What's New

I'm somewhat of a fanatic when it comes to optimizing sleep. While I have not convinced myself yet to try and reduce it drastically, I have tried different things to make it better and improve my overall health in the process.

I don't sleep well most of the time which I attribute to a couple of things including working long-hours in front of a computer monitor and being rather noise sensitive.

I hear things that others don't hear or don't mind hearing which is one of the things that is keeping me awake at night.

Virtual Private Networks, short VPN, serve a variety of purposes. From providing unfiltered access to contents on the Internet over privacy and security benefits to bypassing country-locks of select services.

Regardless of for what it is used for, it works always in the same way. A secure connection is created from the local computer system to a remote server that is maintained by the VPN company. From there, connections to the Internet are established.

If you check a folder's properties on Windows, values for the data's size and the data's size on disk are displayed to you.

These values may differ slightly or a lot, depending on the file system used and the type of files stored on the drive.

It can happen that you see a Gigabyte or more of a difference between the two values.

You can test this by right-clicking any folder or drive letter in Windows Explorer and selecting the properties option from the context menu.

Firefox users who visit Google's video hosting site YouTube may have noticed that the site limits the resolutions that videos are made available in.

In particular, any video resolution higher than 720p may not be made available. Other video resolutions that are available may not be provided as well including 144p, 240p or 480p.

It does not really matter if Adobe's Flash Player is being used to watch videos or if YouTube's HTML5 video player is used: resolutions are limited, usually to 360p and 720p, with all other resolutions are missing from the selection menu.

Support.com has released version 6.0 of the anti-malware software SUPERAntiSpyware recently. One of the main new features of the application is the new System Investigator tool which scans key locations of the system and provides you with suggestions based on its findings.

This sounds a lot like what tools such as HiJackThis do, on paper at least.

Winamp Backup Tool is a lightweight program for Windows that enables you to backup your Winamp configuration to restore it at a later point in time.

AOL announced in 2013 that it would close Winamp and all associated services such as the Shoutcast directory.

Plans changed eventually and Winamp was acquired by Radionomy instead ensuring that development of the player continued. It also meant that services such as Shoutcast would remain accessible on the Internet.

When you connect to a website or service on today's Internet, connections to servers hosting site contents are established. If a server is not available at the time, some part of a website or all of it may not be displayed in the program you are using.

While there are some options to grab the data anyway, caching for instance, you would still rely on a limited amount of servers and companies to deliver those contents to you.

Mozilla has enabled a new feature in the most recent Nightly version of the Firefox web browser, version 34 at the time of writing, that introduces changes to Firefox's address bar behavior and backend.

Firefox's auto-complete functionality, which powers suggestions displayed to the user when text is inserted into the address bar, has been powered by two components, history and urlinline up until now.

For many Internet users, email is still the number one method of communicating with others. While on-the-go users may have switched to messaging and video chat, email is playing a big part in the life of many users.

Google's Gmail service is one of the most popular services when it comes to email even though it has lost quite a bit of momentum in recent time.

With that, I don't mind user growth but innovation.

Broken, damaged or corrupt archives can be quite annoying. It does not really matter if an archive that you have created locally is not working anymore, or if you have downloaded Megabytes or even Gigabytes of data from the Internet only to realize that one or multiple of the files of the archive are either damaged or missing completely.

That does not mean that the data cannot be repaired or extracted anymore. Depending on the circumstances, you may be able to recover the archive fully, or at least partially.

Web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Chrome or Firefox use the browsing history in a number of ways.

Besides making available a list of sites that users have visited in the past, it is also used when users type in the browser's address bar to display matches.

That's comfortable if you want to reopen a site at a later time again. Google Chrome matches only the url and site title when text is entered into its address bar.

The Windows operating system ships with a boatload of system monitors that help users fix issues on the computer or optimize processes.

While that is the case, there is still room for third-party programs that bring additional features to the table.

MultiMon is a free and paid program for Windows that can monitor various activities on the system. In particular, it can monitor the following items: File System, System, Registry, Keyboard, User and Clipboard.

If you are running a version of Firefox for Android right now on a smartphone or tablet, you may have noticed that it lacks an option to automatically clear private data.

While you can clear private data manually, there is no option to configure the mobile browser to perform the operation automatically for you like you can do on the desktop version of Firefox.

Private data includes the browsing history, cache, cookies, downloads or the search history.

Most Internet services don't prevent you from pasting information into password fields or other form fields on websites.

Some on the other hand restrict pasting to select fields or none at all, which means that you need to fill out those fields manually as you cannot use copy and paste to do so.

That's at least how it looks like on first glance. One example that I encountered just recently. I added a couple of items to a cart on this site and was asked to create an account to complete the purchase.