January 2016

WifiHistoryView is a brand new application by Nirsoft for Windows that lists all wireless connections the PC it us run on made in the past.

The portable software program gets the information from Windows itself, which stores the data in the directory C:\windows\System32\winevt\Logs\Microsoft-Windows-WLAN-AutoConfig%4Operational.evtx by default.

While it is possible to look up the information in the event log directly, one of the main advantages of WifiHistoryView is that it is a lot faster and provides quick options to browse or sort through the information.

Netflix announced yesterday that it launches it services globally yesterday offering it to more than 190 countries adding 130 new countries in the process. While that is still not all countries of the world, China is for instance not among the list, the move increases the company's availability significantly.

Ever since the Snowden relevations, privacy search engines and privacy in general has been a boom on the Internet.

Search engines focused on privacy have seen a rise in daily searches. While they are still nowhere near popular as Google Search or Bing, the two main search services in most parts of the world, they have shown that there is a market for these kind of services.

Oculus Rift, a VR solution, is now available for preorder for $599 on the official company website (pricing is €699 plus shipping for Euro countries, and £499 Pound).

The VR solution ships with two games and an Xbox One controller instead of the promised Oculus Touch controllers which will be made available at a later point in time.

Virtual Reality is the next big thing, at least if you believe the hype train that has been in full swing for a while and several companies are working on getting their VR products ready for the market.

Win-S2K84IAC4V4, that's the default name of the Windows 10 system that I just set up. The name is not ideal for a variety of reasons but identification is probably at the top of the list.

Depending on whether you clean install Windows 10 or upgrade an existing Windows system to it, you may end up with a nondescript name.

If you clean-install Windows, Windows 10 picks the name for the computer. I have seen names starting with Win or Desktop, but there are probably more variations available. All have in common that a seemingly random string is part of the name of the system.

Apart from giving its users more control over its features than any other web browser out there, another strength of Firefox is the browser's add-on system.

Just like customization options provided by Firefox, add-ons give developers and users more freedom than any other browser out there (that is not based on Firefox code).

The add-on system is under fire and big changes are upcoming, and not all of the changes are welcome by part of the Firefox community.

A Virtual Private Network (VPN) extends a private network allowing users to connect to remote data centers, network resources, and to encrypt their communication.

A simple way of thinking about VPNs is as a node sitting between your computer and another resource, the Internet for example. If you want additional details, check out the main Wikipedia article on the topic.

Traffic between your computer and the VPN is encrypted which is good for privacy and security, but more about that later.

The LastPass team has released the first big update of the popular online password manager since the acquisition of the company by LogMeIn.

LastPass 4.0 has been released for all platforms the password manager is available on, and existing users will notice immediately that the new version introduces a new look and feel.

Microsoft recently told the world that its new Windows 10 operating system was active on over 200 million devices, a fact that leaked a week earlier already.

File History is a security feature of the Windows operating system that backs up important files automatically when enabled so that they can be restored at a later point in time.

The feature, introduced in Windows 8 and also part of Windows 10, is not enabled by default on Microsoft's newest operating system.

It is unclear why that is the case, but the most likely explanation is that it requires a secondary drive or network location as the backed up data needs to be stored somewhere (actually, it is possible to use File History without a second drive).