In the second of our (hopefully) regular competitions, we have quite a treat for you. You've read the headline so you should know what's up for grabs, but if you missed it, the prize is a year's subscription to Office 365 Home worth $99.99.

Microsoft has very kindly donated a full subscription for us to give away, but this is more than just one copy of the world-famous office suite -- you can install Office 365 Home on up to five PCs or Macs, as well as five tablets. Enough for all the family!

Continue reading →

There are a lot of weird people on the internet, into all sorts of bizarre fetishes, interests and behaviors -- I wont judge. Well, maybe I will condemn Bronies. However, I too have a very strange fetish -- PC hardware. Yes, I love drooling over pictures of PCI cards, power supplies and motherboards to name a few.

Today, ASUS' "Republic of Gamers" enthusiast brand announces a beautiful piece of hardware -- the Maximus VII Formula. What is it? A super-sexy motherboard. If you are a tech nerd, this should definitely get your motor running.

Continue reading →

In a lengthy interview with the Guardian, NSA whistle blower Edward Snowden spoke with editor Alan Rusbridger about his extraordinary rise to infamy. Currently in exile in Russia, he talked about how he disseminated documents about the activities of the NSA to numerous countries: "Once you start splitting them over jurisdictions and things like that it becomes much more difficult to subvert their intentions. Nobody could stop it". He remains defiant. He may be an outlaw but "it’s been vindicating to see the reaction from lawmakers, judges, public bodies around the world, civil liberties activists who have said it’s true that we have a right to at least know the broad outlines of what our government’s doing in our name and what it’s doing against us".

He explains how during his time working as an NSA analyst, he learned about previous surveillance programs run under George W Bush. Programs that were deemed unconstitutional and, having been closed, forced the US government to assume new executive powers that were then used "against the citizenry of its own country".  For Snowden the power of the state is worrying:

Continue reading →

Google has started to roll out Google Maps for Android 8.2, focusing its attention of cyclists with the addition of some handy new features.

The app also introduces voice control for vehicle navigation, effectively turning the user’s Android mobile or tablet into a GPS navigation system.

Continue reading →

Ninetieth in a series. Welcome to this week's selection of the best apps and games that have been released in the past seven days for Windows 8.

Several important applications were updated this week. The official Skype application for Windows 8 supports free group calls in the latest version while the popular Twitter client Tweetium better filtering of blocked users and discounts if you subscribe for a year.

Continue reading →

Dashlane, Inc has released Dashlane 3.0 for Windows and Mac, a major new build of its secure password management tool. The new release is joined by Dashlane 2.7 for iOS, which has been updated to work with version 3.

Version 3 sports a completely redesigned user interface, adds a number of new tools, including a Sharing Center, Emergency Contacts section and a simpler way of viewing password histories.

Continue reading →

Amazon already gives Prime customers access to a Kindle lending library, allowing the user to "borrow" books each month. But for some of the more voracious types, this may not provide enough material for a month's worth of entertainment.

For those customers, the retail giant has unveiled Kindle Unlimited, bringing all of the reading and listening needed to satisfy anyone, regardless of how fast he or she can read.

Continue reading →

Not to be outdone by Google's Android operating system, Mozilla wishes to push its own mobile platform out to customers. The organization is aiming mostly at the low-end market, but that will be expanding in the future.

The mobile platform initially debuted on just two devices, but Mozilla has managed to scare up a few more partners to produce its product.

Continue reading →

You may recall that, earlier this month, BBM finally made its way to Windows Phone Store, after arriving on Android and iOS last year. It was not made publicly available, as BlackBerry chose to conduct a beta testing trial before its official launch.

As one of the folks who quickly signed up for the beta program, I just received an email from BlackBerry detailing what sort of features are available to test, what the known problems are, and how to provide feedback. Here is what fellow beta testers can expect.

Continue reading →

Email is often cited as the killer app which popularized the internet. You might think that by now we'd have moved on but a new survey of 1,000 US email users from mail app provider My.com suggests we're just as in love with our inboxes as ever.

There are currently around 3.9 billion email accounts worldwide and the number is expected to increase by around 27 percent this year. We're also spending more time on our email these days with 46 percent of users admitting to spending an hour or more a day reading their messages.

Continue reading →

Microsoft is keen to get its tiled OS on as many devices, from as many hardware makers, as possible. It introduced the license-free Windows with Bing back in May as part of this push, but prior to that, at Build 2014, it announced it would be offering Windows for free to OEMs and ODMs on all tablets smaller than nine inches.

The dream of an army of smaller devices running Windows 8.1 has suffered a major setback now though with news that one of the largest Windows device makers, Lenovo, has decided to kill off its smaller tablets in the US, citing lack of interest.

Continue reading →

The latest upgrade to Honda's Asimo has given the robot enhanced intelligence, the ability to run 5.6mph and enabled it to perform complex sign language.

Asimo was first introduced in 2000 and is seen as one of the leading attempts at creating a humanoid robot.

Continue reading →

In all the furor over super-slim Ultrabooks and magically transforming hybrids, it's sometimes easy to forget that some people just need a basic portable. The Dell Latitude E5540 is aimed at those people. It's not a fundamentally exciting notebook by any stretch of the imagination, but it could be just what your company needs as a standard-issue everyday workhorse.

The design of the E5540 is decidedly inconspicuous, with matte black plastic the order of the day all round. This is very much a sober corporate notebook that won't cause any commotion in the meeting room. The full width of the 15in chassis has been used to provide a separate keypad alongside the keyboard, as well as discrete volume control buttons at the top. The keys are full-sized and have a comfortably firm action, making touch typing for long durations very pleasant. However, the keyboard isn't backlit, which is an unusual omission for a work-oriented laptop.

Continue reading →

If you live in Europe and don't like the fact that Binging yourself throws up results you'd rather didn’t appear, Microsoft has created a form you can use to request removal of these links from searches. (Yeah, ok…Bing doesn't really work as a verb in the same way as Google. Lesson learned.) Not all that long ago, Google was forced to consider censoring search results that people considered to be out of date, incorrect or irrelevant -- it's a ruling that has been dubbed the right to be forgotten. A form was set up to make it easier for people with complaints to get in touch, and now Microsoft has followed suit and created a Request to Block Bing Search Results In Europe form.

Filling in the form is absolutely no guarantee that a search result will be removed -- and it is important to remember that this is only about removing links from search results, not removing actual content. Or, as Microsoft puts it in the form:

Continue reading →

When Microsoft introduced SkyDrive, it provided every customer with 25GB of storage space for free. The company later reduced this to only 7GB, but existing users were grandfathered into their plans and allowed to retain the old amount of cloud space.

Now the company has quietly reduced that down to only 15GB -- sort of. No official announcement was made regarding this move -- users simply learn of it by checking available storage within their accounts. But all is not what it appears to be at first.

Continue reading →