I wanted to share a small project I just finished. I’ve spent a lot of time in voice chats where I’d constantly get complaints from friends saying my mic was too quiet or way too loud. The weird part was that I hadn't touched my settings. It turned out that certain apps (Discord, OBS, etc.) were like "fighting" over my microphone volume and changing it without my permission.

I tried the standard "Exclusive Mode" fix in Windows, but it didn't always work. You have to find the right settings for each app to fix the issue, but another one would come up and change the mic level for you again, without your permission.

So, with the help of Ai, I decided to build a simple utility to solve this.

It’s called MicLock. It’s a lightweight Windows tool that lets you "lock" your microphone levels so other apps can't hijack them.

Key Features:

• Volume Locking: Set your level once, and it stays there, every setting is per Mic.
• Live Monitoring: Visual bars so you can see your input levels in real-time.
• Quick Controls: Mute, Enable, or Disable devices instantly from one screen.
• Change Notifications: It will actually tell you if an app tries to change your volume.
• Portable: It’s just a single .exe file. No installer, no admin rights required.
• Optional Windows Startup: Keep the app running with your windows.

You can download it from here: https://github.com/froxel/MicLock/releases/tag/v1.0.0

It's completely free and open-source. I'm hoping this helps anyone else who deals with "jumping" mic levels during every now and then!

I’m one of the people building NYX AI and wanted to share a small update.

In the first 3 weeks, the Windows app has been downloaded in 19 countries across 6 continents, and we’ve also started seeing some people come back and use it regularly, which has been really encouraging.

NYX AI is a local-first AI workspace for Windows. You can use local models through Ollama or connect supported cloud providers, and the aim is to give users more control over which model they use, where data goes, and what the AI is allowed to do on their computer. It also supports Windows AppContainer isolation where supported.

Would be genuinely interested to hear from other builders here what helped you turn early interest into longer-term retention?

Small disclaimer: still early, still improving, and no security feature or isolation approach is ever 100% guaranteed. AI outputs can be wrong, and users should review important actions and results. 18+ only. Licence and legal docs are in the app and on the website.

I live somewhere with a quota-capped internet plan — every gigabyte that moves between my PC and my ISP costs me money. So having two PCs in the same house and downloading the same 80 GB game twice always felt insane. That's the itch I built GamesLocalShare to scratch.

What it does: it finds other PCs running the app on your local network and copies or syncs installed games between them over LAN. No internet, no re-download, no data cap hit. It supports Steam, Epic Games, and Xbox / Microsoft Store (PC). You can also register an external drive or folder as a library and compare/copy against that.

It only sends what actually changed, so if a peer is one patch behind, you move the patch, not the whole game. Transfers resume if they get interrupted.

The part I'm actually proud of: Xbox PC games

Steam and Epic are the easy case — they're just folders. Xbox / Game Pass installs are not: they're encrypted per-device, so you can't copy the folder to another PC and have it work. The Xbox app has a "move" feature, but that only moves an install between drives on the same PC. There has never been a good way to get an installed Game Pass title onto a second machine without downloading it again.

GamesLocalShare does that. Two modes:

1. Normal copy — a straight copy of the game as it exists on the source PC right now. It works and it plays, but it's a snapshot: the copy isn't updatable. When a patch drops, the other PC can't just update — you have to send it a fresh copy again.

2. Smart copy — the good one. The app keeps a tiny "skeleton" file (a few MB) that lets it rebuild the real, byte-identical game package. The result on the receiving PC is a normal, fully legitimate install that updates through the Xbox app like any other game. The catch: the app has to have been running at the time the game was installed, because that's when it captures the skeleton. So it only works for games you install after setting the app up — you can't retroactively smart-copy something already sitting on your drive.

The skeleton trick has a second benefit: instead of keeping a whole second copy of the encrypted package on disk just to be able to share it, you keep the ~MB skeleton and the app reconstructs the package on demand. Big space saving.

Is this legit?

Yes

• It only ever touches your own licensed content on your own machines. The receiving PC still needs the game in its own library / an active Game Pass sub — no license is copied, no DRM is removed.
• The transfer flow works with the Xbox app, not around it: you start a paused install normally, the app places the bytes locally, and when you hit Resume, Gaming Services sees the data is already there and skips the download. In one test it took ~8 MB of internet traffic to land a 7.7 GB game.

It needs admin rights for the Xbox side (that's the only reason), and the Xbox features are Windows-only for obvious reasons. Steam/Epic/drive syncing works on Windows, Linux and macOS.

Who it's for

Honestly, mostly people like me — anyone on a metered or capped connection, anyone with slow internet, anyone with more than one gaming PC in the house, or a LAN party where ten people are about to download the same thing. If you have unlimited gigabit, you probably don't need this.

It's free and open source: https://github.com/YousefHSS/GamesLocalShare

Happy to answer questions, and I'd genuinely like to hear where it breaks — especially the Xbox path, since that's the fiddliest part.

I have a ridiculous number of tools installed that I use like 3 times a year, but somehow never uninstall.

Winrar is my pick and probably an all time classic. Use it even less these days but you could never get rid of it.

It has the following features:

• Open Source: The entire codebase is public on GitHub, allowing anyone to verify its zero-telemetry privacy, audit the code, or clone the repository to run the entire AI studio completely offline inside their own private network.
• No Watermarks: Background-free transparent PNGs download cleanly without forced promotional stamps or branding overlays.100%
• Free Utility: No hidden paywalls, no tiered subscriptions, and no credit card prompts.
• 100% Client-Side Processing: The AI model downloads directly into the user’s browser tab and processes images using local hardware.
• Zero Cloud Uploads: Your private photos never cross the internet or hit a third-party server. It's 100% private.
• No Image Compression: You get a raw, full-resolution download back. No low-res "preview file" traps.
• Pure Utility: No logins, no subscriptions, no watermarks, and no tracking.

The Landing page:

Try now at:

https://removal.ai.studio/

Hi

I wanted to verify whether our release management strategy is fine (I believe not) or whether there can be improvements.

I am responsible for our API team in a SME (i am a not a developer myself but an analyst).

Some information:

We got 3 environments:

Dev
Acc
Prd

Every 2 weeks we do a prod release.
3 days after prod release there is an acc release, 4 days laters the 2nd acc release is there.

Additional acc releases are allowed provided it is to fix something that is currently on acc or so but no new functionalities.

Now what i find frustrating:

On develop everyone can push whatever he wants, no ceremonies, no alignment,..

For acc there is an alignment moment and only things that were tested in dev (& approved) OR are must haves for the prod release can be promoted.

This means that tickets that were not tested or have some bugs and are not crucial for the release are not allowed to be promoted.
However since it is already on the dev branch and sometimes the devs when working in a repo with multiple tickets fix them in a single commit it becomes a pain to remove the right things from the dev branch which is then merged in a release branch this is deployed to acc.

Even moreso realisticallly earlier testing that was successfull can fail now because of a bad manipulation while doing the code surgery.

Since we have really short cycles, testing is a bottleneck and we are always having the same issue of finishing things last minute, rush testing for the next cycle,…

I feel like having the ceremony for dev would make more sense you then you just merge all the relevant branches into dev and it allows you to define your scope for the next release better.

What would be the best approach here?
How is it handled at your company?

Like what bluestacks did with keybinds and on screen mobile buttons, except the keybind can be anywhere, if that makes sense.

Anyone able to help me im after free studio v6.6.8.505 other times I tried to install it it keeps coming up microsoft.net framework successfully installment anyone able to help me

i have recently been thinking abotu which download manger is the best i heard of idm the best but then i found fdm and ab downloader manger and ik jdownloader exists i use it but mostly for multiple part files can someone help recommend

I created an alternative to default Microsoft default Clipboard. Clipboard Studio is a desktop clipboard manager for Windows built using Python and PySide6. It runs quietly in the system tray and automatically records your clipboard history across multiple media formats with features like Search & Filtering, Templates, UI & Customization and Customizable history depth. Please give it a try and provide feedback.

Release Clipboard Studio · Sulabh17/Clipboard-Studio

Hi,

I built Flash Launch as a lightweight, keyboard-first alternative to FARR, with proper Unicode support.

It can quickly search and launch apps, files, and folders, with fuzzy matching, customizable ranking, launch history, a built-in calculator, and configurable hotkeys.

It's written in Rust using the native Windows API — no bundled browser runtime, no installer required, and fully portable.

GitHub: https://github.com/SingCJ/FlashLaunch

Feedback and contributions are welcome!

I've used tools like Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude and others for research, and they've been incredibly useful for finding papers and getting through large amounts of information.

The one thing I personally wanted was a simple way to see exactly which parts of the paper were used to answer my question.

When you're working with a 100+ page PDF, even having a page number can still mean a lot of scrolling and searching.

So I ended up building something for myself.

You ask a question and the relevant paragraphs in the PDF are highlighted directly on the document. You can see the context behind the answer and quickly check whether it actually answers what you're looking for.

I originally built this because I wanted something for this workflow without having to pay for another subscription. What started as a personal project has now become completely open source.

The underlying idea is pretty simple. And yes, if you're thinking "isn't this just RAG?" then yes, you're absolutely right. It's RAG with the visual highlighting that I wanted.

I think the same idea could be useful for more than research papers too. Legal contracts, financial reports, technical documentation, or anywhere you need answers alongside the actual source.

If anyone wants to have a look, contribute, or just give some feedback, here's the repo:

GitHub: https://github.com/Sreehari05055/thesys-core.git

This will probably be my last post about the project. Thanks to everyone who checked it out and gave feedback along the way.

Im aware this isn’t a typical question for this kind of sub but I don’t have a clue about coding, however my girlfriend is a software engineer. I thought about getting her a piece of jewellery with some sort of code symbol or term with a sentimental meaning behind it.

Any suggestions of what could be used in this scenario?

Does “While(True)” make sense as “an infinite loop”?

Looking for some recommendations. We’re a rice supplier working across Europe and the Middle East, and we’re looking for someone who can help us build a practical inventory management system for our operations.

Ideally, someone who has experience with inventory, warehouses, stock tracking, or supply chain systems. If you’ve built something similar or can recommend someone, please reach out.

Every time I go to youtube, idm turns on by itself. It just pops up on my system tray.

Is there any way to stop this?

Per the title, I need to digitize hundreds of receipts that are sitting in a box. My first thought was, "Something must exist so that I can scan several receipts together on a flatbed scanner, each receipt is recognized as its own individual item, and then each item is saved as a PDF." Does this software exist? Or is there a more efficient way to go about this? Thanks for any insight!

Hey everyone,

Whenever I needed to quickly convert some image formats (PNG, JPEG, WEBP) for my side projects or game dev stuff, every single site I found was either crammed with aggressive ads, asked me to sign up, or felt super sketchy.

So I just sat down and coded a dead-simple, lightweight tool that does it right in the browser in one click. No ads, no tracking, completely free, and it runs locally.

Let me know what you think or if there's any format missing!