July 2014

Distributing adware to computer users is a lucrative business. It is that lucrative that software companies as well as download portals have started to integrate services such as Open Candy into their installers to earn extra money.

When Cnet's Download.com started to offer custom download managers with adware offers, it was heavily criticized for it by part of the Internet community.

The Chromium web browser and browsers based on it such as Google Chrome are not very flexible when it comes to placing extension icons in the interface.

Extension icons are always displayed in the main toolbar of the web browser. You can right-click those icons to hide them, or use drag and drop to change the position of icons on the toolbar.

What you cannot do is move them to another toolbar, or create a folder of sorts and move some of them inside.

If you are a Firefox user you probably know that you can pin tabs in the browser to make them sort-of permanent in it. A pinned tab is displayed on the left side of the tab bar, and instead of displaying the page title, it is only displayed with the site's favicon.

Pinned tabs cannot be closed using standard Firefox tab closing methods such as middle-clicking or clicking on the close button in the tab bar of the browser.

Quick Crypt looks on first glance just like many of the other file encryption tools for Windows. You can use it to encrypt files using 256-bit AES encryption, and also decrypt those files again at a later point in time.

It does however make available features that are not that common or available at all in other programs of its kind including an option to set expiration dates for encrypted files.

Note: Quick Crypt requires the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5.

My main hard drive is a 120 Gigabyte Solid State Drive  -- Samsung 840 EVO -- which is sufficient for what I do on the computer. I do have a 3 Terabyte drive connected as well for extra storage.

The Solid State Drive usually has about 15 to 20 Gigabyte of free storage space, while the rest is occupied by Windows, applications, and user data generated by applications.

When I look at the space distribution on that drive, Windows is taking up about a third of the space of it followed by the users folder with 24% and the program files folder with roughly 9%.

The clock that Windows displays in the system tray area is probably not something that most users change a lot after initial configuration.

Most make sure that date and time are set correct, but that is about as far as it goes.

While it is really useful that the time is displayed most of the time in Windows, there is usually no need to modify it in any way.

It may be different if you travel a lot as you may need to change the time frequently if you move between different time zones in the process.

As you may know already, I have decided to retire my Gmail account and one of the email services that I consider using as an alternative is ProtonMail.

The service puts a strong focus on security and privacy, and since I received my beta account access just a few moments ago, I decided to write a first look review of it so that you know what it is about and what it offers.

I do not use maps that often, usually only when I'm in a foreign country or a city that I do not know my way around in. A map was helpful when I traveled to Jerusalem for instance as I was not there before.

When it comes to mapping apps that you can take with you on your smartphone, it is often a good idea to make sure that you use one that makes the maps available offline.

When it comes to support for different search engines, it is Firefox that takes the crown. Not only is it the only browser of the big four that features a separate search form natively, it is also giving you great control over the browser's search functionality.

Some browsers make up for that with extensions that you can install to add missing functionality.

While it is often best to keep files on the local computer only and avoid cloud storage, especially for important files, it is sometimes not possible to do so.

Maybe you need to share a document with another person who happens to live in another city or country, or you want to have file backups available for your next business trip to cover all eventualities, or, you simply want to share files with someone else and protect those files from third-parties listening in.

That's were encryption comes into play usually.