The Epson ET-8550 has been a great addition to the printing arsenal, especially with the Shaq-approved ink tanks! I used this to print photos from my Mac, and standard quality still produces perfectly usable and fast prints from Adobe Lightroom. I could easily print a 4×6 or 5×7 within 10-20 seconds.

It’s back again for the holiday season, and this year it shows-off everybody’s favorite 8-bit drawing app – MS Paint! The previous years’ releases included sweaters for Windows 95 and Windows XP, and although they were available this morning, they have since sold out. If the MS Paint version of the sweater isn’t your jam, you can add it to your wish list or share your email, and they’re let you know when some become available. And not only does your sweater purchase cloak you in some sweet nostalgia, but it also helps a great cause. $20 from every sweater purchase goes to GirlsWhoCode, a non-profit whose mission is to close the gender gap in technology and to change the image of what a programmer looks like and does. And on top of that, Microsoft will contribute a minimum of $50,000. That’s goodness, all-around. So, go get your sweater here!

Earlier this week, Windows Insiders who were part of the Fast Ring, got their first glimpse of an isolated desktop environment called Windows Sandbox. Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 18305 contains this new capability that will allow users to test out applications, untrusted or otherwise, without the fear of it destroying their existing their existing desktop environment. Through the magic of the Windows hypervisor (and some Windows Containers goodness), this isolated non-persistent environment looks just like a Windows 10 virtual machine with its own file system, registry, and network connectivity, but is walled off from your actual desktop protecting it from any rogue-ness that could otherwise render your installation unusable. Enabling Windows Sandbox If you’re on the Fast Ring and have upgraded to build 18305, then enabling Windows Sandbox is pretty simple. Navigate to Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs, Turn Windows features on or off, then in the list of Windows…

I actually stumbled across this setting recently, and it reminded me of a Windows “throwback”. It seems to simple, but I forgot that things actually used to be like this. Somewhere along the way, probably with Windows 7, Microsoft started to try to utilize the taskbar space more efficiently. With that, you saw the use of combined taskbar icons, meaning that if you had three separate documents opened in Word, you’d see a single Word icon in the taskbar, but see that there were icons/instances “combined” underneath it and also the text label for the icon was hidden or collapsed. This saves screen real estate, but can make it harder to know what is open at a glance.

If you’re unable to get the automatic upgrade for Windows 10 to work with your Dell Venue 8 Pro, try using the Microsoft media creation tool to get there. Depending on how much free space you have, an SD card may be required for the download to be stored. The media creation tool will prompt you if you’re short on space for this operation. For my upgrade, I opted to have the media creation tool and Windows 10 setup wipe everything so I could start fresh. Since all of my important files, pictures, etc. are sync’d online, I wasn’t concerned about the loss of any local content. This is probably not the case for most people, so back up your files before you start. Note that although this was written with the Dell Venue 8 Pro in mind, this process works on an activated Windows 8.1 setup as well. The…