August 2014

One of the first things that I do to harden a browser like Firefox is to check for plugins and disable those that are not required at all. The others, I set to click to play to make sure nothing gets loaded without the user knowing about it.

If you disable a plugin on the other hand, you may run into issues when it is required on a website. Say, you disable Silverlight because you don't require it but start using Amazon Prime or any other streaming service that requires it.

Welcome to the Microsoft Security Bulletin overview for August 2014. It offers information about all security and non-security patches released by Microsoft since the last release.

A total of nine bulletins have been released this month which patch security issues in Microsoft Windows, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Server Software, the .NET Framework and Microsoft Office.

Two bulletins have received the highest severity rating of critical while the remaining seven bulletins a rating of important.

Most developers use a local development environment that replicates the live website. They use it to test any change made to the website before it is pushed to the live server.

This can be an update, for instance a new version of WordPress, the installation of a new script or feature, or a change to a site's layout or design.

It makes sense to test these things locally first as site visitors may otherwise be exposed to them, bad if a change has not the desired result or renders functionality useless on the site.

Microsoft changed the way the taskbar works in Windows 7. Among the many changes were options to pin programs and files to the taskbar to improve their accessibility on the system.

Part of the change was a switch from displaying icons and names to only icons by default. This in combination with the fact that icons were stacked on top of each other, say two icons for two explorer windows open on the system, freed up a lot of space on the taskbar.

Adapter is a free converter for Windows and Mac that offers an impressive set of features.

There are lots of methods and options to convert media into different formats. From the excellent Freemake Video Converter to dozens of other programs and various online solutions.

If you are new to the club, you need to distinguish your program from others to make a good first impression. Adapter does that and more.

While you cannot say that all browsers on Android are the same, many are only marginally different when compared with each other.

Atlas Web Browser for Android is different in several regards though and while I would not go as far as to call it a next gen browser, it certainly introduces several features that will make it attractive to a large audience.

When the first personal home pages came up back when the Internet started to get traction outside the academic and military world, animated gifs were one of the few means to add animations to a page.

While abused largely by the majority of webmasters to display blinking under construction or contact signs, or dancing babies, it was also used by some for other purposes.

Since no plugin was necessary to display the animation, and HTML5 was not there as well, it was favored by some to display moving contents on a website.

When you visit a website in a modern web browser for the first time, contents get loaded from a web server to the local computer.

While some resources may be loaded from cache already, for instance if you visited another page on the same host or if the same third-party host was used on websites that you visited previously.

Most of the time though, contents get loaded from a web server.

Runbot is a free unobtrusive application for Android devices that you can use to track activities such as walking, jogging, cycling or in-line skating.

I spend most of the time in front of the computer on my desktop thanks to the awesome job that I have. I have started to walk everywhere I need to go -- in reasonable distance -- as a counterweight to all that sitting and working on the computer.

Virtual desktops, also called workspaces in some contexts, expand the visual interface of the system usually in the form of copies of the desktop environment but sometimes also by allowing users to scroll on the desktop.

The first platform graced with a virtual desktop managers was Commodore's Amiga 1000 back in 1985. Today, it is natively implement in most Unix-based operating systems and available in form of third-party programs for other operating systems such as Windows.