Articles for category: Software (Tech & Development)

Microsoft Office apps will soon preload on Windows boot for faster launch

WTF?! Microsoft is rolling out a clever tweak to help Office apps launch faster on Windows. Dubbed “Startup Boost,” this new feature quietly runs in the background as soon as you log in the operating system, preloading “performance enhancements” so apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint open more quickly when you need them. The announcement comes from the Microsoft 365 Message Center. The feature works by preloading parts of Office apps into memory after Windows startup and keeping them in a paused state until you actually launch them. If the system needs those resources back, it will automatically clear them.

March Madness 2025: How to Watch the Elite Eight Today

How’s your bracket looking after three rounds of the tournament? Hopefully you picked the favorites because all four No. 1 seeds and three of the four No. 2 seeds are still dancing. The lack of upsets has made this edition of March Madness feel less mad than past years but it also sets up some big matchups for the Elite Eight today and tomorrow.  Here’s everything you need to know to watch or stream March Madness, all the way up to the Final Four games and national championship in April. Cooper Flagg and No. 1 Duke face No. 2 Alabama

The best Amazon Spring Sale deals on kitchen tech from Ninja, Breville, KitchenAid and others

Food is probably the third most-discussed topic in Engadget’s Slack rooms. Having more than a few cuisine-obsessed folk on staff means when there’s an opportunity to review a new bit of cooking tech, we jump at the chance. Right now, thanks to Amazon’s Spring Sale, a long list of the kitchen tech we’ve covered is on sale. We’re seeing discounts on brands like KitchenAid, Breville, Instant Pot and more. So if it’s time to update your meal prep situation or invest in a time saver for weeknight dinners, check out the best deals on the kitchen tech we recommend. The

‘An Open Letter To Meta: Support True Messaging Interoperability With XMPP’

In 1999 Slashdot reader Jeremie announced “a new project I recently started to create a complete open-source platform for Instant Messaging with transparent communication to other IM systems (ICQ, AIM, etc).” It was the first release of the eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, and by 2008 Slashdot was asking if XMPP was “the next big thing.” Facebook even supported it for third-party chat clients until 2015. And here in 2025, the chair of the nonprofit XMPP Standards Foundation is long-time Slashdot reader ralphm, who is now issuing this call to action at XMPP.org: The European Digital Markets Act (DMA) is

DNS Explained: From Basics to Building My Own DNS Server

Hey everyone! 👋 I’m Naman, a full-stack developer passionate about networking and system design. Recently, I built my own DNS server using Go, and in this blog, I’ll walk you through the fundamentals of DNS and how did i create my own DNS server from scratch. Let’s dive in! 🌍 What is DNS and Why is it Important? DNS (Domain Name System) is like the phonebook of the internet. It translates human-friendly domain names (like google.com) into machine-readable IP addresses (like 142.250.182.206). Imagine if every time you wanted to visit a website, you had to type in a long, numeric

How to Port CV/ML Models to NPU for Faster Face Recognition

Recently, our development team faced a new challenge: one of our partners was implementing an access control system using a single-board computer from Forlinx. To meet the existing time constraints for face recognition operations, we decided to port our models to the NPU. What we can say after porting is that the NPU is generally a reliable way to put heavy processing on an edge device. So, our partner needed to detect faces in a video stream and provide 1:1 matching (face verification). To better understand what this means, let’s recall the basic face recognition pipeline diagram. How Face Recognition

Veloren

In this second flashback episode of TWiV, we look at combat’s rolling remixes, shiny new goodies, plus some puzzles and newspapers. — horblegorble, TWiV Contributor Contributor work Thanks to everyone who contributed to veloren these last weeks: @isse, @c… 14 minute read11 February 2025 Step into the time machine, as we begin a short series of catch up posts to bring ourselves up to speed with what’s been happening in Veloren. It’s been a relatively busy few months to start the year, with contributors new and old bringing their energy to… 13 minute read22 January 2025 The last few weeks