What's New

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.

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.

If you follow tech news sites you may have read pieces already on how Microsoft's Chief Marketing Officer, Chris Capossela explained on the Windows Weekly 497 videocast that the company is aware of that it went too far with pushing Windows 10 upgrades to customer systems.

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.

Mozilla announced on December 23, 2016 that it will support the Windows operating systems XP and Vista at least until September 2017.

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 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.

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.

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.

Opera Software announced today that Opera Max, a free VPN application for Android, crossed the 50 million active user mark after hitting 10 million active users in May of 2016.

The company revealed a new Opera Max VIP mode on top of that which provides users of the app with another use option.

If you are a paying Google Drive customer you know that Google offered monthly payment options only up until now.

The company is giving away 15 Gigabyte of storage to all its users, but requires you to pay a subscription fee if you require more than that amount of data storage.

The storage is shared across several Google services, not just google Drive. It is also used by the email service Gmail, and by Google Photos.

Microsoft released ISO images for Windows 10 build 14986, a recent Windows 10 Insider Preview build, to the public.

The build was pushed out to the Windows 10 Insider Preview Fast Ring last week, and is said to be the last Insider Preview release of the year.

Microsoft has been busy yesterday; the company released the two new cumulative updates for Windows 10 KB3213522 and KB3206309.

More precisely, KB3206309 was released for the latest Windows 10 Insider Build, while KB3213522 for the current stable Anniversary Update version of Windows 10.

Both updates suffer from Microsoft's weak information policy when it comes to updates for its operating systems. The support page for KB3206309 is not yet published for instance.

Hacker's Keyboard is a free keyboard application for Google Android that works well as an all-purpose keyboard but also specifically for administrative tasks.

Google rolled out Gboard recently, an update of the Google Keyboard for Android application which introduced search capabilities and a line on top of the keyboard that would not go away.

Netgear has released the first batch of production firmware fixes for company routers affected by a serious security vulnerability.

Cert issued a warning on December 9, 2016 that several Netgear routers are vulnerable to arbitrary command injection. Cert listed only two router models but has since then added other models to the list.