January 2015

When I start my Windows PC in the morning, I load the browsers Firefox and Chromium, the email client Thunderbird and the RSS reader Quite RSS right away.

While I could add those programs to the startup of the system, I won't do that as I run other programs at times instead. In the evening, I may open Steam for example and Teamspeak to check who is online.

Simple Program Launching and Termination (Splat) is a free portable program for Windows that you can use to create profiles to run or stop multiple programs at once.

I have followed the NANY (New Apps for a New Year) event over on Donation Coder ever since it was first introduced in 2007.

It is a fun event in which programmers pledge to produce one or multiple new software programs for the event that they release for free when the year ends.

What I like most about it is that you get a wide variety of results, from very basic apps to complex ones.

Folder Merger is a free portable application for the Windows operating system that you can use to merge files that reside in different folders into a single destination folder

Merging simple folders on Windows is not that much of a problem. Simply select all files of one folder and copy the contents to the other folder. Finish up by deleting the first folder.

It gets complicated and time consuming if you need to merge many folders into one, or want to move files from subfolders into the root folder.

Keeping track of certain tasks can sometimes be difficult. While it is usually no problem if you complete tasks regularly, say once a week, it gets difficult if you only do so occasionally.

Examples are changing oil on your car, dusting your PC, cleaning the fridge, medical appointments or changing smoke alarm batteries.

While some of you may be able to track those without any helpers, others may have a hard time remembering when they completed a task the last time.

Dimmdrive is a new application available on the gaming platform Steam. It is a RAM drive that has been created specifically for Steam games.

Games benefit a lot from better hardware. Solid State Drives are better than platter-based drives. More RAM is better than less RAM. A faster cpu and video card produce higher fps on the screen, and a fast Internet connection ensures that you can connect to game servers faster.

Mary Jo Foley mentioned recently that Microsoft could ship the company's upcoming operating system Windows 10 with two browsers instead of just one.

These two browsers, different from the two versions of Internet Explorer that Windows 8.x users have access to currently, run independent from each other.

Ah, the Commodore Amiga. One of the greatest home computer systems that was home to some of the best games ever created.

While it is still possible to buy an Amiga on marketplaces like eBay, you may not have enough space at home to do just that.

That's were emulation comes in. While you can argue that emulation cannot mimic the computer 100%, it is better than not using it at all in my opinion.

Plus, it adds several options such as fast load or the emulation of hard drives or floppy drives that make things more comfortable.

You can configure the Google Chrome web browser to open the last session, meaning all tabs and windows open the last time you used it, or to open a blank page or set of pages each time you open it.

If you have configured Chrome to start fresh and not restore sessions, then you won't be able to continue where you left off.

While that may be your intention, you may find it useful at times to restore the previous sessions. Problem is, there is no option to do just that.

Leanify is a lightweight cross-platform application that you can run to optimize the size of certain file types without affecting quality or contents.

File size is not that much of an issue anymore in times where Terabyte hard drives are the norm and not the exception.

It is advisable at times however. If you are running low on disk space, for instance because of quotas in a company network, want to make available files on the Internet or send them to others, then file size may become an issue.

The shutdown of the popular MyP2P.eu website, a popular destination for live and free sports streaming on the Internet, resulted in the creation of WiZiWiG which offered similar services.

It was not the only site that offered lists of events and links to stream those events but became a popular destination quickly.