What's New

When Microsoft released its Windows 8 operating system with a store component everything looked great on first glance. Since Microsoft would review all apps before they were made available to users, malicious or deceiving apps should not be an issue.

In mid-2013 I ran a story about how apps deceive users in either paying money for something that they are not, ride on the bandwagon of popular software, or simply embed websites of third-party services.

Japanese is a language that I really want to learn. While I have started some courses, I could not really convince myself to complete them because of how they were laid out and other issues such as participants already knowing the basics while I had to spend day after day trying to memorize the two syllabic scripts hiragana and katakana as well as kanji.

Update: The developers have added an option to the extension to disable the tracking. You find it on the options page when you click on "show Advanced Option". Here you can disable Enable non-personal,anonymous usage statistics to do so.

When extension developers want to make money from their popular extensions, they have only a few options to do so. They can ask for donations, offer a paid version, integrate a third-party monetization module in the app, or sell it to the highest bidder.

Skype displays the list of contacts in its interface on desktop computer systems. Here you see each contacts status, can add contacts to the favorites, or view a person's profile for additional information.

There is however no option to display information about all contacts in list form. While you see all handles in Skype, other information become only available for individual contacts you select.

The Internet has simplified how we access weather information. Before that, you had to rely on the newspaper, TV, or phone to get weather information. With the rise of the Internet came dedicated websites that provide you with the information you require in real-time at all time.

Nowadays, apps are available that run on your smartphone or tablet at all times to provide you with weather information.

The Firefox web browser supports two types of themes: lightweight themes which were formerly known as Personas and are now commonly referred to as background themes or simply themes, and as a second type complete themes.

The difference between the two is that lightweight themes are limited in to what they can change in the browser. This means that you usually get a new background image for the browser but that is about it while complete themes may change icons and other user interface elements as well.

Managing a collection of ebooks on your desktop system, be it Windows,Linux or Mac, may not be the easiest thing to do due to a lack of programs that let you do so.

While you can use online services such as Google Books for that, it means moving all your documents to the cloud to a remote server you have zero control over.

When it comes to the brightness of the monitor, you have two core options to adjust it if you feel it is too bright or too dark. You can use the brightness setting of the monitor to modify it, or use software running on the computer to do so.

While the first option may be ideal in many situations, it can lead to side effects such as the monitor starting to make a buzzing sound all of suddenly.

If you are running a cutting edge version of Google Chrome, Canary for example, you may have noticed the new "You" menu at the top right of the browser.

As it stands, it will eventually be moved to other versions of the browser including beta and stable versions.

So what is it for? It is a menu for Google Chrome's profile manager. It enables you to create multiple profiles, for instance for different users who share the same computer or activity-based, and also to run Chrome using a guest profile.

When I write a new article I tend to have two browser windows aligned next to each other that span the whole screen. One displays the WordPress admin dashboard, the other is used for research while I write the article.

This can be a quick word look up on a dictionary site like Leo.org, a program web page, or a web forum where a related topic is discussed.