January 2015

From this month forward, Microsoft will no longer release free Advanced Security Notifications before patches are made available on Patch Tuesday, the second Tuesday of the month.

The company's Advanced Notification Service informed customers about security updates in advanced so that customers could get a better understanding of affected products.

If you think about how computer systems are controlled, mouse and keyboard probably come to mind first before touch and voice commands.

It is rather interesting that little progress has been made in improving mouse or keyboard usage. While some progress has been made, for instance by using lasers, not much has changed in terms of how the peripherals are designed.

Game Downloader is a free program for the Windows operating system that you can use to discover, browse and download more than 350 different PC games in various categories.

PC gamers have many choices when it comes to playing games on their computer. From platforms like Steam, Gog or Origin over free to play games and freeware games to game emulation.

YouTube is not the only online platform on which Internet users can upload, share and watch videos but it is without doubt the most popular one.

While that is the case, there is a growing number of users and content producers who dislike YouTube or some of its features but stick with it because of a lack of alternatives.

Dailymotion and Vimeo, two other video services, never managed to grow substantially to get close to YouTube's level of traffic.

I have to admit that I never quite got the world's fascination with services like Instagram. While I do have an account, I only use it when I write about the service.

There must be something to it though as it is used by millions who use the app to create and share media with others.

Since videos can be shared as well on Instagram, using the service can accumulate quite some data.

If you need an extra push sometimes to get work done as you get distracted easily, you may find programs and services useful that restrict what you can do on a device or computer until you complete work for the day.

That's the main idea behind the new text editor FORCEdraft as it prevents you from switching away from it to pursue other interests on the PC.

As is the case with these types of programs, there are ways around them but more about that later.

If you are using Microsoft's Outlook.com email service you have various options to connect to it. You can use the web interface, mobile apps or desktop email clients.

Regardless of how you use the service, you may want to make sure that it is properly protected against hacks and other malicious attacks.

Outlook.com accounts are directly linked to Microsoft Accounts. This shows when you try to locate security related settings on the Outlook website as you will notice quickly that there are none.

One of the things that I do for most software or services that I discover is to check for reviews before I try it out myself.

Reviews can reveal important information about a project and while it is still important to use common-sense and make your own experience, some may raise red flags so that I be extra cautious.

Sometimes when you are trying to connect to websites or services in Google Chrome, you may receive the error message no date received instead of the website you wanted to load.

The message indicates a data transfer issue that is sometimes difficult to correct as it may not always be caused on your end.

For some users of the browser, no data received may appear completely random as they may be able to load sites right after the error, or may not experience it at all for a prolonged period of time.