November 2014

I'm always surprised when companies introduce features to established applications or programs that will cause user uproar.

WhatsApp introduced a new feature recently that showed two blue checkmarks next to messages when a message was read by recipients.

What made this problematic was the fact that there was no option to turn it off or at least suppress it. As soon as you opened a chat a read receipt would appear on the sender's screen.

The only option to avoid the read receipt until now was to not open the conversation in the app.

Amazon Prime has evolved a lot in recent time. Designed in the beginning as a yearly-paid subscription service to cover all shipping and handling costs for Amazon purchases, it is now offering additional benefits such as TV streaming to customers.

The price of Prime has gone up as well. If you are in the US, you pay $99 per year for it (Amazon Student members pay $49). The price is different in Europe. Here in Germany you pay €49 for instance which is $61 when converted.

The most recent addition to Amazon's Prime service is unlimited photo storage for all Prime customers.

One of the main challenges of learning Japanese is to learn the Japanese alphabets. That's different from learning a modern Latin alphabet language such as English, German or French and the main reason for that is that you have to memorize a lot more than the 26 or so characters Latin alphabets are comprised of.

With Japanese, you have to memorize both the Hiragana and Katakana alphabet and on top of all that the Kanji as well.

Students of the Japanese start with Hiragana and Katakana usually. Good news is, there are not nearly as many as there are Kanji.

When the Firefox add-on Firebug first launched it was a godsend for web developers as it introduced a set of development related tools that improved many workflows considerable.

Browser developers began to introduce native development tools in their browsers.

Today, all major browsers ship with a set of development tools that are very similar in nature to what the Firebug add-on has to offer.

Firebug development continued on the other hand and the extension is still a very popular add-on for the Firefox web browser.

Microsoft pushed out a new Windows 10 Preview Build yesterday together with the security and regular updates for all its operating systems and products.

Windows 10 users can get it already provided that they have set the speed in which they get the preview builds to fast under Preview Builds in the Update and Recovery part of PC Settings.

While I'm still pretty disappointed that Google removed any option to display new or updated Chrome extensions in the official web store, progress is being made elsewhere.

Options are part of many Chrome extensions. They enable users to modify the behavior or appearance of extensions.

Not every extension ships with an options page though but many do.

The only way to open the options of a Chrome extension up until now was to open chrome://extensions in the browser and click on the options link next to the extension.

I like what Good Old Games has to offer. It started out as a service to bring classic video games to modern systems and has evolved since then to include some modern titles as well. Different from Steam and also from modern gaming platforms such as Origin it has craved out a niche and sits in it comfortably.

It evolved over time without sacrificing the community or principles that made the service great.

I prefer to watch TV shows after a season ends instead of watching individual episodes once a week. I don't mind waiting for the season to end to watch the show afterwards but one of the things that I have to take care of during the season is that I avoid sites or posts that reveal spoilers.

Depending on how popular a show is, it can happen that I'm exposed to spoilers on a variety of sites on the Internet but also in real-life.

When you install Windows 10 anew on a PC or run it for the first time if it comes pre-installed with the computer, you create the first user account during that process.

This is the main account on the system and configured to be an administrator account by default, but it is not the only one that is created during that process.

Windows 10 creates two additional user accounts automatically which are both inactive by default.

The first is a guest account which Microsoft designed for users who access the device but don't have a permanent account on it.

Firefox users who download torrent files occasionally can install the Torrent Tornado add-on for the web browser to do so.

The main advantage over installing a dedicated torrent client is its simplicity. Torrent Tornado does not require the installation of binary components or another program outside of the browser which means that it can be used right after installation of the extension in the browser and the required restart of it.

The browser extension adds a new icon to Firefox's main toolbar which you can move around or hide if you prefer to do so.