What's New

Remember the Commodore home computers C-64 and Amiga? Commodore hardware was highly popular back in the 80s and early 90s, but several bad business decisions brought an end to the company. Still, there are plenty of people out there that look back with fond memories, and others who may be curious about gaming or programming on these old machines.

While you can purchase C-64 and Amiga hardware and software on places such as eBay, emulation is an option as well. WinUAE is probably the best Amiga emulator out there, but it does require Kickstart ROMs to function.

After hiding the 3D Objects folder in recent builds of Windows 10 from the main sidebar menu by default, Microsoft removed the apps Paint 3D and 3D Viewer for new Windows installations as well.

Mozilla plans to release an update for its Firefox web browser later today. The new Firefox 86.0.1 will be pushed to the browser's stable channel to update Firefox 86.0 and older versions of the web browser to the latest version.

Firefox 86.0.1 is not available yet at the time of writing, but it will be released in the coming hours, provided that no stopper bugs are discovered before the release.

The new version of Firefox is a bug fix release; it does not include security updates.

Is your desktop or taskbar full of shortcuts that you use regularly? While it may be a quick way to access your programs, it doesn't look neat. Forget docks, take the minimalistic approach instead.

PopSel is a freeware application that allows you to create a custom menu, add shortcuts for files, folders, URLs, and access it from a desktop shortcut.

Each year, the free archiver 7-Zip gets updated to a new version. The developer of the application has released two alpha previews of this year's 7-Zip 21 version. Reason enough to take a look at the new version of 7-Zip and the changes and improvements compared to the previous versions of the file archiver.

Microsoft published security updates for all supported versions of Windows 10 yesterday on the March 2021 Patch Day. It appears that the updates are causing issues on some devices; specifically, the attempt to print may result in bluescreen errors on affected devices.

The updates patch security issues, all with the second-highest severity rating of important. One of the additional issues that these updates patch is a printing to FILE ports vulnerability. The issue is patched in updates for all versions of Windows, from Windows 7 to Windows 10.

Now that the legacy version of Microsoft's Edge browser has run out of support, Microsoft is doubling-down on its new Chromium-based Edge browser. During the Ignite 2021 conference, Microsoft revealed plans to align the codebase of the Edge browser on all supported platforms.

Currently, Microsoft Edge on the desktop differs from the mobile versions of Edge for iOS and Android, and even the mobile apps differ because the iOS version is using WebKit as its codebase while the Android version Chromium.

Brave Software has acquired the Tailcat search engine, to step up the competition with Google Search. Tailcat will be integrated in to Brave Browser, as Brave Search.

Valve Software announced an addition to the Remote Play Together feature of the company's Steam gaming platform this week. Remote Play gives Steam users the option to play games with others, even if the invited users don't have the game in their library.

Remote Play works with a selection of games only and up until now, required that every participating user had Steam installed and a Steam account.

Exodus is a free privacy application for Google's Android operating system that reveals the use of trackers of installed Android applications and their permissions.

We reviewed Exodify, browser extensions by the Exodus project, back in 2018 and covered the web service Exodus as well back then. Users may use the browser extensions to display permission requests and tracker uses of any app on Google Play, or run searches for applications on the Exodus website.

Do you backup your data? You should, as you never know when it might come in handy. Some people like having a backup readily available on a hard drive, while others prefer a cloud-based solution that they can access from other devices.

I rely on RSS Feeds to catch up with news from multiple tech sites, news sites, and other sites that support RSS. It's simpler, faster, and much more efficient than visiting sites or even waiting for newsletters to drop. There are plenty of good add-ons that you can use for getting feeds right from your web browser. Brook is a Firefox extension that keeps it simple, and offers a quick way to access the latest articles from your favorite  websites.

Alerts and reminders are useful for getting things done. But sometimes you may not want to fiddle with menus and toolbars, keeping it simple and faster might just be the best idea. So in a way, a note on your desktop can serve the purpose. If you want a sticky notes application with minimal options, PeperNote is a good choice.

If you have upgraded your stable version of the Firefox web browser to version 85.0, released in January, you may have noticed that it no longer supports ESNI.

ESNI, which stands for Encrypted Server Name Indication, is a security and privacy feature designed to protect against network eavesdropping.

News and Interests is a new feature of Microsoft's Windows 10 operating system that is currently in testing. Introduced in Insider build 21286, News and Interests is available in certain geographical regions only currently. Microsoft has not yet revealed if the feature will land in the upcoming next feature update version of Windows 10.