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TekBits Technology News

Blackbird: Windows privacy, performance, security tool

Blackbird is another Windows privacy, performance and security tool in the seemingly unlimited arsenal of these tools that is been designed to improve user privacy on Windows machines.

Privacy tools come in all flavors; from one-click scripts to sophisticated programs that list dozens or even hundreds of settings for you to tweak and adjust.

WordPress: block anonymous Rest API access

The most recent version of WordPress ships with new REST API capabilities which plugins, apps, services, or the WordPress core can utilize.

The WordPress development team pushes new features to WordPress all the time. Many of those features improve the functionality of WordPress significantly.

Every now and then though, features get added that are problematic from an admin or user point of view.  The main issue with the bulk of these changes is that they cannot be disabled easily. I have disabled Emojis and XML-RPC here on this site for instance.

Video Converter HandBrake 1.0.0 released

HandBrake 1.0.0, a new version of the popular open source cross-platform video converter, was released on December 24, 2016.

I reviewed HandBrake for the first time in the year 2007 here on ComTek4u as a program to convert video DVDs. The program is capable of more than that however. Basically, what it allows you to do is convert any input video file or DVD / Blu-Ray video source that is not copy protected, to the file container formats mp4 or mkv.

Disable keyboard shortcuts in Firefox

Keybinder is an add-on for the Firefox web browser that enables you to change, reset, or disable any keyboard shortcut in the browser.

Certain keyboard shortcuts may get in your way when you use the browser. This is in my case for instance the case for Ctrl-B which opens the Bookmarks window.

Ghacks is powered by WordPress, and one keyboard shortcut of the WordPress editor is Ctrl-B; it bolds the selected text automatically which is usually faster than moving the mouse to the B-icon and clicking on it.

Debloat Windows 10 script collection

Debloat Windows 10 is a collection of Powershell scripts that block, disable, modify, or optimize various Windows 10 features that users may find annoying, or at least not super useful to begin with.

Word of warning: these scripts have no undo function. The author suggests you run them on a fresh installation of Windows 10. I suggest you create a full system backup before you run them, so that you can restore the system should things go wrong.

Vivaldi 1.7: browser screenshot functionality

Vivaldi Technologies AS released the first browser snapshot of the upcoming Vivaldi 1.7 version yesterday.

The new version introduces a feature to the browser that many users may find useful: the ability to capture screenshots.

While that is not a super-new feature, as browsers like Firefox support screenshot taking natively, and screenshot extensions are available for most browsers, it is nevertheless a handy feature.

What will 2017 bring for web browsers?

2017 is just a couple of days away, and it will be an interesting year if you are interested in technology.

What will 2017 bring for web browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Edge or Vivaldi? This is what I try to predict in this article.

To do that, I have to look at the current situation first briefly. In the Windows world, there are three major browser makers left. They are Mozilla, Microsoft, and Google.

These three organizations dominate the market, and many other browsers, Opera, Pale Moon or Vivaldi, use code from the major three.

Windows 10: Uninstall OneDrive

OneDrive is one of the many applications that ship with Windows 10 by default. It enables online storage, file syncing on the operating system.

Those who sign in with a Microsoft account may use the OneDrive application right away. Removal or uninstallation of OneDrive was not possible for a long time, at least not without going through hoops to make this happen.

Many Windows 10 users who relied on a different online storage provider -- Google Drive, Amazon Drive, Dropbox, you name it -- probably wished for an easy way to remove OneDrive from the device.