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By Usama Jawad96
PSA: Microsoft may have sent you Store credit to spend on the Spring Sale
by Usama Jawad
Microsoft's Spring Sale is well underway with the company offering up to 75% off on Xbox titles and up to 50% off on media content on the Microsoft Store. Notable deals include DOOM Eternal Deluxe Edition for $29.69, Red Dead Redemption 2 for $26.99, and Star Wars: Squadrons for $19.99, among others. It now appears that the company is also sending out complimentary gift cards to some people to spend on the sale.
Numerous users have reported on Twitter that they have received messages from Microsoft on Xbox which contain complimentary $10 Store cards. Although the credit can be redeemed until April 30 and has to be spent within 90 days after redemption, the implied messaging from Microsoft is that it wants you to spend it on game purchases on the Xbox Spring Sale.
On our side, we also noticed that we received a similar "surprise" in a promotional email from Microsoft a couple of days ago that contained a redeemable Microsoft Store card code. However, visiting the URL now showed that the gift cards are no longer available.
While the distribution of credit appears to be quite random, we recommend that you check both your emails as well as your Xbox messages to see whether you have been graced by Microsoft's goodwill. The company is likely banking on the possibility that once you receive free credits, you'll visit the Microsoft Store to purchase something and end up spending your own money too. However, given the wide variety of deals on offer, that's not necessarily a bad thing - provided you don't go over budget, of course. You can check out Xbox Spring Sale deals over here and discounts on movies and TV shows here.
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By Steven P.
PSA: If Google Chrome is freezing when using text fields, here's a fix
by Steven Parker
Once in a while, you might find Chrome misbehaving when inputting text into text fields. You may find that when typing something and maybe accidentally choosing a suggested autofill, you can no longer change the text in the text field. It's a common problem and although we're currently on Chrome v89 it seems like a fix is still a ways off.
Google has not shared an official fix for this particular problem but users of the browser have blamed things like Kasperksy and Hardware Acceleration, in short, the jury is still out. There's a couple of options that work from directly in the browser. The first is a temporary fix:
Clear saved autofill data in the Chrome browser (versions 73 and higher)
Open Chrome Open the top right Chrome Menu (three vertical dots in the upper right of the browser) Select More tools > Clear browsing data... Select the Advanced tab Change Time range to All time Check Autofill form data Select Clear data Doing this will also clear your saved addresses, but it will clear everything that you ever typed in a text field from within Chrome. It does not clear previously typed in web addresses or searches from the address bar, which appears to be excluded from the Autofill form data setting.
The second, more drastic option is to disable autofill altogether (versions 73 and higher):
Open Chrome. Open the top right Chrome Menu (three vertical dots in the upper right of the browser) Select Settings Under Autofill, select Addresses and more Toggle the slider off for Save and fill addresses Doing this disables text fields from populating what you previously typed, which frees up a bit of memory for the browser as it won't have to cache or sync that data across devices.
We won't delve too far into the unofficial ways users have reported a bit of success with by tinkering with other app settings, you can find those in the Google peer support thread, but do let us know if you've had success with combating this problem another way in the comments below.
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By Steven P.
Turn off Topic Suggestions and Interests at Twitter with this handy script
by Steven Parker
One morning while checking out a link to a tweet directly on Twitter, it showed I had an unread notification, but this was not so on Tweeten. Intrigued, I went and had a look and saw that Twitter was suggesting for me to follow topics on "Manchester United FC"... huh? As a Portsmouth FC fan that follows the official club Twitter handle as well as several people affiliated with Pompey (including the owner of the club) it makes me wonder why Twitter is suggesting a football club I clearly have no interest in. In fact, the whole Topic Suggestions feature is annoying, I keep dismissing them and more come each day, whatever happened to just letting users sign up to lists or search for interests themselves?
Topics initially launched back at the end of 2019 as a means to opt into topics of interest; it plugs into "Interests", which is a tracking feature that tries to make sense of your behavior when interacting with Twitter and then builds a profile of what you're most likely interested in, which in turn then suggests those interests as Topics to follow.
Anyway, there is a way to turn them off thanks to some code uploaded to Github that you can run in the browser dev tools console (which was spotted via Reddit), but it requires a lot of patience, and you will also be forced to uncheck new "Interests", or should I say "Topic Suggestions", that get added to the list every once in a while.
First of all, go to Twitter.com and click on ... More (on the left side of the page) Then click Settings & Privacy > Privacy & Safety > Ad Preferences > Interests
Here is a direct link to the page https://twitter.com/settings/your_twitter_data/twitter_interests Once you are on that page you will see a long list of checked interests, they will all be enabled unless you have already manually disabled some Interests.
On your keyboard hit the F12 key, which will open dev tools in Edge, Chrome and Firefox. You can also right-click anywhere on the page and select "Inspect" Switch to the Console tab in dev tools Where you see a new line with > paste the following code and hit the Enter key to run it. Be aware that after a while the page will say "Twitter is over capacity... " but it will look like it is still unchecking list items, it isn't. Manually stop the script process by reloading the page, Wait a few minutes and then restart the script. You may have to repeat this process four or five times. On Github, the original code has a timer set of 100, but upon testing and reading the comments I had more success with fewer timeouts by upping it to 1000.
As you can see in our video, I was already quite a ways into running it (by this time I had to restart it for the fourth time) before getting a "Twitter is over capacity..." error. To be clear, the way this page is set up also creates the overcapacity error if you manually uncheck each line without using the script. The page reloads in the background to save the preference, and the further down the page you get the more likely it is that it will fail.
So our suggestion is to let the script run with an ample timer like 1000 or more, and when it starts failing, manually reload the page and wait a few minutes before pasting the script in again and running it in the console.
It is like certain platforms enjoy burying settings or make them incredibly hard to find and disable. What happened to when tech was supposed to add value to our lives? Now it seems like it just makes for an annoying garbagefest to deal with.
Anyway, this won't be for everyone, but if you do decide to use it, let us know how long it took you to get everything unchecked. In our testing, it took us one hour and fifteen minutes from start to finish, including the waiting to run it again in between. Oh, and you can still follow Topics by typing in something of interest on Twitter and then electing to follow the applicable Topic.
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By Steven P.
Thanks to some bug fixing work by @Redmak the comments (and reply to comment) box is now dark instead of eye blindingly white 😂😂
Prev / Next articles are now stacked and stand out a bit more below articles
Earlier this week @DaveLeggremoved some javascript and cleaned up some code that was no longer used (for example we now only use one advertiser to display in page ads, before it was two, which required two sets of javascripts).
For guests we completely removed the CKeditor javascript from loading in the background (some 500kb) this was overlooked and a bug, because guests could never comment so it makes no sense to load the editor at all.
A future update will add some lazy loading, so that certain heavier elements (like the editor) will only load once they are in focus on the page.
BTW a little known fact is that guests can enable Darkside on our news site with the theme icon toggle at the top of the right rail sidebar:
It's also at the top right of all articles (except reviews, which are full width pages).
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By Steven P.
We have purchased a plugin that automatically locks a thread after a year of no replies. We came to this length of time after initial testing and feedback from members, so thanks for that!
There are several forums that are not included with the autolocking of threads, they are The Media Room, A Collection of Essential Guides, Reviews by Members for Members, Science News & Discussion, Members Metropolis & Soapbox forums (member only forums) Backstage Pass (subscriber only forum) and this Site Announcements forum.
Pinned topics also are not auto locked.
If you come across a topic that should be unlocked you can report the first post in that topic with a message to our staff why it should be unlocked.
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