How to Access iCloud Photos from Your PC

iCloud makes file sharing between multiple Apple devices faster and more convenient. When you buy a song from iTunes on your iPhone, it automatically goes into your computer as well as into your iPad, if you have one. Now you’ve taken a picture using your iPhone or iPad and want to share it using the PC. How do you gain access to that photo using an iCloud-enabled PC? Step 1 will get you started.

STEPS

1

Access the iCloud Control Panel download page. Open your browser and enter this URL link: www.icloud.com/icloudcontrolpanel. It will bring you to the site to download the iCloud Control Panel

2

Download the iCloud Control Panel. Click on the blue “Download,” and wait for the installer to finish downloading.

3

Install the iCloud Control Panel. Click on the downloaded EXE file at the bottom of your browser to start the installation process.

If the file isn’t at the bottom of your browser, locate it in your default Downloads folder; once you’ve found the file, double-click on it to run it.

Wait for the installation to finish; the program’s shortcut icon should appear on your desktop.

4

Turn on iCloud. Just click on the program’s icon in the Start menu or on your desktop. iCloud will require you to enter your Apple ID and password. Do so on the fields provided.

5

Open iTunes. After entering your Apple ID and password, close the iCloud Control Panel, and open iTunes.

6

Access your photos. To check your photos, go to My Computer located in the Start menu. A new category will be added into the My Computer menu: the Others category will now have the iCloud Photos menu. Double-click on this to access your photos on iCloud.

How to Disable iCloud

iCloud is an Apple cloud storage service that allows users to sync personal information across all their iOS devices; such as music, photos, documents, mail, contacts, calendars, and more. iOS users, Mac OS X users, and Windows users can all disable iCloud from within the iCloud application on their devices.

Method 1 of 4: Disabling iCloud on iOS

1

Tap on “Settings” from the home screen of your iOS device.

2

Tap on “iCloud.”

3

Scroll to the verify bottom of the iCloud screen and tap on “Delete Account.” iCloud will now be turned off and disabled on your iOS device, and will no longer store your personal data.[1]

Method 2 of 4: Disabling iCloud on Mac OS X

1

Click on the Apple menu and select “System Preferences.”   

                                                                          2

Click on “iCloud.” The iCloud preferences menu will display on-screen.[2]

                                                                                 3

Click on “Sign Out.” iCloud will now be disabled, and will no longer back up your information.

Method 3 of 4: Disabling iCloud in Windows 8

                                        1

Navigate to your computer’s Start screen and select the “iCloud” application. The iCloud Control Panel will display on-screen.

If using Windows 8.1, click on the down arrow located in the lower-left corner of your screen to access the iCloud app.[3]

                                                                               2 

Click on “Sign Out.” iCloud will now be disabled, and will no longer store your personal data.

Method 4 of 4: Disabling iCloud in Windows 7

1

Click on the “Start” menu and select “All Programs.”

2

Point to the folder labeled “iCloud” and select the iCloud application. The iCloud Control Panel will display on-screen.

3

Click on “Sign Out.” iCloud will now be turned off and disabled, and will no longer back up your personal information.

How to Clean a Touch Screen

Two Methods:Using a microfiber clothUsing alcohol gel

Smudges all over your gadget's touchscreen? Maybe the fingerprint trail for the latest, must-have game you are addicted to lies on your screen? Regularly cleaning your cell phone, tablet, MP3 player's touchscreen, or any other touch screen device is essential for its upkeep and longevity. Learn how to wipe away those smudges with ease and how to avoid doing things your touchscreen would not appreciate.

Method 1 of 2: Using a microfiber cloth

1

Choose a microfiber cloth. This is ideal for cleaning a touchscreen. Some devices will have such a cloth included or perhaps you can borrow one you use on your sunglasses.

.The cost of such cloth varies. For cloth recommended by companies for their products, the price can be considerably higher simply because of the recommendation. Look around for a good deal on such cloth or substitute with a cheaper but still effective microfiber cloth.

2

Turn off the device before commencing to clean it. It is usually much easier to see where to clean when the device is switched off.

3

Give the screen a once over by brushing it with the microfiber in small circles. This will remove the majority of simple imperfections.

4

Only if truly needed, moisten a cotton cloth, even the corner of your cotton shirt, and repeat the small circular motions. It may actually be enough to just breathe over the screen and use that moisture to clean with.

Read the instructions accompanying the cloth you're using. Some of them need to be made slightly damp before use. If this is the case, skip this step and follow the cloth's instructions instead.

If dampening a cloth, it is best to use distilled water.

5

Brush again with the microfiber cloth to finish off. Don't over-rub though! And if there is any dampness left, just leave it to air dry.

Do not put too much pressure on the screen when cleaning it.

6

Wash the microfiber cloth. To wash the microfiber cloth, soak it in warm, soapy water. The warm water serves to open the fibers and release the grime that may have gathered. Scrub the cloth lightly while soaking it (not too hard or you will damage the cloth). After soaking, avoid squeezing out any excess water, let the cloth out to air dry. If you're in a hurry, you may want to blow dry it. Do not wash any screens with the cloth until dry (or lightly damp) to the touch.

          Method 2 of 2: Using alcohol gel

This method is good because the sanitizer kills all the germs.

1

Get some alcohol gel. It is also known as hand sanitizer.

2

Take a clean paper towel.

3

Squeeze a little gel into the paper towel.

4

Wipe down the screen.

5

Use a clean microfiber cloth to remove smudges - but there shouldn't be any!

How to Add a Printer to Mac or iOS Devices

Are you finding it difficult to add a printer to your Mac device? When the print command is given to the Mac OS X app, then printing dialog appears representing a sheet with the window. In the printer popup menu, you can check the lists of all the available printers that can be used to accomplish printing jobs. The Apple Mac OS X device has the built-in software for few printers, this helps in automatically adding printer to the list when USB port is needed.

Steps

1

Connect Printer to the PC. Before you begin with the printing process, make sure the printer is properly connected to your computer system, and check all the cables are plugged in nicely. Then turn on the device.

2

Browse Printer Menu. In the Mac OS X v 10.2.8 or earlier versions, you can go in the ‘Printer’ menu to select ‘Edit Printer List’. As soon as you do this, the Printer List window appears soon. You can now select the ‘Show Printer List’ in the ‘View’ menu and then the ‘Printer List window’ appears

3

Add Printer. Now look for the ‘Add Printer’ button and click it for establishing connectivity with the printer and the computer system.

4

Complete USB Printer Connectivity. In the first popup menu, you have to select USB. Then your printer appearing in the list is selected. Click on ‘Add’ option. After completing the connectivity, close the ‘Printer List Window’

How to Build a Supercomputer

Are you in need of a machine that can deliver hundreds of trillions of floating-point calculations per second? Or are you in need of a bar story about how the supercomputer in your basement flipped a breaker? Building your own High Performance Compute cluster, a.k.a. supercomputer, is a challenge any expert geek with a weekend of free time and some cash to burn can tackle. Technically speaking, a modern, multi-processor supercomputer is a network of computers working together in parallel to solve a problem. This article will briefly describe each step in the process, focusing on hardware and software.

Steps

1

First determine the hardware components and resources needed. You will need one head node, at least a dozen identical compute nodes, an Ethernet switch, a power distribution unit, and a rack. Determine the electrical demand, cooling and space required. Also decide on what IP address you want for your private networks, what to name the nodes, what software packages you want installed, and what technology you want to provide the parallel computing capabilities (more on this later).

Though the hardware is expensive, all software listed in this how-to is free, and most are open source.

If you would like to see how fast your supercomputer would theoretically be, use this tool: http://hpl-calculator.sourceforge.net/

2

Build the compute nodes. You will need to assemble the compute nodes or acquire pre-build servers.

Choose a computer server chassis that maximizes space, cooling, and energy efficiency.

Or you can utilize a dozen or so used, outdated servers - whose whole will outweigh the sum of their parts yet save you a sizable lump of cash. All processors, network adapters, and motherboards should be identical for the whole system to play together nicely. Of course, don't forget about RAM and storage for each node and at least one optical drive for the head node.

3

Install the servers into the rack. Start from the bottom, so the rack isn't top heavy. You will need a friend to help you with this - the dense servers can be very heavy and guiding them into the rails that hold them into the rack is difficult.

4

Install the Ethernet switch above the server chassis. Take this moment to configure the switch: allow for jumbo frame sizes of 9000 bytes, set the IP address to the static address you decided on in step 1, and turn off unnecessary routing protocols such as SMTP Snooping.

5

Install the PDU (Power Distribution Unit). Depending on how much current your nodes may need at maximum load, you may need 220 volts for high performance computing.

6

With everything installed, you can begin the configuration process. Linux is the de facto OS for HPC clusters–not only is it the ideal environment for scientific computing, but it doesn't cost a thing to install it on hundreds or even thousands of nodes. Imagine how much it would cost to install Windows on all those nodes?

Begin with installing the latest version of the motherboard BIOS and firmware, which should be the same on all nodes.

Install your preferred linux distro on each node, with a graphical UI for the head node. Popular choices include CentOS, OpenSuse, Scientific Linux, RedHat, and SLES.

This author highly recommends using the Rocks Cluster Distribution. In addition to installing all the tools necessary for a compute cluster to function, Rocks uses a great method for 'distributing' many instances of itself to the nodes very quickly using PXE boot and the Red Hat 'Kick Start' procedure.

7

Install the message-passing interface, resource-manager, and other necessary libraries. If you didn't install Rocks in the previous step, you will have to manually setup the necessary software to enable the parallel computing mechanisms.

First you will need a portable bash management system, such as the Torque Resource Manager, which allows you to break-up and distribute tasks to multiple machines.

Pair Torque with the Maui Cluster Scheduler to complete the setup.

Next you will need to install the message passing interface, necessary for the individual processes on the separate compute nodes to share the same data. OpenMP is a no-brainer.

Don't forget the multi-threading math libraries and compilers to build your parallel computing programs. Did I mention that you should just install Rocks?

8

Network the compute nodes together. The head node sends the compute tasks to the compute nodes, which in turn must send the result back, as well as sending messages to each other. The faster the better.

Use a private ethernet network to connect all the nodes in the cluster.

The head node can also act as a NFS, PXE, DHCP, TFTP, and NTP server over the Ethernet network.

You must separate this network from public networks, which ensures that broadcast packets don't interfere with other networks in your LAN.

9

Test the cluster. The last thing you may want to do before releasing all this compute power to your users is test it's performance. The HPL (High Performance Lynpack) benchmark is a popular choice for measuring the computational speed of the cluster. You will need to compile it from source with all possible optimizations your compiler offers for the architecture you chose.

You must, of course, compile from source with all possible optimization options for your platform. For example, if using AMD CPUs, compile with Open64 with -0fast optimization level.

Compare your results on TOP500.org to compare your cluster to the fastest 500 supercomputers in the world!

How to Add a Sound Device to a Computer

Are you looking for a way to add a sound device to your computer? Well, here is a simple solution so easy, that even a cave man can do it!

Steps

1

Go to your start menu. It's the button in the bottom left or top left corner on your computer.

2

Once you have pressed the start menu button, your computer menu should pop up on the side. Do not go to "Programs". Instead, look on the right column and search for the control panel.

3

Click on it and wait a while for the control panel to load.

4

Within a few seconds, your control panel should pop-up. Proceed looking through the different icons until you see a button that says "Hardware and Sound."

5

Click where it says "Add a device".

6

Follow the set up wizard to add the device.