What's New

The annual Steam Summer Sale has just started and gamers can once again buy virtual games, apps, and even real hardware for a discounted price.

While I'm personally not that excited anymore about new Steam sales, as Valve removed much of the excitement from them by doing away with Flash sales, user voting on special deals and such, it may still be of interest to Steam users who are looking to pick up discounted games and other things.

If you operate an Android device regularly or from time to time you may have noticed that news headlines are displayed in the notifications area regularly.

While any news app may display news headlines there, the most likely candidate for that on Android is Google News as it comes included on most devices alongside many other Google applications.

I noticed these news notifications only recently and can't really say what triggered their display. Maybe the upgrade to Android 8.x on the Nokia 5 device but it could have been something else as well.

When you install a new feature upgrade of Windows 10 on a computer or upgrade from a previous version of Windows to a newer one, you get options to rollback for a certain period of time.

Windows keeps the files of the old systems on the drive for a period of time to give users and admins options to roll back to the previous version. There are plenty of reasons for wanting to do so, from broken functionality or programs to removed or modified features.

Microsoft supports Windows 7 officially until January 2020; while the company won't end support for the operating system that it launched in 2009 early, it appears that Microsoft is trying to get users to upgrade to newer versions of Windows by limiting support and ignoring certain issues that were introduced in recent updates.

Microsoft launched an updated news application called Microsoft News for Google Android and

Google announced the new paid VirusTotal service VirusTotal Monitor today designed to provide customers with daily reports for files uploaded to the service.

One of the core goals of VirusTotal Monitor is the mitigation of false positives. The detection of false positives, the incorrect detection of malicious code in files, is a huge problem for software and security companies, and end users.

Falcon is a free program for Microsoft's Windows 10 operating system that you may use to center icons and the Start button on the taskbar.

While you can make some modifications to the Windows taskbar, you are somewhat limited when it comes to the default options. You can move the taskbar to another edge of the screen, hide it by default, or change the icon size, but that is about it.

There’s plenty of gaming platforms out there nowadays, from Steam to Origin, it seems like you need to have almost as many gaming platforms as you do games installed.

GNU/Linux users are a bit more limited in their choice of games available, although thankfully more and more are being released all the time.

Lutris for Linux

Google released a new version of the company's data compression app Datally for Android yesterday; the update introduces new  features and improves others.

The company launched the Datally application for Android in late 2017. We reviewed the first release version of Datally back in 2017 to give Android users better control over the device's data usage.

The initial version of Datally monitored the data usage on the Android device, offered tips to reduce data usage, and suggested public wireless networks that it picked up to save mobile data.

A Variety report suggests that BitTorrent Inc, creators of the BitTorrent peer-to-peer protocol and owners of uTorrent and BitTorrent (client), has been acquired by blockchain entrepreneur Justin Sun.

Google revealed five new features for Android's default messaging app Messages yesterday. The first advertised feature unlocks options to read and send texts from desktop computer systems.

The new feature works similarly to how other messaging platforms including Google's now more-dead-than-alive Allo messaging app handled desktop integration.

LatencyMon is a free-for-home use software program for Microsoft Windows devices that monitors the latency of the system when run to point out issues and assess the system's real-time audio and other latency-depending performance.

Latency issues can impact the experience that you have when working on a computer. While you may not see much of an issue when editing Word documents, you may experience lag, stutter, freezes, and other issues while playing games or streaming content that are caused by latency issues.

Microsoft plans to launch a new OneDrive storage feature in the next feature update for Windows 10, out September/October 2018, that turns local OneDrive files to on-demand files automatically when the files are not accessed for a set period of time.

Chameleon is a new open source extension for Mozilla Firefox that is a port of the Firefox add-on Random Agent Spoofer for the browser.

IOBit Uninstaller 8, the latest version of IOBits installation monitoring and software uninstallation program for Windows, comes with new bundleware monitoring capabilities among other new features.

The default option to remove installed software from Windows machines is pretty basic even though you may improve it. Some of the shortcomings are that you are limited to removing individual programs (no batch uninstallation), and that leftovers are not removed from the system.