How To Bring Back Epic Browser PROXY VPN and AD Blocker Button Icons to Toolbar

Want To Bring Back Epic Browser PROXY VPN and AD Blocker Button Icons to Toolbar?

Epic Browser Logo

Epic Browser is a great alternative to the browsers that come with your computer like Edge and Safari. It is considerably more secure. But recently, the Proxy VPN service that was activated by default has been made an extension, and to get it back there are a few things you need to do. To get started, you can either watch the video below, or continue reading.

Firstly, click on the three dots in the top right hand corner, the select “Settings”

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From the menu that appears, select “Extensions”

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You will now find yourself seeing the extensions that come with Epic Browser

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In the bottom right corner of each item you will see a toggle switch, toggle both to the “On” position

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Windows users will now see the icons restored to the toolbar. For Mac users there is a few more steps to go. Close out of the extensions page and click the “Extensions Icon” in the toolbar – it’s the one that looks like a jigsaw puzzle piece

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You will see the Ad Blocker and Proxy VPN listed

Now click the little pin next to each item you want to see in the toolbar, I clicked all three

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And now you will see the icons have been restored to your toolbar, and you can go back to enjoying this fantastic and free browser

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Easily Backup and Restore VMWare Virtual Machines

Recently, a Webernets reader (Yes, there is at least one person looking at this site) crashed their XP Pro virtual machine, and it made me think about a really quick and easy way to back up and restore a VMWare Virtual Machine in the unfortunate event of a terminal failure.

As VMWare Virtual Machines can grow in size pretty quickly, especially if they are not regularly “cleaned up“, in most cases you will need to use an external hard drive or a very large USB key to store your back up. Whilst it is convenient to keep your back up on the same computer, its also no help to you at all if that computer is the one that fails, so keeping a back up some where else is a pretty good idea. I actually would recommend doing BOTH. You can never have too many back ups in multiple locations – ask any one who has ever had a catastrophic failure!

To get started, you need to locate your Virtual Machines, and this is REALLY easy! Open a finder window, click “Documents”, and you will see a folder called “Virtual Machines”

To back up your virtual machine, simply drag the virtual machine file to your back up destination. As you can see below, I have a virtual machine called “XP with Apps”, which is my main Windows computer, and I would be pretty lost if anything happened to it. I also have a FREENAS server, which is just basically a big hard drive that is attached to my home computer network, and shows up as a “Share”, so to back up my XP Machine, I just drag the virtual machine file onto the Freenas entry in the side bar menu, and let it do its work. As my Virtual Machine is quiet large, it does take some time for it to copy over.

Now that we have our Virtual Machine backed up, you are probably wondering how easy it is to restore it? Its just as easy! Check this out!

To restore a saved virtual machine, just locate it on your back up source (In my case, it is on my Freenas server), and drag it into your virtual machines folder. For this demonstration, I am going to restore my most FAVORITE Linux distro, PUPPY LINUX! I started by dragging the Puppy Linux Virtual Machine from my Freenas server to the desktop on my Mac.

Once the file had copied over, I moved it into the “Virtual Machines” folder in my “Documents” folder with my other virtual machines. Then to begin the restore, just double click the virtual machine file.

When you double click it, a window will pop up asking if you have copied or moved the virtual machine. In this case, we have performed both actions, we have moved, as well as copied the machine. Given the wording in the dialogue box, and the confusion that arises after being presented with a multiple choice question where both answers are applicable, I went with “If you don’t know, answer “I Copied It””, and I clicked “I Copied It”.

Almost instantly, my Puppy Linux virtual machine sprang into life, and before you can say “How the heck did I do that?” my Puppy Linux Virtual Machine was up and running!

Thanks to the folks at VMWare for making this so easy!

Reclaiming space on a iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad

iPhone Capacity StatsMy iPhone/iTunes has been bugging me for a while now about how my phone is running out of memory, and it won’t let me load more music, or take new photographs or video. My first instinct was that I should clean house, and move some photos or songs off it, and whilst it was plugged in to my Mac I noticed something interesting in the storage capacity stats window:

iPhone Capacity Stats1.03 GB of Other? I would much rather have an extra GB of music and photos than a GB of “Other”! So, I did a little bit of research and it looks to me that “other” is stuff like contacts, calendars and emails etc, so no joy to be had there,  but it is also log files, history, cache, and other gunk that is meaningless to most users. There were also reports in the Apple forums that you can reclaim “some” of that space with a full system restore. So I thought I would give it a try!

I started by making a full backup of my phone. Once my iPhone was plugged in to my computer, and it showed up in iTunes, I right clicked on it and selected “Backup” from the menu. It took a few minutes to copy everything over.

Select Back Up from MenuOnce that was all done, I went to the “Summary” window and clicked the “Restore” button.

ITunes Restore ButtonAfter clicking the usual procession of Ok’s, Yes Please’s, and I Understand’s, it set about completely wiping my iPhone.

Restoring iPhone WindowOnce it had erased the memory, it began uploading the 4.3.5 software installation, powered on and off a few times, and then I got asked if I wanted to restore my phone from the back up I created, or if I wanted to start my phone from fresh again. I clicked “Restore from Back Up” so it would reinstall my apps, contacts, music etc etc and off it went again It did take some time to completely erase, and re-install the software and my files and info (about 15-20 minutes), but it was well worth it!

Reclaimed MemoryMy iPhone went from 1.03GB of “Other” down to 0.24GB of “Other”! That’s nearly 800KB of “Other” that can now be used for photos and music!

Woo-Hoo!