February 2015

When it comes to working with the computer keyboard, there is a wide variety of user types. Some prefer to use a single finger to type, others use two while the majority of experienced users use six, eight or even ten.

As you can imagine, using additional fingers can speed up the typing significantly. Many inexperienced users on the other hand find it problematic to go from a typing method they know to one that is faster.

If you plan to subscribe to Microsoft's online service Office365 Personal in the near future, you know that you have to pay $6.99 for a subscription per month or $69.99 per year to do so when you sign up directly on the Microsoft Sto

Gallery Doctor - Phone Cleaner is a free application for Android device that promises to go through your digital photo collection on the device to separate good from bad free up space in the process

I guess it is fair to say that most smartphone users use their phones to take photos. It does not really matter if the default camera is used or if an app like Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook or QuickPic are being used.

The popular memory test program MemTest86 has been updated to version 6.0 yesterday. The new version introduces several new features and many changes of which the most important one is support for DDR4 RAM.

Support includes DDR4 RAM hardware as well as retrieval and reporting of DDR4-specific details

The new version of MemTest86 works like the old in many regards. It is still provided as a standalone disk image that you need to copy to CD, DVD, USB Flash drive or other removable media that you can boot the computer from.

OneNote 2013 is a note-taking application by Microsoft that is available for various desktop and mobile operating systems.

It is part of all editions of Microsoft Office 2013 and Office 365, and has been made available as a standalone version for Windows as well.

This standalone version has been freely available in a limited version for personal use since last year for Windows 7 and newer systems of the company.

It feels almost like a (friendly) race between the Opera browser and Vivaldi right now. Vivaldi, created by ex-employees of Opera Software was published just a couple of weeks ago as first technical preview version and it left a solid first impression.

Definitely superior to the first version of the Opera web browser after the company changed its engine to Blink.

But the comparison is not fair if you consider the additional time that Vivaldi had to produce that first version.

PlayTheInternet is a Chrome extension that enables you to collect and play videos hosted on YouTube, SoundCloud or Video easily without being on those sites.

Designed as an effective option to create music video playlists independent from any single service, it can be used for any video hosted on supported sites and works as well for other contents where the spoken word matters most.

What sets this program apart is that it is not restricted to the three supported websites when it comes to collecting videos.

About 18 months ago, I expressed my opinion on smartwatches and why I would not buy one in the near future. Today, I'd like to share my opinion on so-called smart TVs as well.

So what is a Smart TV? It is a device that combines traditional broadcasting features with interactive features and apps that for may require an Internet connection to work.

Basic examples of these features are integration of streaming services such as Netflix or Amazon Video, Internet browsing or voice control.

If you want to make sure that network resources or domains on the Internet are accessible, you have plenty of options to do so.

While you can run tests manually, it is not practicable as you would have to repeat the test regularly to make sure it does not go down.

Network monitoring software and online monitoring services like Deez.io can be used to automate the process.

Browser developers and web companies work on various alternatives for Adobe's popular Flash technology.

The most common solutions are to replace Flash video with HTML5 video and to replace Adobe Flash with a native version of the plugin that provides better control.

Google for instance maintains Pepper Flash and Microsoft its own version of Flash on Windows 8.

Mozilla on the other hand made the decision to create a Flash replacement that it called Shumway. As you can imagine, this is a much larger undertaking than using a different plugin system to run Flash.