York at its core looks like yet another networking monitor that is using the WinPcap packet capture library. If you look closer though, you will notice that it makes some things more comfortable than other programs of its kind. Alternatives include the Open Source application Open Monitor, NetWorx or NirSofts’ Network Traffic View. The program [...]

There are a lot of programs out there that let you time one or multiple activities on a computer. Cherry Tomato does that for instance automatically by gathering information about the windows that are in the front of the screen. Other programs like Chronometask, Free Light Timer or Time ComX offer timing functionality as well. [...]

You probably remember the My Permissions service which I reviewed about a week ago. It basically listed direct links to a dozen or so permission pages of social networking sites. Among the sites where some of the most popular sites on today’s Internet, including Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn or Dropbox. The service offered little [...]

Outlook is not my main email client and I never really used it that much. Still, I have it installed as a part of my Office 2010 installation, and I tend to use it sometimes to test a new plug-in or feature that I would like to write about. For the past month or so [...]

Remember last year’s IPv6 day ? No? Last year’s test day was designed to see how well and effective the new technology works when it is enabled on core Internet sites and services. Back then major Internet service providers, websites and companies enabled IPv6 on their servers for a one day trial of the new [...]

Most music discovery services let you only play music that they have available in their databases or on their servers. That’s great and all but may be limiting at times. Ex.FM offers a solution. The web service at its core is still a music discovery service, with the difference that it will pick up music [...]

Grooveshark’s ride to popularity has abruptly ended, at least in Germany. German users trying to access the website of the popular music streaming service Grooveshark are now greeted with an informational page telling them that the service has ended its operation in the country. According to the information, cost of operation reached a level in [...]

VLC is one of the most popular third party media players. If you check the download stats on portals such as Softpedia or Betanews, you will notice that it is always listed in one of the top spots. That’s not because of the player’s pretty name but the functionality it provides. VLC plays nearly every [...]

I recently funded my first Kickstarter project, a board game called Warparty that I have high hopes for. If you have never heard about Kickstarter before, let me explain the basic concept. Kickstarter is a funding community that brings designers and developers together with people who are interested in their projects. You can create a [...]

Mentor FM is one of those tools that it is pretty awesome and scary at the same time. The Internet radio tunes into your Facebook account to play music that you like. The awesome part is that it usually gets things pretty right in this regard. All you need to do is to give the [...]

When you look at the extensions that you have installed in your Chrome browser, you will probably notice that you do not use all of them all the time. It is more likely that you have extensions installed for specific tasks, for instance work, entertainment, research or shopping. And even though you do not use [...]

Google in recent years has started to make many modifications to Google Search, from auto suggestions over live previews to Google Instant. Not every user likes all or even any of those changes which makes those features highly annoying in the eyes of those users. I even know a few who switched to another search [...]

With YouTube’s redesign now live on the site and with no turning back opportunity anymore, it is time to realize that the changes have not all be for the better. If you are not logged in or an active YouTube user you can probably live with the new frontpage design and all, but if you [...]

You may sometimes be in a position where you need to look up information but do not have Internet available at the moment. This can be during your daily commute or in a situation where an Internet connection is not available or working. We have reviewed several options in the past to get the majority [...]

Most Internet users do not know that every step they make on the Internet is likely tracked by one or multiple companies. Tracking can be loosely divided into a first party and third party group. First party tracking is usually connected to the generation of visitor statistics, and less about the individual user. Third party [...]

Smartphone users can access most Google services on their smartphone. Those using Android are often logged in to a Google account all the time. Most do not know however that they can use their smartphone to log into their Google account on another computer. This is done with the help of a unique QR code. [...]

Zappos yesterday notified all of their employees and customers that a company server has been compromised. The email, accessible online only for visitors from the US, indicates that the attackers may have gotten hold of part or all of the customer account database of Zappos.com. Information that may have been retrieved by the attacker include [...]

When I signed up for my Hotmail email account I used a custom email address. As a consequence, I never received a “real” Hotmail email address. While I was able to create Hotmail aliases, I could not really use all the features associated with an account on the site as I used the third party [...]

Did you know that newsletters make up about 50% of the email the average user receives? Microsoft discovered this after analyzing what they called graymail. Graymail in short is all mail that is not spam or personal email. When they looked at graymail they discovered that newsletters and social updates were the two biggest groups [...]

SearchMyFile is a portable desktop search software for the Windows operating system. The program’s portable nature ensures that searches do not leave traces on the system the program is executed on. And while that may slow down result generation a bit, it is still faster than many other programs that you can use to search [...]

Every now and then you may come upon a file that you cannot open right away, because you do not have the right file opener available on the system. While you could fire up your favorite Internet browser to research the file extension to find out which program you need to open it, you could [...]

I have been using WordPress ever since I started blogging here on Ghacks in 2005. It has been a pleasant ride most of the time, with the occasional rough bump down the road. As a WordPress administrator, you have access to thousands of different plugins that extend or improve the blog’s functionality. One issue that [...]

The Virustotal online virus scanning service is one of the services that I use on a regular basis. Whenever I find a great looking software in a “not so great” location, I use the service to check the software out before I execute it on my system. This is for instance the case when software [...]

Rogueware, or rogue security software, is a class of malicious software that disguises itself as legit security software. These programs often have the look and feel of antivirus applications, but instead of protecting the computer from malicious software, they do the exact opposite. The majority of rogue applications fake infections of the system to scare [...]

If you are using Google Image search for your image finding needs you’d probably noticed that it is sometimes not as easy to find the image on the page if you are clicking through. This is especially true for pages with dozens or even hundreds of images on a single page. The Google Chrome Oogle [...]

Awesome Tanks is a free fast paced action game that you play in your web browser. The game comes with everything that you’d expect in a tank game, with the exception of a story. You need to select a difficulty level at the beginning before you are taken to the upgrade screen where you see [...]

The popular Bittorrent indexer The Piratebay announced yesterday that they would switch the position of torrent and magnet link download links on the website in order to save bandwidth. Many media sites reported that The Piratebay would be dropping torrents altogether, but that is not true. While it is still possible to download torrent files [...]

Many search engines are no longer tools that you use to find unfiltered results. Modern search engines like Google Search or Bing filter results for each individual user to display what they think are the most useful results for that particular user. This means that ten people who search for the same search phrase at [...]

I prefer a near silent environment when I’m working on the computer. This is especially the case when I’m writing articles or researching things that I may write about. With noise being a part of everyone’s life, it is often not that easy to stay concentrated. I often get distracted by noise in the house [...]

The operating system FreeBSD 9.0 has been released yesterday. The new version introduces several new technologies, feature additions and updates, including USB 3.0 support, the TRIM command for the Fast File System which improves interaction with Solid State Drives (SSDs), an update to Storage Pool Allocator version 28 which adds support for data deduplication and [...]