September 2014

Oh no, not another weather app I hear you say. I agree that there is usually nothing special about weather apps and it is usually the case that the majority of apps offers a similar functionality and design.

Weather Timeline Forecast for Android is special however. First, it is not free and I would like to get that out of the way near the beginning to avoid hopes getting crushed in the end when that fact is revealed. It costs a Dollar and I think it is well worth that price.

With that out of the way, lets take a look at why I think it is special.

Windows Inspection Tool Set is a free open source program for the Windows operating system that provides users with a set of tools to manage various aspects of the operating system.

After you have installed the 32-bit or 64-bit version of the software on your system and started it up, it displays its core tools and options directly in the interface.

Here you can click on one of the listed system items such as the running processes, network connections or users to display information about it in a new window that gets launched automatically.

Menu Wizard is a handy browser add-on for the Firefox web browser that you can use to hide or move menu items. It supports the Firefox menu bar (not displayed anymore by default), the tab and main context menu, and the bookmarks bar by default so that you can customize what is displayed and how it is displayed in the browser.

Malicious browser extensions have been a big issue in the past couple of years. One should not confuse outright malicious extensions with adware or toolbars even though they are related to some extend.

The core difference between those groups of extensions is that malicious extensions go beyond displaying ads, leaking information about a user's browsing behavior or being plain annoying.

Browser makers such as Google or Mozilla have invested time and money in methods to protect users from potentially unwanted extensions.

If you ask Windows professionals and experienced users about tools that they like and use a lot, chance is that Nirsoft and the programs created by Nir Sofer make that top list.

I recently started to collect retro video games, mostly classic 16-bit stuff. One of the issues here, after you have made up your mind about the console systems you want to collect is to decide whether you want to limit the collection to a certain region.

Do you only want to collect European PAL games, North-American NTSC games or Japanese games? I made the decision to go all in and collect everything.

The main issue here is that it is nearly impossible to buy many Japanese games in Europe. And the ones that are on offer are quite expensive as well.

One of the most annoying things on the Web are interactive elements, usually videos but also advertisement, that play sound automatically when a website is opened.

While that is often easily identifiable, especially if you open your websites one by one only, some users may have experienced situations where it was not that easy to determine where the sound comes from.

Google recently introduced sound symbols in Chrome and Chromium-based browsers that visualize that sound is playing in a tab.

Microsoft's OneDrive online hosting and synchronization service (formerly known as SkyDrive), has recently increased storage for all paid accounts to 1 TB.

Free users on the other hand receive 15 Gigabyte of free storage when they sign up for the service. Options to increase the storage limit for free are provided. It is for instance possible to refer other users to OneDrive  to get up to 5 Gigabyte of additional storage (0.5 GB per user) on top of that permanently.

The developers of TrueCrypt made the decision to retire the encryption software a couple of months ago. The reason given by them was that TrueCrypt was no longer secure and that users should move to other encryption products instead.

Most users who buy, build or get a new PC want to move data from the old one to the new. This includes personal files such as photos, videos or music but also applications, application data and customizations.

While it is possible to transfer plain files easily to the new PC, for instance directly over a network connection or by using storage media such as external hard drives or DVDs to do so, it is not as easy to move applications to a new PC.