell embraced it early. If you’re using Intel open-source, or other supported GPU drivers, while running Gnome, you’re most likely using Wayland.

The Wayland session for Gnome has tons of performance improvements, but crashes can still happen. Unfortunately, the restart feature doesn’t work in this session. So, if you’ve run into a frozen Gnome desktop session, you need to do something else to regain control of your computer.

To restart a Wayland Gnome session, you won’t be working within the Gnome desktop environment. Instead, you’ll need to access the TTY console and force the desktop manager that handles Gnome to restart, forcing your session to reboot. Press Ctrl + Alt + F2  or Ctrl + Alt + F3 to gain access to the TTY console.

Once inside of the TTY console window, you must log in. Write out your username in all lower-case letters and press Enter. Following the username, write in your password. Upon entering your password successfully, you’ll gain access to the Linux command-line in TTY mode.

From here, follow the step-by-step instructions to restart your Gnome Shell session.

Step 1: Using the systemctl stop command, stop the Gnome display manager from running. Doing this will automatically end your Gnome Shell session and cause it to close.

sudo systemctl stop gdm

Or, if you use LightDM with Gnome, run this command instead.

sudo systemctl stop lightdm

Step 2: By running the stop command, the Gnome (or LightDM manager) will stop running. From here, run the start command and re-launch the login manager.

sudo systemctl start gdm

Or, for LightDM, run this command instead.

sudo systemctl start lightdm

Assuming the command is successful, your Linux PC should show you the Gnome login screen, and you’ll be able to use it to log into Gnome Shell again, without a frozen session!

Method 3 – Display replace fix

If you’ve tried the Xorg and Wayland fixes and found they haven’t worked to your needs, there’s a third way to restart the Gnome Shell session while it’s frozen, using the Shell’s built-in “replace” function.

The “replace” command works similar to the Gnome Wayland fix, in that it must be launched in the TTY window. So, press Ctrl + Alt + F2  or Ctrl + Alt + F3 to access it.

Note: this fix works with all versions of Gnome Shell, including Wayland.

Inside of the TTY area on your Linux PC, write in your username and password to gain access to the command-line interface. Then, follow the step-by-step instructions below to learn how to reset your Gnome session with this method.

Step 1: Create a file called “gnome-restart” using touch.

touch gnome-restart

Step 2: Using the echo command, add the restart code to the gnome-restart file.

echo '#!/bin/bash' > gnome-restart

echo 'DISPLAY=:0 gnome-shell --replace &' >> gnome-restart

Step 3: Update the permissions to the “gnome-restart” file so that it can be executed as a program from the terminal using the chmod command.

sudo chmod +x gnome-restart

Step 4: Move the “gnome-restart” file into /usr/bin/ so that the system can call it like a program.

sudo mv gnome-restart /usr/bin/

Step 5: From the TTY terminal, write gnome-restart to restart your Gnome Shell session.

Note: the gnome-restart command can also be run directly from the Gnome desktop. To do it, press Alt + F2 to open the command window on the desktop, and run the command inside of it.

gnome-restart 

Upon running the command successfully from TTY, return to your Gnome desktop by pressing Ctrl + Alt + F2  or Ctrl + Alt + F3. Your session should be usable again!

Video editing apps aren’t uncommon but even paid apps don’t have a full set of video editing features. The feature many might miss is a crop feature. If you need to crop a video and you’re on Windows 10 system, Handbrake is the tool for the job. It’s powerful so your video quality won’t suffer, and it’s free.

Crop vs Trim

The feature you commonly find in video editors is a ‘Trim’ feature whereas you need to ‘crop’ a video. The difference is that trim applies to the playable length of a video. If you have a ten second video, and you remove the last two seconds from it, you’ve ‘trimmed’ your video. If you have a video that is 1920x1080px, and you remove/cut out the bottom 400px from it, you’ve cropped it.

Crop should also not be confused with resizing. Resizing keeps the whole video intact but reduces its resolution. Crop cuts a part out of it.

Crop a video with Handbrake

Open Handbrake and add the video you want to crop.  Once the video has been added, go to the Dimensions tab. Click the Preview button at the top (highlighted in the screenshot below).

The preview window will help you see how much of the video you’ve cropped out. On the main Handbreak window, you will see four fields marked Top, Bottom, Left, and Right. Use the arrows or click inside the field to enter a value in pixels. This is the amount of video you will crop out i.e., remove from the video. If you leave a field at zero, e.g., the top field, no part of the video will removed from there.

When you’re done, enter where you want to save the file and then click the ‘Start Encode’ button at the top. This will begin the cropping process.

Cropping is permanent; you cannot get back parts of a video that have been cut out of it. It is, again, not the same as resizing a video where, you keep all of it and just reduce its resolution. It’s like trimming a video where if you cut out a section of it, you cannot get it back if you overwrite the original file. When cropping videos, it’s a good idea to always save the crop version as a copy of the original file until you’re done with the project.

It’s worth mentioning that Handbrake doesn’t report the correct resolution for videos so make sure you know the real resolution of the video before you crop it. It will make it easier to figure out how much of the video to cut out. For more help, take a screenshot of the full video and use an image editor to figure out how much to cut out. Image editors have better cropping tools.

We spend too much time in front of screens. Some would argue that it’s a necessity given the nature of work for many people but that doesn’t mean all time spent in front of a screen is productive, or healthy. iOS 12 introduced a new feature called Screen Time which helps users control how much time they spend on their device, and also see how much they use their device every week. With Catalina, you can now set up Screen Time on macOS.

Catalina is the macOS version expected to arrive in Fall 2019. At the time of writing, Catalina is in beta.

Screen time on macOS

Open System Preferences and select the Screen Time preference. Click Continue on the first screen you see.

Click Options at the very bottom of the column on the left, and in the pane on the right, click ‘Turn On’.

Now that Screen Time is on, you can start configuring it. The one thing you need to configure is app limits i.e., how much time you’re allowed to spend on a particular app. You don’t have to configure it for every single app on your Mac. Instead, you only have to do it for apps that you want to control your use of. For example, if you Skype too much, you can set a time limit for how much time you can spend on the app.

To set app limits, go to the App Limits tab in the column on the right. Click the plus button at the bottom of the right-hand pane. The apps are divided into groups so, depending on the type of app you want to set a limit for, it will be in its respective group. You will have to look for it yourself. For apps that you cannot find, look under the ‘Others’ section.

After you select an app or apps under a particular section, you will have to set its time limit as well. You can set a hard daily limit or you can set a custom limit which allows you to define how much time you can spend using an app for every day of the week. For example, you may want to limit Skype usage from Monday to Friday, but use it much more on the weekends.

That is the basic Screen Time set up. On macOS, Screen Time has far more sophisticated features than it has on iOS. Check out the Always Allowed tab to whitelist essential apps.

If you choose to set up Screen Time on macOS, and you want to limit total screen time on all your Apple devices, you can share your screen time across them. This option is available on the Options page of the preference. The screen times will only be shared but app usage on one device will not cut into the time allocated for usage on another device.

External drives sometimes need to be formatted and this is something fairly basic. Desktop operating systems can do this out of the box and macOS is no exception. If you want to format a drive on macOS, you can do so with the built-in Disk Utility.

When you format a drive, all data on it is erased. If you value the data on the drive you’re about to format, back it up first. Once the drive has been formatted, there is no guarantee that the data can be recovered.

Note: macOS does not support writing to NTFS drives and as such, the Disk Utility cannot format a drive to NTFS. If you need to format a drive so that it can be read on both a Mac and a PC, use the ExFAT format.

Format a drive

Connect the drive that you want to format to your Mac and then open Disk Utility. You can launch it from Spotlight, or from Launchpad. It’s up to you.

In Disk Utility your internal drive and the external ones are all listed in a column on the left. Since you’ve connected the drive that you want to format, it will be mounted automatically and it will show up in the column on the left.

Select the drive and then click the Erase button at the top. In the options window that appears, open the Format dropdown and select the format you want to use for the drive. You can also give the drive a name. If you don’t know what a ‘Scheme’ is, it is best to leave it alone.

If you want extra secure formatting, one where absolutely everything is erased and very securely so, click Security Options and opt for the ‘Most Secure’ erasure. Click the Erase button and formatting will begin.

Formatting can take a while depending on the size of the drive, and the level of security that you’ve selected. If you’ve gone for a more secure erasure, it will take much longer to format a drive on macOS.

When the format is complete, you will see the following message. Click Done and you’re free to do with the drive whatever you like.

Disk Utility may not support NTFS but it does support quite a few other formats. If you want to use them, make sure you know what they’re for and what limitations they come with. If you’re looking to format a drive to NTFS, you can do so via third-party apps.

Windows Snap splits a monitor down the middle allowing an app to take up one half of the screen, and a second app to take up the other half. This is how Snap has worked for ages and no real change has been made to it. In a way, it’s probably a good thing that Microsoft hasn’t tried to fix what isn’t broken but some users prefer to snap apps horizontally i.e., stack them on top of each other. Out of the box, you can’t do this on Windows 10 but there’s no shortage of window management apps that are free and can horizontally split the screen for you.

We recommend using GridMove. It’s free, light-weight, and doesn’t interfere with the Snap feature on Windows 10. It works best if you use the mouse to snap windows on the horizontally split screen but it does support custom keyboard shortcuts for snapping as well.

Horizontally split the screen

Download, install, and run GridMove. It will add an icon to the system tray where you can access the app’s setting. Right-click it and select ‘Templates>2 Part-Horizontal’ to horizontally split the screen.

The app can be told that you’re using more than one screen and that allows it to split all your screens horizontally.

You will notice that there’s also a Hotkey option in the app’s settings. This allows you to program a keyboard shortcut for snapping the windows however, it cannot take over the Win+left arrow, or the Win+Up arrow keyboard shortcuts. Unfortunately, the app kept throwing an error each time we tried to set up a Fast Modifier hotkey. Even using the hotkey in the example didn’t work. This might just be a problem specific to the system we tested the app on so give it a try on your PC.

Go to Hotkeys and make sure the Use Fast Move option is selected. Next, go to Hotkeys and select Fast Move Modifiers. In the window that opens, read how to define various keys for the shortcut and then enter the keyboard shortcut you want to use.

There is no shortage of apps that can split the screen into various layouts. GridMove is somewhat basic so if you have a large monitor and want more options for snapping windows, you can try other, more sophisticated apps. If you’re willing to purchase an app to do the job, MaxTo is quite powerful. It costs $30 but has a trial version to test out before you pay the full price.