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If there is a niche on mobile devices that is flooded with apps it is the weather niche. There are so many weather apps available that it would take weeks to test them all.

And if you are thinking of launching a weather app to one of the stores, you better make sure that it offers something that other apps don't offer.

The forecast.io service on the Web does that for instance, and Microsoft's Climatology app for Android aims in that direction as well.

Whenever you connect to a website using any browser, the site receives a variety of information automatically. While not all sites process the information or record them, some may very well use them for tracking and other purposes.

Web services such as the EFF's Panopticlick highlight the information that websites may retrieve while you are connecting to them.

This may include the operating system and web browser, screen size, system fonts or which plugins are available.

When you are tasked with analyzing a issue in detail on a PC running Windows, a malware attack for example, it is often necessary to look beyond the obvious and use tools that provide you with a detailed low-level view of what is going on.

While some recommend to start clean by formatting the PC and installing Windows anew, if you want to analyze what happened, you need specialized tools for that purpose.

As a webmaster, I know that it is crucial to keep an eye on your websites at all times. When they go down, you lose business, reputation and maybe even rankings in search engines if the downtime is too long.

That's all bad and every minute that can be shaved off the downtime is important.

That's were domain monitoring comes in. Since you cannot possibly monitor your domains 24/7 on your own, you need automation to help you deal with that.

I prefer desktop mail programs over cloud-based web mail services for a variety of reasons. Mozilla Thunderbird has been my preferred desktop email client for many years.

I consider it one of the best clients in this regard even though Mozilla more or less decided to put it on life support. While most see this as a bad thing, it does not necessarily have to be, considering that there is not much that you can add to an email client in terms of functionality once you have the basics covered.

Google Chrome, Chromium and other Chromium-based browsers have supported an offline cache mode for a while now. The feature, hidden behind an experimental flag on the browser's chrome://flags page, made resources available from cache if they'd become unavailable.

It can sometimes be important, or even a requirement, to verify that files in two different folders are identical. This can for instance be the case to verify that files were backed up correctly and without issues to another location, or to make sure that development and productive environment files are identical.

While you can perform these checks manually, it is only practicable for a small number of files.

If you are a regular here on ComTek you know that one needs to be careful when it comes to giving away or selling old devices that were used for storage (read used hard drives still haven for identity theft from 2008 for example)

This can be an external hard drive, an old PC or laptop, or a smartphone. As long as there is permanent storage, there is the chance that data may be recovered even if you have deleted it or used a reset option to restore a factory state.

Sometimes when I discover new websites while browsing the web in Firefox, I open them immediately but don't access them directly. I do this most of the time while I'm busy with other things. While I could keep the original page that links to the resource open, it is sometimes not practicable to do so.

Microsoft ships the Windows 8 operating system with a set of apps that provide core functionality such as reading news, opening emails or managing photos.

The company has added more apps with every major release of the operating system and it is now the case that about 20 different core apps are installed on the operating system on first start.