August 2014

A recent trend in communication is to add encryption to common forms of messaging such as email or chat. While that protects the content against snooping, provided that the implementation is not flawed in itself, it does not resolve the issue of relying on a central server structure.

If you are using Whats App, Skype, or other messaging applications, you will notice that they all depend on servers that manage the data.

TEncoder Video Converter has been around for quite some time but I never got around to reviewing it here on the site.

One reason for that is that the application has received mixed reviews in the past.

While users like its functionality, it has been heavily criticized for its adware-bundling installer.

Just recently I found out that the developer is making available a portable version as well. Since it is portable it does not ship with adware. The review is entirely based on it and not on the setup version.

Finding a reliable free VPN provider can be a a daunting tasks. We have tested numerous providers that offer free VPN services and added only the best to this page.

Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), regardless of whether they are free or paid, offer a selection of features that make them attractive for several use-cases.

They can be used to access sites that are blocked otherwise, for instance in a school network, at work or country-wide. This includes situations where you cannot access a site due to bad routing on part of your ISP.

Disk image formats such as Iso, Bin or Img are also known as archive files of optical discs. They are made up of the sector contents of optical discs which makes them ideal for several purposes including backup and also mounting.

While the concept of backing up an optical disc, an audio CD, game DVD or video DVD for example, is fairly straightforward, mounting is not necessarily.

The idea here is to make available the contents of the disc as if it would have been inserted into an optical drive connected to the system.

Mozilla has added a new Firefox Search option to Nightly versions of the mobile browser. From Firefox 34 on, all users of the browser will have access to those features.

When you swipe from the bottom of the screen up on Android devices running recent versions of the operating systems, an option to launch Google Now comes up.

If you are running Firefox 34 on Android you will notice that another option has been added to the feature: Firefox Search.

New technologies are more often than not a double-edged sword. While they add or improve functionality on the one hand, they may also introduce undesirable features.

This is for instance the case when it comes to WebRTC. It brings real-time communication capabilities to web browsers via JavaScript apis. Think Skype but without plugins or third-party software installation.

While that is great for Internet users who use new services making use of WebRTC, others are left with privacy issues because of it.

File downloads are just a matter of clicking on a link and waiting for the download to finish in most cases. There are however situations where downloads are interrupted so that you end up with a broken file on your system that you cannot do anything with.

Several users who tried to download the excellent Tech Toolkit I reviewed yesterday for example have reported that downloads of the 1.6 Gigabyte archive would fail whenever they tried to download it.

When you enter queries into Firefox's address bar, you will receive results depending on what you have entered. If you enter an url for instance, Firefox attempts to load the address in the current tab.

Things are not as clear when you type in a single-word query, queries with periods or arithmetic expressions. If you take a query with a period for example, Firefox attempts to load it as if it were a url, even if it is not.

The query 8675309 returns an unable to connect error message and the query 867-5309 a search results page after some time.

I tend to get more calls and emails asking for help with computer related problems in Summer than in any other season.

The core reason for that -- it is not scientific but purely based on my experience -- is that the rise in environmental temperature causes PCs to overheat more frequently.

If a PC component overheats, the processor or video card for example, it may shut down itself automatically, or hang or crash instead right away.

Whenever I visit a family member or friend who asked me to fix a computer issue, I take a USB flash drive with me containing dozens of tools to analyze and repair computer issues.

GEGeek Tech Toolkit is a free collection of more than 300 portable freeware tools that serve a similar purpose. The collection has a size of 1.6 Gigabyte compressed and about 3 Gigabyte uncompressed on the system.