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July 2014

goTenna lets you communicate without cell towers, Wifi or satellites

If you want to use your smartphone for communication, you either have to be connected to a network of sorts to do so, or use short-range communication technologies such as Bluetooth to do so.

There are however situations where all of these communication options become unavailable. Say you are on a camping trip in the wilderness and lost a group member.

Chance is, you don't have any reception and since that group member is not close by, all the close-range options are not working as well.

Lock your Google Chrome profile with your Google password

Many computer systems are not overly well protected when someone else manages to get physical access to the computer. This can be a family member, a colleague at work, your boss, or a thief who just stole your laptop at Starbucks.

While user accounts are usually secured by a password, the computer may not always be locked which in turn means that a third-party can access most programs, files and information on it unhindered.

Google enforces HTML5 use on YouTube for Firefox 33 and newer

Google Chrome users who are regulars on Google's video hosting platform YouTube have been forced to use the HTML5 player on the website for some time now.

Google provided Chrome users as well as users of other browsers a choice in this regard in the past.

The HTML5 player was opt-in for example which meant that users had to visit the YouTube HTML5 Video Player page to switch from Flash to it if they wanted to use it as the main player on the site.

Beware! Malwarebytes Secure Backup for Android is trialware

What would you do if your backup program would suddenly turn into a paid application asking you to sign up for a paid account to keep accessing the files that you have backed up?

If that is not communicated in the app or on the website prior to it happening?

This sounds like yet another ransomware ploy but that is not the case this time.

Chip Updater: how good is the software update checker?

Keeping your Windows system up to date can be quite the time-consuming task if you do it manually, as you need to check for software updates regularly.

While some programs ship with update checking capabilities, the majority does not. While you could go ahead now and check the websites of the programs to see if updates are available, it would probably take hours to do so depending on how many programs are available on the PC.

Update Checkers automate the process at least for part of the installed software.

Audentify identifies artist and song of YouTube videos

If you are a regular on the video hosting website YouTube, you may have had issues identifying music used in some of the videos.

This is generally not a problem for single music videos, as they are properly tagged more often than not, but it is an issue for many non-music videos that get uploaded to YouTube as no information about the music used in them may be listed in the description or title.

If you have a YouTube account, you may sometimes want to ask the author of the video about it and if you are lucky, may even get an answer that helps you out.

How to lock down your Android Wi-Fi settings to improve privacy

The Electronic Frontier Foundation discovered that the majority of Android devices were leaking Wi-Fi connection history data to anyone within range.

This location history contains the names of Wi-Fi networks that the device has been connected to in the past. While it may contain cryptic names, it may also contain names such as "Home", "London Heathrow Airport" or "Tom's Mancave" that can be easily identified location-wise.

Browse and download all Bing homepage wallpapers

One of the features that distinguishes Microsoft's Bing search engine from Google Search is the homepage image that the site displays each day on its start page.

Depending on which version of Bing you open, you may even get a direct option to download the wallpaper of the day to the local system.

While that seems only supported in some regional versions, especially the US-English version of Bing, it is still possible to download images directly using your web browser of choice.

Screenhero: share your screen with someone else

Back in the old days when you needed to collaborate with someone or a team, the best option you had was to be in the same room to make that happen.

The Internet changed that for the better, with services such as Google Docs or Office 365 offering collaboration capabilities to work on the same document at the same time regardless of location in the world.

Screenhero is an interesting collaborative screen sharing application for Windows and Mac that looks similar to remote desktop applications on first glance.