September 2014

Whenever I'm out to buy something, as opposed to buying online, I pay for all the goods I buy in cash. Instead of handing over a card or inserting it into a card reader of sorts, I hand over the money directly to the cashier.

I try to do this even in situations where this is uncommon, in hotels for instance if they ask for your credit card. It is usually possible to deposit some money instead of handing over your card and that's what I do normally.

In this article I'm going to lay out the reasons for being against card and digital payment systems.

One of the things that you can do to improve security on your system is to keep an eye on files that could be malicious.

While it is certainly possible to keep track of all new files and file modifications on a system, it is usually too time consuming of a task to be a viable solution.

Another option is to limit the monitoring to select folders or locations only. While that takes less time it is also not nearly as accurate as monitoring all of a system.

Playstation game controllers can be connected to Windows PCs directly as they use USB connectors which you can use for that purpose.

A system like Windows 7 will recognize the controller and install the necessary drivers automatically but you still need to install additional drivers first before it is recognized in most games and programs.

The driver package of choice for many is MotioninJoy which you can download here. While it is highly popular, it is displaying ads in its interface which requires an Internet connection.

As a computer user you may have experienced situations where you did not keep track of the time while working on the computer.

Maybe you enjoyed those cute cat videos on YouTube so much, embraced a coding session or spend time on Twitter or other social media sites.

Unless you set an alarm, manage to check the time on the desktop or locally, or are interrupted by someone else, you may spend more time doing something on the computer than you want to.

And even if you don't mind spending that time, it may be important to keep track of time nevertheless.

While I'm not using YouTube a lot I know that it is one of the best sites to listen to music. Just key in a band, album, artist or song name and it is very likely that you get dozens, hundreds or even thousands of results.

The quality varies from official releases by studios and the artists to copies uploaded by fans.

These fan uploads may display the lyrics of songs either embedded in the video itself or in the video's description while the official uploads usually don't display these information on the site.

As is the case with many tools out there, I prefer a desktop RSS reader over an online solution. Sure, online services such as Feedly have advantages. You can access them for instance from any Internet capable device and they require less space than local solution.

On the downside, you depend on the service. If it goes down, has a bug or decides to become paid only, you may not be able to access the service for the time being or ever again.

Companies like Google or Microsoft have a hard time getting users to upgrade to the latest version of their operating systems. On Android for instance, a quarter is using Android version 4.4, the most recent version of the system.

It is not necessarily the fault of users that their systems are not upgraded as manufacturers may not provide updates to devices which leaves users standing in the rain and without official options to update their devices.

I reviewed Mailpile back in August of 2013 for the first time. The project was running a Kickstarter campaign back then for funding and did so successfully.

A first alpha version, only available as a source code and a demo interface on the web was released in January 2014 and a second alpha about six months later in July of 2014.

It can sometimes be a necessity to compare different versions of a file. Maybe you want to make sure that a file you burned to disc or stored in a backup is identical to the original, list all changes that someone else made to a file, or compare files after a hacking attack to find out if they have been modified in any way by the hacker.

File comparison tools are one option to do so. These programs provide you with the means to compare one or multiple files quickly which is one advantage that they have over comparing data manually.

If you have browsed the Internet lately, especially sites located in Europe, then you may have noticed that they tend to display a cookie notification on first visit.

The site informs users that it uses cookies which the European Union believes is the right thing to do to educate users about that fact.

I dislike those messages for several reasons.

First, there is barely any site that does not use cookies. All this does is state the obvious.