January 2015

Solid State Drives are great. If you switch from a platter-based drive to a SSD you will think you are in speed-heaven for the first time. Windows boots faster, programs start faster and everything seems to be improved speed-wise.

With the first generation of Solid State Drives, things deteriorated quickly due to limited write cycles and controllers that were far from optimal.

If you install and run new software regularly on your Windows system, you may have come upon programs that you have a bad feeling about.

Maybe because you have downloaded them from a site you cannot trust, maybe because it is a new app that has not been reviewed anywhere yet, or maybe because of what it is supposed to do.

You may scan the executable file locally then and on sites like VirusTotal to find out if it contains malicious code.

Developers and companies that offer free version of products have different options at their disposal to monetize their work.

From pro and business editions over donations to third-party offers. Third-party offers in this context means integration of other programs or services in the installer to earn revenue whenever users install those offers.

Since companies get paid when users install those programs and services, it is often the case that it is difficult to block their installation.

Many modern day phones come without SD card slot which means that you are stuck with the phone's internal storage.

While 8 or 16 Gigabyte may look like much on paper, it may not last a day depending on how you are using your phone.

If you like to add music or videos to it for example, or take lots of HD photos, then you may realize that additional storage space may be beneficial, especially since some storage is automatically taken away by the operating system and pre-installed apps.

One of Firefox's greatest strengths is its add-ons engine that powers thousands of extensions that improve the browser in one way or the other.

The majority of these add-ons are created by third-party developers who are not associated with Mozilla.

If you have followed Firefox's development in past years, you may have noticed that add-on compatibility changed over time.

Most Facebook users know that Facebook knows a lot about them but most do not know what this includes.

Some information are obvious; the things you post online or information that you have added to your profile.

Others, like interests, IP addresses, facial recognition data or photo metadata may not be as obvious or not accessible on the site at all.

If you want to find out what Facebook knows about you, you can request a copy of your data from Facebook to analyze it on your local computer.

Depending on what you do, what you buy and where you go, you may come into situations where formulas can come in quite handy.

If you live in the US and plan your next trip to go outside the country for example, you may need to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius, or Miles to Kilometers to understand what is going on.

The same may be true if you are currently in high school, a scientist or in another profession that uses or even depends on formulas.

Need to calculate the Energy by mass and light speed, impulse by force and time, or heat transfer by mass?

You can add pictures to Android messages or emails easily on devices by selecting that option. Usually though, you are limited to images that are either on the local device already or hosted on a connected file synchronization account.

If you want to add images that you found on the Web, you either have to download them or attach their link instead which may take quite some time as you need to open a web browser, open an image search site or a site images are hosted on, download the image or copy the link, and attach it to the message.

I stay away from user comments on YouTube as they provide little to no value most of the time. In fact, you could say that they are annoying or even worse than that.

Some YouTube users like comments on the other hand and even those users have to cope with a massive amount of useless comments that serve no purpose but to troll on the site.

If you read comments on YouTube occasionally or regularly, you may want to hide or remove comments on the site that are of no value.

The most recent Developer edition of the Opera browser, version 28.0.1745 ships with a new feature that highlights tabs in the browser if audio is playing on websites loaded in those tabs.

There are not many features that I wish Firefox would have that Chrome has already. One that is high up on that list is Chrome's ability to not only indicate whether audio is playing in a tab but also its means to mute it without having to switch to that tab first to use on-page controls.