If a file or folder is in use, i.e. it’s open in an app, or a process on your system is using it, you cannot delete it. This becomes evident when you see the file or folder in use error box that prevents the deletion process from completing. Here’s what you can do to delete a file or folder in use.
Basic steps
Normally, a file or folder in use error is harmless. All you really have to do is make sure the file or folder you’re trying to delete isn’t being used by an app. In the case of a folder, if there’s a file within the folder is in use or open, it will prevent the folder from being deleted. Make sure everything is closed properly.
Sometimes Windows 10 thinks an app is still using a file when it is in fact done with it. For example, if you upload a file from Chrome to any website/web service, Windows 10 sometimes thinks the file is still open in Chrome even though the upload has finished. The same can happen with other apps so the safe thing to do is to close any apps that you might have used to access the file (or folder) in question.
If all that fails, there’s a simple way to get around it; safe mode.
Delete file or folder in use
Restart Windows 10 in Safe Mode. There are a few different ways to do this, however the easiest way is to open the Start Menu, click the power options, hold down the Shift key and click on Restart from the power options menu.
You will boot to a blue screen with various options. Select Troubleshoot>Advanced Options>start up settings and click on Restart. On the next screen, you will see a numbered list of actions. Enter the number that corresponds to Safe Mode. For me, it was 4 but you should go through the list you see and make sure you pick the right option.
Once you’re in safe mode, go ahead and delete the file or folder. This is also a good way to get rid of smaller, less malicious viruses however you should use Shift+Delete instead of regular delete if you suspect the folder or file is malicious.
To return to your normal Windows 10 desktop, simply restart your system.
If the file or folder comes back after being deleted, it means it is being created again by an app or process on the system. You might very likely need to scan your system for malicious apps in this case.
macOS is still miles behind Windows 10 when it comes to snapping windows. Snapping is a concept that Windows made popular but Apple is rarely shy about taking features from other operating systems or even apps. It still doesn’t do window management like Windows does and that’s why there are many apps that try and replicate it. Penc is a free, open source Mac app that lets you resize and snap windows with swipe gestures on macOS.
Snap windows with swipe gestures
Penc doesn’t mimic Windows 10 completely in the way it snaps windows. It can snap windows and resize them but you have to activate it with the keyboard.
Download, and run Penc. It needs special accessibility access in order to work. Once the app is running tap the Command key on your keyboard twice, and do not release it after the second tap.
You will see a translucent overlay appear on your screen. Position your mouse cursor over a window and then pinch to resize it, or move the overlay to whichever side of the screen you want to snap the window to.
You can release the Command key once you’ve snapped the window. If the Command key isn’t convenient for you to use, you can change it.
Visit Penc’s preferences and change the ‘Double press modifier key to activate’ key. You can also change how sensitive the app is to swipe gestures. It will not change the sensitivity of your touch pad overall.
macOS has yet to replicate the ‘maximize’ button that most users want. The maximize button doesn’t fill the entire screen though, as of a somewhat recent update, you can double-click the edge of an app window and ‘fill’ it in that direction. It’s clumsy to use, and not something that a lot of people know about.
macOS has something like this but only for full screen apps. The OS is capable of implementing this feature easily enough so it’s possible that Apple doesn’t think it’s worth implementing for the desktop. For as great as the touch pad on a MacBook is, or the Magic track pad that Apple sells, its swipe gestures often feel under-utilized. In fact, Windows 10 which runs on systems with varying hardware, is actually doing a much better job with touch pad gestures.
If you want to customize touch pad gestures on macOS, you need an app called BetterTouchTool and it’s not free though most people who use it claim it’s more than worth its price tag.
Bluetooth, and Bluetooth devices aren’t the easiest to interact with outside of the built-in options that Windows 10 provides you. Even those don’t always work right. This isn’t entirely a Windows 10 problem because there are a lot of Bluetooth devices out there with varying capabilities. That said, if you want to connect a Bluetooth device with a hotkey, you can use a script, and Bluetooth Command Line tools to do the job.
This is for devices that you’ve already paired with your PC. If the device hasn’t been paired yet, go ahead and pair it first. Make sure that Bluetooth is turned on, on your system.
Connect Bluetooth device via hotkey
First, visit this page and download Bluetooth Command Line Tools. Install it, and allow it to be added as a Path variable.
Once it’s been installed, open Command Prompt with admin rights and run the following command. It will return the MAC address for all Bluetooth devices.
btdiscovery
Copy the MAC address of the Bluetooth device you want to connect via a hotkey.
Visit this Github page and download or clone the repository. Inside, you will find several files. The first file you need to access is the mac.txt file. Open it and paste the MAC address you copied.
That’s most things done. Now we enter a somewhat ‘test’ phase. The files include two types of scripts labelled ‘connect’ and ‘disconnect’. You can use either the BAT script or the VBS script to connect/disconnect the device. The test part is where you run them and see which ones works the best. For me, it was the batch file.
Once you’ve figured out what works, create a shortcut to the script, and set a keyboard shortcut to run it. The process is the same no matter what type of script it is.
Limitations
This may not work for all devices. It may also take quite a while for the device to connect. In fact, it might take so long that you prefer to use the Connect quick action in the Action Center to connect your device.
If you want to use this for multiple devices, you will need to copy/clone the entire Github repo for each one, and set up the MAC address for the devices in each repo.
If it’s too slow, you will likely not use it but this is the unfortunate problem with Bluetooth devices. Even Windows 10 isn’t able to work with them all. It has a battery feature that allows you to view battery percentage of Bluetooth devices but there’s a third-party app that does it better.
Most monitors are landscape oriented i.e., they’re wider than they are tall. That’s how in-built displays are oriented on laptops. If you have a Macbook. or you’re using an external display, or you’ve splurged on the new Apple display that can support both orientations, you may be interested to know how you can rotate the display on macOS.
Rotate external display
Open the System Preferences app and go to the Display preference. On the Display tab, you will see a ‘Rotation’ dropdown. Open it and you will see three different angles listed there; 90, 180, and 270. Selecting the 90 degree option will rotate it left, 180 degrees will flip it over, and 270 will rotate it towards the right.
After you select which direction to rotate the display, you will have to confirm that you want to make the change permanent. If you don’t confirm it in time, the display will revert back to its original orientation.
Rotate internal display – Macbook
If you have a Macbook, and you use this same trick to try and rotate the display, you will see that the Rotate option simply doesn’t appear. This might make it seem that the internal display on a Macbook cannot be rotated but that is not the case.
If you have System Preferences app open, close it. Once it’s closed, hold down the Option+Command keys on your keyboard. Left click the System Preferences app in the Dock to open it. Do not release the Option+Command keys.
Once the System Preferences app is open, and you’re still holding down the Option+Command keys, click the Displays preference. This time, the preference for the in-built display on your Macbook will show the Rotation dropdown it showed for the external display. The same rules apply; you can rotate the screen 90, 180, and 270 degrees. 90 will rotate it left, 180 will flip it upside down, and 270 will rotate it right.
As with the external display, you will have to confirm that you want to keep the new orientation within the given time limit. If you don’t confirm it, the display orientation will revert back to normal.
If you’re wondering why the option to rotate the display on a Macbook is hidden, it likely has to do with Apple trying to prevent users from accidentally changing it. There was once a time when you could literally change the display orientation of a Windows PC with a keyboard shortcut and that led to a lot problems for Windows users who accidentally executed the shortcut. Apple is right to think ahead about it.
Eclipse is the leading Java IDE for developers on Linux. It’s not hard to see why, as the app is filled with dozens of features, including support for Java, JSF, various XML editing tools, and even Git source control integrations.
The Eclipse tool is open source, and available for download on the developer’s website. Officially, Eclipse supports Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Arch Linux, OpenSUSE, and all other Linux distributions via a generic, TarGZ package. Here’s how to get it working on your system.
Note: in this guide, we’ll be focusing on installing the Eclipse Java IDE for Linux, not the Enterprise edition. For more information on how to Eclipse Java IDE for Enterprise, click here.
Arch Linux instructions
Arch Linux has the Eclipse Java IDE available to users in the “Community” software repository, for both the Java IDE and the Javascript IDE as well. To get the Java IDE working, start by opening up a terminal window. Opening a terminal window can be done by pressing Ctrl + Alt + T or Ctrl + Shift + T on the keyboard. Once the command-line terminal is ready to use, access the Pacman configuration file in the Nano text editor.
sudo nano -w /etc/pacman.conf
In the Pacman configuration file, press the Down arrow key and find “Community.” Next to “Community,” you’ll see a # symbol. Remove the symbol from directly in front of it. Be sure also to remove the # symbols from the lines directly below. Once everything is taken care of, save the edits by pressing Ctrl + O, and exit the editor with Ctrl + X.
With the “Community” software repository opened up, it’s time to install the Community packaged version of the Java IDE for Eclipse.
sudo pacman -Syy eclipse-java
AUR version
While the Arch Linux “Community” software repository has a relatively recent release of the Eclipse Java IDE, it’s not perfect for everyone. If you’d like to install the AUR release instead, follow the instructions below.
First, start by installing both the Git and the Base-devel packages. These two pieces of software are critical during the installation of the Eclipse Java IDE from the Arch AUR, as it allows for software to compile, as well as allowing for direct interaction with the AUR over Git. To install these packages, open up a terminal window and use the Pacman command below.
sudo pacman -S git base-devel
With the packages installed on Arch Linux, it’s time to download the latest AUR release of Eclipse from the internet. Using the git clone command below, start the downloading process.
The download will take a bit of time. When the process is done, use the CD command to move the terminal window into the “eclipse-devel” folder.
cd eclipse-devel
From here, you’ll be able to compile the software using the makepkg command. Though, keep in mind that when building the software on Arch that problems can happen. Be sure to check the comment section on the AUR for guidance!
makepkg -sri
Generic Linux
The official way to install the Eclipse Java IDE, along with all of the other pieces of software developed by Eclipse is to use the standalone TarGZ installation tool. To get your hands on the installer, start by going to the official Eclipse website.
On the website, look for the “Download” button and select it. From there, find the “Download Packages” button to move to the available options for Eclipse on various platforms.
Once you’ve made it to the “packages” page, look for “Get Eclipse IDE 2019‑06,” and select the download button directly below it to start the download.
After the Linux package is done downloading, open up a terminal window by pressing Ctrl + Alt + T or Ctrl + Shift + T on the keyboard. From there, use the CD command to move the command-line session into the “Downloads” directory.
cd ~/Downloads/
Inside of the “Downloads” folder, use the tar command to extract the Eclipse installation archive.
tar xvf eclipse-inst-linux64.tar.gz
After everything is done extracting in the “Downloads” directory, you’ll see a folder with the label of “eclipse-installer.” Move the command-line session into this directory with the CD command below.
cd eclipse-installer/
Inside of the “eclipse-installer” directory, run the GUI installer with the following terminal command.
./eclipse-inst
Once the GUI installer opens up on the screen, you’ll see several different installation suggestions. Locate the “Eclipse IDE for Java Developers” option, and select it to move to the install page.
On the “Eclipse IDE for Java Developers” page, click the orange “INSTALL” button to install the Eclipse IDE for Java Developers” on your Linux PC.
After the Eclipse installation tool is done, you’ll be able to instantly open up the Java IDE by selecting the green “LAUNCH” button.
Sound is an essential component of a PC. Sure, you can use a computer without sound but it reduces what you can do with it. Most entertainment options go out the window if you don’t have sound. Additionally, if you rely on sound/audio alerts, they cannot be played. If you suddenly find there’s no sound from speakers or headphones on your system, there are a few things you can try to fix the problem.
Restart your system
This advice is never going to get old so, try turning your system off and then on again to see if the sound comes back. It’s possible there was a problem when you booted your system and the sound driver didn’t load properly.
If you have any apps installed for ‘enhancing’ sound, remove them. With those very basic thigns out of the way, here are a few things you can try to fix no sound from speakers or headphones on Windows 10.
Run the sound troubleshooter
Open the Settings app and go to the Update & security group of settings. Select the Troubleshoot tab, scroll down, and run the troubleshooter for audio problems. Apply all fixes that it recommends. Restart your system.
Check enabled device
Access the Control Panel sound settings. Go to the Playback tab and right-click in an empty area inside the list of enabled devices. From the context menu, select ‘Show disabled devices’ and ‘Show disconnected devices’.
Check if any new devices appear. If your speakers show up, right-click them and select the enable option from the context menu. It is possible that the speakers are disconnected which you have to deal with in the Device Manager.
Install/Connect device
Disconnected speakers may be a hardware or a software problem. Before we decide to inspect the hardware, we have to rule out all problems with software. Open Device Manager and expand Sound, videos, and game controllers. Look for your sound card. Right-click it and select Properties from the context menu. On the Properties window, go to the Driver tab. Check if there’s a button to enable the device. If there is, click it, and then restart your system.
Sound Drivers
Sound disappearing from your system may have something to do with the drivers. You will have to try several different things here but you will be working mostly with just the Device Manager. Expand the Sound, video and games controllers and go to your sound card’s properties. Go to the Driver tab and check for driver updates. Install any updates that are available, restart your system, and the check the sound.
If this doesn’t work, return to the Driver tab and roll back to an older driver if the option is there. Restart the system and check sound.
Try a different driver. You can use either Realtek drivers or you can use Microsoft’s generic sound drivers. To change which drivers you’re using, opt to update the driver but instead of letting Windows 10 check for available updates, go with the option to pick drivers from a list.
Finally, try manually installing the sound drivers. Look for the latest version of the sound drivers that are available for your system and install them from outside the Device Manager.
Windows updates
Check if your Windows 10 recently received an update. It could be a feature update or a smaller update that could have caused the problem. Roll back the update and check to see if that fixes the problem. You can roll back the update from the Settings app under Update & security.
End of life
If your PC is particularly old, it is possible that its hardware is no longer supported. A driver update or a Windows 10 update may have installed rendering the audio mute. It’s rare since sound is pretty straight forward but it can happen. You will have to go back to an older, supported versions of the driver or OS, or upgrade your system.
If this hasn’t worked, you might have to entertain the idea that something is wrong with the hardware.
If you’ve newly transitioned from a Windows system to a Mac, you might be somewhat confused as to how you create an app shortcut on macOS. There is no reference to shortcuts anywhere and if you search for them in Spotlight or System Preferences, the Keyboard is mostly what comes up. Shortcuts, whether they’re for files or for apps, exist on macOS. They’re called Aliases and they’re quite useful. Here’s how to create one.
Context menu
Navigate to the file or app that you want to create a shortcut for. Right-click it, and select the Make Alias option from the context menu. This will create a shortcut for the item in the same location. You can then move it wherever you want. Unlike Windows, there’s no context menu option for creating a shortcut on the desktop.
When you use the context menu, the shortcut is always created in the original directory.
Keyboard shortcut
Another way to create an alias or shortcut on macOS is to use the Control+Command+A keyboard shortcut. This works on Catalina and should apply on older versions as well however, if it doesn’t work on yours you can look up what the correct keyboard shortcut is for your version of macOS. To do this, open Finder, select an app and go to the File menu on the menu bar. Make Alias will be listed in the menu with its shortcut next to it.
To execute the shortcut, open Finder, select the item(s) you want to create a shortcut for, and tap the keyboard shortcut.
Drag & drop
If you prefer to use drag & drop to move files on macOS, you’ll be happy to know that you can also use drag & drop to create a file or app shortcut on macOS. Open Finder and select the items(s) you want to create a shortcut for. Hold down the Option+Command keys, and then drag & drop the item(s) to the folder you want to create the alias/shortcut in. This method is the only one where you can create a shortcut in your preferred location in one step. The other two methods listed above require that you move the shortcut after creating it.
Shortcuts, or aliases, retain the thumbnail or icon that the original file/app has however they also have a black arrow to indicate they are not the original file. Deleting an alias is generally harmless however it’s not a good idea to populate the Applications folder with aliases and move your apps elsewhere. On macOS, apps belong in the Applications folder.
Google Cloud SDK is a pack of command-line tools that users can install to interact with the Google Cloud Platform directly. The software works on most Linux operating systems, provided that the Linux system has access to Python2. In this tutorial, we’ll go over all of the ways you can get Google Cloud SDK on Linux.
Arch Linux instructions
Arch Linux doesn’t officially carry the Google Cloud SDK in their package repositories. Instead, if you’d like to get the SDK up and running on your Arch-based PC for development, you’ll have to resort to using the Arch Linux User Repository instead.
Interacting with the AUR on Arch Linux requires installing some packages. These packages are Git (for downloading packages from the internet) and Base-devel (needed to compile programs from source, install AUR programs, etc.) Getting these packages working on Arch is simple. To do it, open up a terminal window using Ctrl + Shift + T or Ctrl + Alt + T on the keyboard. Then, use the Pacman package manager to load everything up.
sudo pacman -S git base-devel
Following the successful installation of the Git and Base-devel packages, it’s time to download the Trizen package build from the AUR. Without Trizen, installing the Cloud SDK is very tedious, and you’ll have to install dependencies by hand. Using the git clone command, download the latest release of Trizen.
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/trizen.git
Use the CD command and move the terminal session into the newly created “trizen” directory.
cd trizen
Inside of the “Trizen” directory, run the makepkg command to generate and install Trizen onto Arch Linux.
makepkg -sri
Finally, use the Trizen AUR package installer to load up Google Cloud SDK on Arch Linux quickly.
trizen -S google-cloud-sdk
Once set up, access the SDK with:
gcloud init
Are you having trouble using the AUR release of Google Cloud SDK on your Arch Linux computer? Feel free to try out the Snap version of the software instead. It’s officially updated and handled by Google, so it’s sure to contain fewer bugs and problems than an unofficial AUR build!
Snap package instructions
Google has uploaded the Cloud SDK toolkit to the Ubuntu Snap store for easy installation. So, if you have to have the latest Google Cloud tools for your projects, but don’t want to deal with downloading everything, and dealing with the setup process on Linux, this is the way to go.
Using Snap packages on Linux is supported by most modern Linux operating systems, like Ubuntu, Debian, Arch Linux, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Gentoo, and others. However, a lot of the distributions that support Snaps don’t do so out of the box, so before attempting to get the Cloud SDK Snap installed, you must enable the Snap runtime on your Linux system.
Enabling the Snap runtime on Linux is quite easy. To do it, open up a terminal window, install the “snapd” package, and enable “snapd.socket” with systemctl as root.
Note: unsure about how to set up the Snap runtime on your Linux system? We can help! Check out this in-depth article all about how to set up Snapd on Linux. Alternatively, try installing Ubuntu Linux, as it has Snaps enabled out of the box!
Once the Snap runtime is up and running on the system, use the snap install command to install the latest Google Cloud SDK.
Be sure to run snap refresh if you need to update the SDK.
Generic Linux instructions
Aside from being available on the Arch Linux AUR and as a Snap package, Google Cloud SDK can be quickly installed to any Linux system by downloading a Tar archive directly from Google’s quickstart page.
There are two versions of the Cloud SDK available for download on Linux: the 32-bit version and the 64-bit version. To start the installation, open up a terminal window by pressing Ctrl + Shift + T or Ctrl + Alt + T on the keyboard. Then, use the curl command to get the latest release.
Note: you may need to install the Curl app before using it to download with the command below.
After the Google Cloud SDK TarGZ file is done downloading to your Linux system, use the tar command to extract the contents of the archive.
tar zxvf google-cloud-sdk-251.0.0-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
Or
tar zxvf google-cloud-sdk-251.0.0-linux-x86.tar.gz
Running the extraction command should create a new folder in your home directory (~) labeled “google-cloud-sdk.” Using the CD command, move into that directory and start up the installation script.
cd google-cloud-sdk ./google-cloud-sdk/install.sh
The installation script is quick and will get the SDK set up thoroughly on your Linux system. When it’s done, access it with:
Minecraft turned 10 this year and in celebration, Mojang not only offered a reasonable discount for the game which is something that never happens, but also released classic Minecraft for free. Classic Minecraft is Minecraft when it was first developed. It was basic, to say the least. You had very few blocks to build with and, unfortunately, no evil mobs to fight off. Here’s how you can play classic Minecrafft in a browser.
Play Classic Minecraft
Classic Minecraft has limitations, as you can guess. For one, you cannot save a game, you can’t use your usual Minecraft/Mojang/Microsoft account to login, you cannot join any existing server games, and basically anything to do with your main account will not work with it.
You need a fairly modern browser for this. Chrome and Firefox will do. You need a keyboard and a mouse to play. Even if you have a game controller connected to your system, it will not work with the game.
You can play together with up to nine players, and you can have a small, medium, or huge map to play on. Visit this page, and it will generate a new game for you. Enter a nickname for yourself. The game will give you a link that you can share with your friends and invite them to play the same game.
You get a brief overview of the controls and since they’re basic, there isn’t much for you to learn. There are no tools so items all ‘break’ with one click, and are similarly placed with another.
The WASD keys are used for movement, the Spacebar for jumping, and F for toggling fog.
While this isn’t going to take as much toll on your system as the actual game played as a desktop app, it’s still going to consume lots of RAM through your browser. It’s a good idea to make sure nothing on your system is consuming too much RAM. Close other tabs when you play.
We’ll be honest; this isn’t a super-immersive experience. You won’t be playing for hours. It’s a bit of nostalgia which is good in moderation. You’re basically playing the game in creative mode; you can build what you want with whatever blocks are available to you. If your friends join in, you can build together.
If you initiate a game, and leave it when there are no other players in the game, the game will be lost/end. If there are other players in the game, you can rejoin it by visiting its link.
Chrome has experimental features that normally are turned off by default. In some rare cases, an experimental feature may be enabled but that normally happens when the feature is fairly stable. These experimental features can be enabled by a user and it’s done from the Chrome Flags page. You can change quite a few things and it’s just as easy to change a flag back to its default value. Here’s how you can reset Chrome flags to their default values.
Reset Chrome flags
You can reset Chrome flags one by one, or all at once. We’re going to show you how to do both.
Open Chrome and paste the following in the URL bar to go to the Flags page.
chrome://flags/
If you want to reset Chrome flags one by one, you need to know which ones you’ve modified. Scroll through the list of flags and any flag with a blue dot to its left has been modified. Open the dropdown next to it, and select Default to reset it to its default state. You will need to relaunch Chrome after making this change.
If you want to reset all Chrome flags in one go, visit the Chrome Flags page and you will see a ‘Reset all to default’ button at the very top, next to the search bar. Click it and it will reset all the flags to their default state. Again, you will have to relaunch Chrome.
Chrome flags are applied to the entire browser i.e., they are not profile specific and there’s no way to restrict a change to just one profile. The flags’ state is not synced across devices though so if you have Chrome sync enabled, and you use Chrome on different systems where you’ve modified the flags, you will have to reset them on each device individually.
While flags aren’t so unstable that they’ll crash Chrome, or render it unusable, if you happen to run into such a situation where you are no longer able to open Chrome after modifying the state of a flag, you can uninstall and reinstall Chrome. A fresh installation of Chrome will have all its flags set to their default state.
Chrome has the same flags for both its Windows and Mac versions and the process for resetting them to their default states is the same. Flags are not the same as switches so make sure the feature you want to disable was enabled via a flag and not a switch.
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