What's New

VLC Media Player for Android has been available as a beta application for some time now.  The app supports many of the features of the famous desktop version of VLC including out-of-the-box playing of many video and audio formats, support for DVD ISO images, a media library, and support for subtitles and multi-track audio.

Some features however are not ready or available at all in the beta. This includes hardware decoding on most devices for example.

Microsoft has released previews of several Office apps today for users running the most recent build of the company's upcoming Windows 10 operating system.

The first batch of universal Office applications, meaning they will run on all Windows 10 devices eventually, are now available in the beta version of Windows Store that ships with Windows 10.

Did you know that you can select and copy multiple independent bits of texts in Firefox in a single operation without using add-ons to do so?

All you need to do for that is to hold down the Ctrl-key on your keyboard before you start to select text on a web page displayed in the browser.

You will notice that you can select multiple independent texts on the page to copy them all to the clipboard or process them in another way as long as you hold down the Ctrl-key during the operation.

I don't own a Kindle but my mother does. She uses it mainly to read some books, listen to audiobooks and watch movies when she is traveling.

I'm the one who is copying audiobooks, ebooks and movies to the device and ever since I started doing so, I ran into issues with the default video player on the device.

I discovered quickly that the Kindle supports the mp4 format and that videos had to be in that format for the default media player to play them.

If you are running Windows 10 on a system either directly or in a virtual machine, you know that the operating system displays a selection menu on boot.

The menu displays options to boot into Windows 10 which you can do by selecting Windows Technical Preview, or to restore the initial state of Windows 10 by selecting Windows Rollback.

The menu is displayed for 30 seconds by default and Windows 10 will be loaded if no user interaction is recorded in that time.

While efforts are underway to make the web plugin-free, plugins at it stands are still highly popular.

Not only are they installed on nearly every system and integrated in web browsers, they are also required on many sites for some or even all functionality.

I have to admit that I was impressed with what the first version of the Vivaldi web browser brought to the table.

It felt in many regards like a browser that had been there for a long time and not like a new browser that was just released for the first time.

Sure, some features are not there yet and others need some work, but overall I have to say that it looks promising.

Multi Commander is a third-party file manager for the Windows operating system that improves file management and handling significantly in many ways.

Windows Explorer, the default Windows file manager, is limited in many regards. Even basic operations such as copying files from one folder to another or the unpacking of multiple files are not completed easily when it is used exclusively.

Third-party programs like Multi Commander have been designed to replace Windows Explorer to improve file handling on Windows systems.

Microsoft's Windows 10 operating system is coming out later this year if development does not take a hit between now and then.

The company announced previously that an upgrade to Windows 10 will be free on devices that run a legitimate version of Windows 7 or newer.

The offer is limited to the first year but once upgraded, Windows 10 remains free on those systems.

If you are a regular here you know that you can modify quite a few Google Chrome settings on the chrome://flags/ page.

The majority of settings that you find there are not yet ready for prime time. Some technologies may still be in active development, other features are tested by Google and made available to a wider audience through flags.

Since you find more than a hundred flags on the page at any time, it can be quite time consuming to go through all them regularly to find out what is new.

SuperEasy Live Defrag Free (yes that is the name of the program) is a free file defragmentation program for Windows that ships with advanced features.

Fragmentation occurs when parts of a file get saved in different locations on a hard drive. Since it is necessary to load all parts if the file gets loaded, it may slow down read or write processes on the system.

While that is less of an issue on modern systems, it may still be an issue depending on use and the storage devices that are used on the system.

Offline - An Offline Browser is a free application for Google Android devices that you can use to download web pages to your device to read them at any time even when you don't have an Internet connection at all or one that is unreliable.

This can be quite useful at times. Reading the latest articles of your favorite online newspaper in the subway, having tourist information at hand right away while you are on vacation, or troubleshooting articles from your favorite tech blog that you can use for work.

Cookie use notifications on websites is a very annoying thing on the Internet for a number of reasons. These notifications are displayed on many websites to citizens from the European Union and state, basically, that the site they are visiting is using cookies.

Designed to inform citizens about cookie use on sites they visit, these messages become annoying quickly.

You may experience that they are displayed over and over again to you when you visit the same site. Why? Because the system uses cookies to determine if the notification should be shown to you or not.

So-called QR Codes are very similar to shortened urls. The core similarity is that you don't see where the link takes you when you activate it.

QR Codes are used in many different locations and situations. On advertisement so that you can look up additional information about an offer, in shops, public transport, magazines and on websites.

The recently released WhatsApp Web uses a QR Code for instance to link the account on your phone and the web interface.

There are many free programs out there on the Internet that are great: Firefox, Thunderbird, VLC Media Player, CCleaner, Revo Uninstaller, QuietRSS, WinSCP or KeePass are just some examples of programs that you can download and use for free.

While it should be pretty straightforward to download these programs, it is often not the case. Sure, if you know the url they are offered on then you go there and download them, but if you don't, you have to use search engines or visit a download site to get them.