Tausi Insider

Photo : Piotr Piatrouski ( Shutterstock ) Spotify and Apple Music may be great for music discovery , but they don’t do a great job telling you more about who you’re listening to. You could know every lyric to “Don’t Stop Believin’,” but if you don’t know what year it came out, you’re going to let your trivia team down. (I t’s 1981, by the way.) NowPlaying is an app that wants to become the encyclopedia of music trivia. It gives you more information about the song, album, artist, or band you’re listening to, and goes into some pretty great details along the way— including where the song or album was recorded, and the names of all of the musicians who worked on any track. The app listens to songs playing around you, or links with your Apple Music account to pick up songs from your playing history, which makes it pretty convenient to look up trivia. It packages that information in a nice interface, as well. To give you a sample of what you can expect, we looked up Green Da...

Photo : Rawpixel.com ( Shutterstock ) It’s the time of year when everyone shares their Spotify’s Wrapped statistics, b ut there’ s a new and unique way that some people are sharing their top artists . What is Instafest? Instafest is a third- party app that’ s been making its rounds, where m usic listeners get to showcase their top artists in a three -day festival lineup for mat and share it with the world. Here’s how to make yours. How to make your dream “music festival” Creating your ultimate music festival is easy. When you go to the Instafest.app link, you’ll be prompted to sign in with three options: Spotify, Apple Music, or Last.fm. Choose whichever platform you use the most to have the most accurate results . Log in with that account and accept the terms. Will y ou be giving your data away to advertisers ? Yes, probably. G/O Media may get a commission 13% Off Meta Quest 2 Bundle Enter a new reality This bundle packs in the Meta Quest VR headset itself, two controllers...

Screenshot : Flow Launcher The Everything app is great for quickly searching through files, but it’s no Spotlight search. If you’re looking for something like Spotlight (or Alfred), try out the Flow Launcher . It’s free, open-source, and has a great array of community plugins. Flow Launcher is a keyboard launcher that looks like Spotlight, if it was designed using the Fluent design language. Use Alt+Space to bring up the launcher, then type out your query. You can use this shortcut to launch apps, search the web, find files, do calculations, run shell scripts, and more. And, of course, there’s a plug-in store to enhance the functionality even further. https://www.tausiinsider.com/7-apps-to-get-the-best-mac-features-on-windows/?feed_id=328458&_unique_id=64252a1903627

Photo : morrowlight ( Shutterstock ) On a computer, selecting multiple things at the same time is easy—y ou obviously click and drag to highlight whatever you want. On your iPhone, though , it’s a different story. Depending on the app, your obvious options are to hit “Select All” or choose the “Edit” button and tediously tap away at each item you want to select. But, as it happens, your iPhone has a hidden trick that lets you select items in bulk: Instead of tapping to select multiple items, you can use a simple swipe to breeze through your selection. As long as the app supports it, take two fingers and swipe over the items you want to select, and iOS will select those items . You can even drag down to the bottom of the screen to scroll and select, or lift off the screen and repeat the gesture to highlight another group of items. It’s a lot of fun. Once you’ve selected multiple items, you can tap and hold the screen to reveal bulk actions like delete, share, and copy. Right now...

Image : spacedrone808 ( Shutterstock ) Windows 7 launched in October of 2009 . Barack Obama was president, Avatar was soon to hit movie theaters, and swine flu was officially declared a global pandemic. The world has changed a lot since then (for example, Avatar 2 is set in the water instead of the forest), and so has Windows. While Microsoft “ officially” ended support for Windows 7 on Jan. 14, 2020, this week, it’s truly, officially dead. If you’re still using it (or Windows 8.1, for that matter) you really shouldn’t be. As reported by Bleeping Computer , Microsoft will pull the plug on software support for the Extended Security Update (ESU) program for Windows 7 on Tuesday, Jan. 10. This program provided a three-year paid exception to Microsoft’s abandoning of Windows 7 for Professional and Enterprise users who relied on the operating system to run specific software. As of this week, however, even ESU customers will find their versions of Windows 7 as unsupported as the res...

Photo : Shutterstock ( Shutterstock ) L ike many veteran internet users, I have had my Google Account for a long time. More than a decade in, I’m running out of my free 15GB of storage, and most of that space is t aken up by Gmail. While the majority of those messages are junk and spam, some are important to me, so I don’t want to delete things haphazardly—but sorting through them would take forever . If you find yourself in similar straits,   do what I did: download your Gmail emails to your computer as an easy backup. There are two steps to dealing with a Gmail backup . The first, of course, is downloading the messages from Google, but it doesn’t end there. Google will send you the files in .mbox format, a file format none of the apps on your computer can likely read. But, that’s okay. We’ll fix that. How to download your Gmail emails (gmails?) Google makes it easy to save your Gmail messages. H ead to Google, click your profile icon, and choose “Manage your Google Account....

Photo : GaudiLab ( Shutterstock ) If you’re tired of music streaming apps deciding what you should listen to, you can take back the power . PlaylistAI is an app that uses AI to help you create playlists easily, and it is compatible with Spotify and Apple Music. It lets you specify the kind of music you’re looking for and creates custom playlists for you. Here are a few ways you can use PlaylistAI to expand your musical horizons. Create playlists from music festival posters Big music festivals tend to announce their lineups with a large poster that contains the names of all participating bands. PlaylistAI can scan these posters, identify all the artists, and create stunning playlists for you. You simply take a screenshot of a posters and upload it in PlaylistAI . I tried this with a poster for the Bottlerock music festival. The app identified all the bands in the poster and gave an option to remove the ones I wasn’t interested in. It also asks you to choose the number o...

Photo : g0d4ather ( Shutterstock ) My friends, it’s been a great run—but Microsoft will stop selling Windows 10 on Tuesday, Jan. 31, one week from this article’s publication. The news isn’t necessarily shocking , since the company has been full-steam-ahead with Windows 11 since October 2021. However, it’s still a sad development. Windows 10 is the preferred OS for many PC users who still can’t stomach upgrading. Of course, Windows 10 isn’t dead . Microsoft will continue to support both Windows 10 Home and Windows 10 Pro until Oct. 14, 2025, giving plenty of us on PC an excuse to keep running the OS until then. If you already have Windows 10 running on your PC, you’re good to go. But if you’re going to build a PC, you’re going to need a new license to install the beloved OS. Here’s where you can get one. Buy Windows 10 from Microsoft directly (while you can) As of this article, Microsoft is still selling Windows 10 licenses on its website. You can buy Windows 10 Home for $139, a...

Photo : PixieMe ( Shutterstock ) The Start Menu is an iconic Windows element (let’s pretend Windows 8 never happened). It’s the launch pad of Windows, providing access to files, apps, controls, and more. But lately, the Start menu hasn’t been working as expected, and neither have Windows search or certain apps. There’s a reason for that, and, while there’s no official fix yet, there are workarounds to get things going again. What’s up with the Window’s Start menu bug? If you notice your Start menu not responding, you’re not alone. As reported by BleepingComputer , Windows is currently experiencing issues with the Start menu, Windows search, and Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps. Microsoft confirmed as much in this post about known issues with Windows 11 version 22H2. However, the bug affects other client versions of Windows as well, including Windows 10, version 22H2; Windows 11, version 21H2; Windows 10, version 21H2; Windows 10, version 20H2. According to Microsoft, the p...