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Windows: ImageMagick Install Guide

Why ImageMagick is Recommended Why should you use ImageMagick? Free - no subscriptions, nothing to required to buy sponsorship is most welcomed though! 1 Offline - no having to upload your personal files online Format support: JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, and PDF Open source2 Been around since forever (2009😜) 3 Why Use ImageMagick as a Software Developer? it uses the command line - impress your friends lots of utilities and arguments for editing and manipulating images - impress yourself Where to Get ImageMagick For Windows ImageMagick can be downloaded at ImageMagick - Download. The ImageMagick team recommends a version at the top of the table ending in Q16-HDRI-x64-dll.exe. ...

September 17, 2024
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Windows: Best Way to Convert HEIC to JPEG or PNG

In this article, we’ll show how easy it is to convert HEIC images to JPEG or PNG format a command-line tool. This method is simple and efficient way to convert individual or multiple HEIC images quickly. The best way to convert HEIC to JPEG or PNG is ✨magic✨ once you have the correct tool: ✨ImageMagick✨ Summary Use ImageMagick to convert the HEIC to JPEG or PNG with the following commands: ...

September 16, 2024
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Windows: How to Quiet Loud Computer Fans

If you have a powerful PC or laptop (read: power hungry ⚡), the fans on the PC or laptop can become too loud during load. All this noise can be annoying if you’re just using your system day to day. If you are okay losing some performance you can easily tweak your power settings to prevent the fans going into turbo mode and sounding like a jet engine. ⚠️Warning: This could potentially affect performance ...

September 15, 2024
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PowerShell: Aliases

The other day I was looking something up for PowerShell and realized that cat command for the classic ‘Windows Command Shell’1 is an alias of Get-Content PowerShell cmdlet. I wondered what other aliases does PowerShell have. There is an extensive collection of about 138 default aliases on PowerShell going to 109 PowerShell cmdlets on Windows. PowerShell was designed to work with other operating systems too, like Linux and MacOs. If you are new to PowerShell, then these aliases are a good place to learn commands that are often used. ...

September 6, 2024
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Demystifying Windows UI Technology

Introduction As a Windows developer you’ve considered creating a graphical user interface (GUI). The inevitable question that comes up is: which Windows GUI technology should I use? I tried to answer that question myself, and thought surely everyone is still using Windows API (ye olde Win32 API) with GDI/GDI+! Right? No? Oh, let’s see what there is now… WinUI, WPF, WinForms, UWP, .NET MAUI, oh my, the list goes on. Why did these all come about? ...

January 4, 2024
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Windows Terminal: Quake Mode

Cool trick with the Windows Terminal is Quake mode. The name comes from the Quake games’ console. The Quake console was used to send commands to the game such as /god for God mode or /give all to get all game items. The Quake in-game console was shown by pressing tilde ~ key. A similar behavior can be accomplished with Windows Terminal called Quake mode. In Windows Terminal quake mode the terminal is snapped to the top of the screen. The bottom of the window can be sized but the window is docked to the top. ...

July 27, 2023
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Windows Terminal Starting Directory

I often need to jump into a command-line interface (CLI) in Windows from an Explorer window. Previous, I used to type cmd . into Explorer’s current directory (press F4 to hightlight) to open the current directory. However, I have been using Windows Terminal (wt) more than the classic Command Prompt (cmd) for some of the quality of life features (e.g., tabs). To call Windows Terminal from Explorer type wt into the current directory – but this does not open the current directory. Neither does wt ., you’ll get an obscure error: [error 2147942405 (0x80070005) when launching .]. If you look at the help (wt --help), it is burried in the help. If you do wt new-tab --help will have the starting directory command. ...

July 20, 2023
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PowerShell: Create Text File

Command Prompt to PowerShell To create a new text file using PowerShell, use New-Item. Classically, done by echo "some text" > into-a-file.txt, but PowerShell New-Item provides more robustness. The equvalent of the echo redirect > to a new file is PowerShell cmdlet New-Item. In this example, output hello into a new text file in the current directory called myFile.txt. echo hello > myFile.txt New-Item ".\myFile.txt" -Value "hello" -Force Note that New-Item does not replace the file if it already exists by default, we can use -Force to emulate the behavior of the echo redirect. If you run the command without -Force it will give error: New-Item: The file 'C:\myFile.txt' already exists. ...

June 1, 2023
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Windows: Backup Files

Backing up files on Windows without any additional software is best done by Robocopy. Robocopy is short for “Robust File Copy” and is a command-line utility for file and directory copying for Windows. Using Robocopy is the easiest way to backup files in Windows without using any additional software. The command is robocopy. Basic usage is: robocopy <source> <destination> To use it to back up files, there are two general approaches (more exist but this is a good start): ...

February 22, 2022
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Best 4 Ways to Convert an Image to PDF

Adobe Acrobat is probably the most professional way to convert an image to a PDF but it requires creating/signing into an account and paying a monthly fee – no thanks! I propose alternative ways to convert an image to a PDF depending what is available on your computer. Method 1: Convert Image to PDF using MS Word If Microsoft Word is available then the easiest method is to use Word and Export to a PDF. The easiest and highest quality method to convert an image (e.g., jpg, png, bmp, etc) to pdf is to use Microsoft Word. No need for external apps or websites. ...

September 6, 2021