July 2014

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.

Norwegian company Opera Software has released a new developer version of its Opera browser for the desktop. While previous updates to Opera were most of the time rather uneventful in terms of new feature support, this one is packed with additions including one that users requested for a long time.

Probably the biggest feature that Opera Software added to Opera Dev 24.0.1555.0 is a bookmarks manager. While it is not enabled yet by default, it is easy enough to do.

Programs that provide you with options to take screenshots, create animated gifs or record videos are not available in abundance on Windows.

While you get lots of tools that allow you to take screenshots, and some that can create screencasts, only a few can create all three types.

And if you leave out commercial programs, you end up with even fewer options.

Welcome to the overview of Microsoft's Patch Tuesday for July 2014. It lists all information about this month's security and non-security updates for Microsoft operating systems and other company products.

A total of six bulletins are released this month that fix 29 vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows, Internet Explorer and Microsoft Server Software.

While I cannot really remember when I have changed default cursors in Windows the last time, I know some users who like to use custom cursors for a variety of reasons.

Some like to install cursors that match a custom theme that they have installed on their system or even install a theme that ships with cursors, while others prefer cursors that may offer better visibility.