A few weeks ago I took a look at Lumsing's harmonica battery pack. Now from the same stables comes the lengthily titled DCH-5U 5-Port USB Travel Wall Charger. This is a slightly different twist on the idea of providing power to travellers' devices -- this is a wall charger rather than a portable battery pack. If you're going on vacation, taking a trip, or even just hitting the office, there are your devices to consider. Your phone, tablet, MP3 player, and other bits and pieces all need power, all need their own charger.

Except they don’t. Leave all of your chargers at home, and just take a selection of USB cables -- this 5-port hub allows for up to five USB devices (obviously) to be charged from a single wall power point. The 31W/6.2A unit has two 5V 1A ports for phones, and three 5V 2A ports for tablets and devices with higher power demands. Oddly, the ports are labelled, left to right, iPad, iPad, Samsung Tab, iPhone, and Android. It would have made more sense to simply indicate which of the five were the high-powered ports, but this is a minor niggle in the grand scheme of things.

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Even though Android can run paid apps without any problems whatsoever, the same cannot be said about Android Wear. Google's new operating system for wearables fails to install anything but free offerings, effectively preventing developers from making money.

That is not much of a problem now, as most Android Wear-designed apps are free. But, as the platform gains more traction, this could severely impact developers' interest. Google, however, has decided to reveal a workaround.

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Twitter may have an official Windows Phone app, but the offering is sorely lagging behind its Android and iOS counterparts in the features department. That is because the updates come only a couple of times per year, and, even then, they fail to bring the latest goodies on the platform.

Luckily for those who are willing to put up with the offering, Twitter has finally released a new update for its Windows Phone app, the first one to come in 2014. And to show just how much it cares about the platform and its users, Twitter has not even announced the update on its blog (but, Microsoft did).

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All businesses insure against risks like fire, flood and theft. Insuring against cyberrisks though is a relatively new field and it's hard to know how much cover is adequate.

According to a new report from NSS Labs, US retailer Target had $100 million worth of cybersecurity coverage at the time of its breach last year. But with losses estimated at $88 million by May this year and a number of lawsuits still pending it looks like that cover won't be enough.

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On this site we often take a look at how the Internet and related technologies have changed our world and how we live our lives.

It's been a long time since I had to endure the process of "pounding the pavement" to look for a job, but it's a task many people face every day. Back in the olden days, finding a new job meant typing, retyping and re-retyping your résumé until it was perfect, mailing it out in response to ads and other leads, making lots of phone calls to your contacts within your field of expertise, and hitting the streets for interviews.

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Microsoft’s thirst to put Windows on as many devices as is humanly possible is finally starting to bear the smallest fruit possible with growth of half a percentage point expected in 2015.

Gartner’s figures on the worldwide operating system market released yesterday showed that Windows owned 13.9 percent of the OS sector in 2013, a number that will drop to 13.7 percent this year before rebounding to 14.4 percent in 2015 -- a rise in two years of 0.5 percent.

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According to a report from Endeavour Partners, "more than half of U.S. consumers who have owned a modern activity tracker no longer use it and a third stopped using the device within six months of receiving it". This trend is symptomatic of a larger problem -- the job that a wearable device does is still unclear to most consumers. This is the crux of the problem I see with wearables, as they exist today.

Maybe we can look to the original wearable device, the watch, for some insight. The watch became popular with consumers because it met a ubiquitous need. The job of the watch was to give instant access to information (time), which users could then put in context (answer to the question "so what?") with their schedule, travel, etc. Consider this example:

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As a teenager, I wasted much of my life and loved every minute of it. Rather than do anything productive, I would vegetate in front of the TV watching movies like Smokey and the Bandit on WPIX. The concept of actually learning something outside of school was foreign -- who wants to learn during their free time? In my defense though, the 90's didn't offer much outside of TV and AOL chat rooms.

Nowadays however, teens are afforded some very cool opportunities, including Google's Code-In. If you aren't familiar, it is a program for teens aged 13-17 to both learn about and participate in open source technologies. Today, Google announces that it has improved KDE with the help of some of these teens.

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Keeping tabs of things across multiple platforms generally falls into two camps -- you are either an Evernote fan, or a OneNote user. One thing the former has excelled at is clipping content from the web and allowing the user to easily save it to a notebook. Now OneNote takes a step forward in this arena, adding new features to keep up with its rival.

The feature works a bit differently than WebClipper, but that isn't a bad thing. Users can send an email to me@OneNote.com and it will automatically clip the web content, as well as the contents of the email message.

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Want to get more out of your rooted Android device? Looking for unique features and expanded functionality? Unhappy with the CyanogenMod team selling their collective souls to the VC devil?

If you answered "yes" to any of the above, you owe it to yourself to check out OmniROM. Billed as the "anti-CyanogenMod", OmniROM is the result of efforts by several former CyanogenMod team members to create a new custom Android ROM, one that adheres to the CM team’s original vision of an open-source alternative to Google’s stock OS.

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When it comes to purchasing new software, many organizations do so to increase efficiency, save time, and reduce costs. This is particularly true of nonprofits, which often have limited staff and busy schedules.

Enter "free" software: on its surface, a simple, cost-effective solution. However, free software isn’t always free, and nonprofit executives often learn this the hard way: after incurring costs from implementation, consultants, ancillary features, support, and ongoing maintenance. These costs add up to more than a solution with an upfront cost but long-term savings. Here are pitfalls to avoid and tips to help you select something that will be a better fit for you, your nonprofit, and your budget over the long haul.

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Buying and trading goods used to be so easy. If I needed a rake and my neighbor needed a hoe, we could simply swap. If I wanted to sell something, I would take out a classified ad in a local newspaper, like the Penny Saver. Hell, I bought my first car that way -- loved that thing.

Nowadays, buying and selling is much more complicated -- especially electronics. You can buy something from eBay or Craigslist only to find out that it doesn't work or is stolen. Smartphones and tablets can be risky to sell, because you have to remember to wipe your data before giving it to the other party. If you forget, the buyer can get your personal information and private photos. Forget to delete that sexy selfie that you took? Some weirdo from eBay now has it and will spread it around the net. Today, Avast announces that as a test it purchased 20 used and supposedly wiped phones from the net. The personal data recovered is shocking.

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Microsoft has had a hard job convincing people of the merits of the Windows Modern UI in Windows 8, so any help it can get to make the Start screen in particular more useful has got to be a good thing. With that in mind, it can only applaud Russian software developer Greatis Software.

The folk at Greatis are the brains behind a collection of gadgets and tools for making the Start Screen that bit more useful. Step forward, Start Screen Unlimited Lite 2.0.

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Where would we be without innovation? In the dark most probably. It's what drives the commercial world forward, in particular the "disruptive technologies" that radically change the way that the world operates.

Marketing specialist Pulp-PR has put together an infographic from a number of data sources showing the effect these technologies have and highlighting what it thinks are the currently most innovative tech companies.

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PopcornTime has been in and out of the news. The program uses BitTorrent to grab movies and TVs shows and allows you to stream them right away. The service was initially taken down, but has found a way to come back, and claims those problems are in the past, stating "This PopcornTime service will never be taken down".

Now, in an even bolder move, the service has announced support for Chromecast, Google's tiny TV dongle. "This is the alpha version, so handle with care and let us know what works, what doesn’t, and if you do find something that’s not working properly (hopefully not!!) let us know in our forum and be as specific as possible (also tell us which Windows version you’re running, etc.)", the service announces.

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