February 2015

Media players come in all forms and shapes, from massive programs like Windows Media Player to lightweight programs.

The majority of programs display a graphical user interface that you use to control playback and player functionality.

Meson Player, the successor of Stealth Player, is different as it does not offer a graphical user interface.

The only indication that the player is running is a system tray icon (or the equivalent on Mac and Linux systems since it is cross-platform) and the playing of music of course.

Flashcards are used by students all over the world to aid memorization. They are used to learn vocabulary, dates, formulas or other types of information that can be learned using a question or answer format.

While a question or answer format is typical, some forms of flash cards can be used either way. This is for instance the case for vocabulary when you learn a foreign language.

Physical cards have dominated in the past but apps have entered the field in recent years as well. One of the advantages of apps is that they may add information to each card.

Whenever I discover a new program I scan it first on the Virustotal website before running it on a local test system.

This initial virus check helps me determine whether an application is (likely) legitimate or not. It happens that one or some of the antivirus engines used by the service to scan files may return hits.

These hits are often false positives, especially if lesser known antivirus engines report them. There is still a level of uncertainty about those files.

The file hosting and synchronization company Dropbox just published Dropbox for Gmail, a browser extension for Google Chrome.

The idea behind the extension is to improve the integration of Dropbox as a service when the Gmail web interface is used.

The extension adds a new icon to Gmail's compose window after installation that you can use to integrate files hosted on Dropbox in the email.

If you have started or installed the Pale Moon browser recently you may have noticed that it ships with a new default start page.

The start page, or homepage, is the page that gets loaded when you start the browser and have not configured it to load the previous session or start with a blank page without content.

Pale Moon entered a cooperation with start.me, a personal homepage service on the Internet similar to how iGoogle worked and still maintained services like Netvibes work.

I published an article just yesterday about unique Firefox extensions praising the extension API of the web browser.

Mozilla announced today that it will introduce extensions signing later this year which changes several processes for extension developers and many users of the browser.

The file hosting company Rapidshare AG just announced that it will shut down its services on March 31, 2015.

The notice, published on the service's front page on the Internet states that the company will stop its "active service" on the day and that accounts won't be accessible from that day on.

According to the information, accounts will be deleted and data won't be available anymore.

Rapidshare recommends to download files before the deadline to secure a copy of the data before it becomes unavailable.

Welcome to the Microsoft security release overview for February 2015. You find information about each security bulletin that Microsoft released this month.

Since the company releases bulletins for all its products, you will find information about affected operating systems and other Microsoft products below.

In addition to that, a list of non-security updates and security updates that Microsoft released since January's patch day are also provided.

If you have opened on a video result on the search engine DuckDuckGo recently that linked to the video hosting site YouTube, you may have received a privacy warning instead of being taken directly to the site.

The warning reads "YouTube Privacy Warning. YouTube (owned by Google) does not let you watch videos anonymously. As such, watching YouTube videos here will be tracked by YouTube/Google.".

An image's aspect ratio describes the proportional relationship between its height and width. Common aspect ratios are 4:3 and 16:9, used by video formats and 4:3 and 3:2 in consumer cameras.

Aspect ratio plays a role when you need to resize images or videos and also when media is displayed or played.

For instance, an image may look out of place if you use it as the system's desktop background image if you ignore its aspect ratio.