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One of the things that I do for most software or services that I discover is to check for reviews before I try it out myself.

Reviews can reveal important information about a project and while it is still important to use common-sense and make your own experience, some may raise red flags so that I be extra cautious.

Sometimes when you are trying to connect to websites or services in Google Chrome, you may receive the error message no date received instead of the website you wanted to load.

The message indicates a data transfer issue that is sometimes difficult to correct as it may not always be caused on your end.

For some users of the browser, no data received may appear completely random as they may be able to load sites right after the error, or may not experience it at all for a prolonged period of time.

It is relatively easy to manage a digital music collection. Programs like MediaMonkey Gold or iTunes can import all music files right away with options to correct any importing issues and add information to individual tracks or albums.

But when you look for a program that you can use to manage your physical music collection, cassette tapes, records or audio CDs, then you may not find as many suitable options.

The Firefox web browser supports two different theme types: so-called Personas or light themes, and complete themes.

The main difference between the two is that Personas modify only colors and backgrounds, much like Chrome themes do, while complete themes can modify nearly every element in the interface.

Adding a theme to your web browser of choice is a great way of personalizing it. Depending on the browser you are using, themes may modify all interface elements or only some.

Google Chrome limits what themes can modify. If you check out the official themes category on the store you will notice that themes may alter colors and background images only but not icons or other interface elements.

Waifu is a cross-platform movie streamer that you can use to watch the latest Anime shows. It works similar to Popcorn Time, a streaming application for movies and TV shows in that it uses torrent technology to deliver the goods.

Note: Use of the program may or may not be illegal in the country you are residing in.

Even though use of Popcorn Time may be illegal in some countries, it demonstrated how a well constructed media streaming application could look like.

Filters are a great tool to process emails automatically on Gmail. You can create filters to apply labels to filters automatically, prevent that it ever lands in spam, or forward emails automatically.

To configure filters, you need to open the Gmail website in your browser of choice and sign in to your Google account first.

Once you have done that, you have three main options to add filters on Gmail. The first two options are available right on the frontpage while the third is listed on the settings page.

The Internet Archive may have started as a website preservation service but it has since then expanded into many different areas.

It is now offering access to movie, audio, software and image archives. One recent addition to the archive is its games section.

Up until now, it offered downloads for various home computer systems and video game consoles, and options to play some of those games online were added recently as well.

If you ever had to move specific files from one location to another you know how difficult of an operation this can be.

Say someone connected an USB Flash Drive to your computer and you want to copy all images, video files or documents to it.

While you could copy those files manually by iterating through all folders on the flash drive, you'd spend some time doing so.

File Fisher is an easy to use program that automates part of the process for you.

Movie File Merger is a free program for Windows that you can use to merge video collections or move a subset from a collection to another location.

If you ever had to merge a movie collection with another, for instance your own and a friend's, or to add all video files on your own hard drive to a single directory structure, or move a subset of video files from a location to another, an external USB drive for example, you may have noticed that it is not as easy as it sounds to do just that.

When you visit torrent indexing websites, download links may be offered on those sites as torrent files or as magnet links.

Some services offer both while some only one of the options. The core difference between the files is that magnet links are links that can be posted anywhere while torrent files need to be uploaded before they are made available.

You find a detailed comparison of magnet links and torrent files here.

I'm currently rewriting and updating articles here on this site that were published years ago. Currently working on the email category which had its fair share of Thunderbird extension reviews.

At least half of the extensions reviewed back then are no longer working properly in recent versions of Thunderbird.

Some were last updated in 2010 or even earlier than that and are simply no longer compatible with the email client even if you force compatibility.

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.