AndrOpen Office brings OpenOffice to Android

Android celebrating

If you need a mobile office suite then Kingsoft Office is a good place to start, and of course Google Drive is easy to use on any device. But if you’re looking for something more powerful, for offline editing, then you might be tempted by AndrOpen Office: it’s a complete fork of Apache OpenOffice, available on your Android device.

The suite has all the usual OpenOffice components: Writer (word processor), Calc (a spreadsheet), Impress (presentation graphics), Draw (a drawing tool), Math (equation editor) and Base (database).

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Fluffyapp adds new drop display, no longer supports Windows XP

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It took three years for version 2 to make its final appearance, but just one month later developer Richard Wang has released FluffyApp 3.0. FluffyApp is a freeware client that allows Windows users to share files (known as "drops") using the Mac-only CloudApp file-sharing service.

Version 3.0 includes a new drop display feature, live drop history updates and features a major rewrite of its core code. It also now requires .NET Framework 4.5 to function, which means it’s no longer compatible with Windows XP.

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SkyDrive is no more -- say hello to OneDrive

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After running into legal problems with the name SkyDrive -- satellite television provider Sky sued for trademark infringement -- Microsoft announced last July it was going to change the name of its cloud storage service. Sky generously gave Microsoft some time to come up with an alternative and today we learn the new name is… drumroll… OneDrive.

Let’s hope One Direction aren’t feeling litigious.

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Keep your PC awake with Caffeine

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If your PC screensaver keeps activating at awkward times, or maybe your system goes to sleep when it shouldn’t, then it may be a good time to adjust your power options (press Win+R and launch powercfg.cpl).

If you only have this problem occasionally, though -- when giving a presentation, perhaps -- then Caffeine provides a quick and easy way to temporarily keep your system awake.

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Nokia's poor Lumia sales hold back Windows Phone's growth

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The underwhelming Nokia Lumia sales from Q4 2013 have put a damper on Windows Phone's momentum, as, for the first time last year, the Finnish maker moved less units compared to the previous quarter. Growth was already slowing down, as I pointed out three months ago, but a decline in moved units was unexpected, potentially leading to irreparable damage, in the short and the long run as well, for the market share of the tiled smartphone operating system.

Lumia sales are extremely important for the growth of the platform because Nokia's Windows Phone market share has been holding steady around the 90 percent mark for a very long time. This means that if the Finnish maker has a great quarter, in regards to Lumia sales, the tiled smartphone OS has a better chance of holding its own against Android and iOS, and increasing its market share. Luckily, we do not have to wait any longer to find out how the Lumia sales from Q4 2013 have impacted Windows Phone, as Kantar Worldpanel ComTech just released a report for the respective quarter.

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Peace breaks out in the patent wars -- Google, Ericsson and Samsung are all friends again

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Patent litigation seems to have become part and parcel of handset and tablet releases recently, but at least one battle appears to be coming to an end. Samsung and Google have signed a patent agreement, ending years of legal wrangling. An announcement on the Samsung Tomorrow blog goes into little detail about what the deal entails but a global patent cross-license agreement has been signed which covers both existing patents and those filed over the coming decade.

Allen Lo, Deputy General Counsel for Patents at Google said: "We're pleased to enter into a cross-license with our partner Samsung. By working together on agreements like this, companies can reduce the potential for litigation and focus instead on innovation". While both companies will undoubtedly be pleased that a deal has been struck, ultimately it is consumers who will benefit from what should turn into more collaborative ventures in the future, with both side gaining access to the other's technologies.

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AMI StorTrends 3500i offers high performance storage for smaller enterprises

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Most PC users probably know American Megatrends Inc (AMI) for its BIOS, but the company is also a major player in the storage market.

Its latest release, the StorTrends 3500i, is aimed at smaller and medium businesses. It uses a hybrid of SSD and conventional drives to deliver performance with lower capital expenditure than other solutions.

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NirSoft unveils SimpleProgramDebugger

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Nir Sofer has announced the release of SimpleProgramDebugger, a tiny portable debugger which runs on anything from Windows XP to 8.

The program can attach to a running process, or start a new process in debugging mode. There are no options to control or interrogate that process, but SimpleProgramDebugger will display its main debugging events: Load DLL, Unload DLL, Create Thread, Create Process, Exit Thread, Exit Process, Exception and Debug String.

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Yarn, ribbon and breached computers -- Michaels (possibly) gets hacked

credit card fraud

Michaels is a pretty cool store, if you are into crafts. If you have a need for things like yarn, pipe-cleaners or fabric, it is a fabulous place. Heck, tech nerds can have fun there too -- they can build a Raspberry Pi case out of popsicle sticks.

However, there is one thing consumers don't expect to get at the craft store -- their credit cards compromised. Yes, Michaels joins Target as the latest victim of hackers...maybe. You see, sadly, it seems Michaels is not sure what exactly may have been breached (if anything).

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Policing Twitter -- can the existing legal system cope with the technological age?

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Twitter is rarely out of the headlines, but this week two legal cases surrounding the social network slash micro-blogging service brought it to attention for slightly different reasons than normal. On one side of the Atlantic a couple fell foul of the law for using Twitter to make threats to a feminist campaigner, while on the other a celebrity managed to avoid prosecution for libel after managing to plead ignorance about the falsity of a claim made online.

For a court case victory, it was announced in a very restrained, quiet way... particularly when you consider that the victor was none other than Courtney Love. The celebratory tweet reads simply "I can't thank you enough Dongell Lawrence Finney LLP, the most incredible law firm on the planet. We won this epic battle. #justiceprevails", and the decision to use Twitter was slightly ironic considering the fact that the court case stemmed from a previous tweet made by Ms. Love.

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British school children subjected to NSA-style surveillance

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The idea of being monitored, spied upon, surveilled, call it what you will, is something we are gradually becoming used to. CCTV cameras abound, we now know that our private communication could be intercepted at any time, and god only knows what else is going on unbeknownst to us. The plots of Person of Interest look positively tame compared to what is actually happening. Look, a whole introductory paragraph about modern-day surveillance and not one reference to Big Brother, 1984 or George Orwell. Oh ... damn.

But it seems that it is not just potential terrorists, criminals and other ne'er do wells who might feel concerned about who is reading their emails and monitoring their online activity. Hundreds of schools up and down the UK are actively monitoring the online communication of pupils using methods not too far removed from those employed by the NSA on a global scale.

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ImDisk Toolkit adds dynamic RAM disks

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Setting up a RAM disk can be a quick and easy way to speed up some programs, but it also has a very obvious down side. Any RAM you allocate to a virtual drive is no longer available to Windows and the rest of your system, which may reduce performance in other situations.

While this kind of trade-off sounds inevitable, the latest ImDisk Toolkit shows it doesn’t have to be that way. New dynamic memory management support means that RAM disks will only consume the memory they actually need. If you’ve a 512MB RAM disk with 10MB of files, say, then memory consumption will be only a fraction above 10MB: the remaining 500MB will be available for other applications.

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PngOptimizer compresses PNG files without affecting image quality

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Save an image as a PNG file and you can be sure it’ll be compressed to a significant degree -- but there could be scope for reducing the file size even further. You don’t have to resize the image, cut the number of colors or do anything to affect image quality, either. It’s just a matter of using PngOptimizer to rewrite your files in a more efficient way.

The program arrives as a single 246KB executable, and its interface is as basic as that size suggests. There’s just a window, with no toolbar or menus: you drag and drop your target onto PngOptimizer, and they’re automatically analyzed, optimized and saved.

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Beats Music extends free trial, but no Windows Phone app yet

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It’s been a busy week for Beats Music, with a big launch, followed closely by a subsequent closure of registration due to problems with the network. Regardless if the problems were real or a publicity stunt, the streaming service is back now.

Today the company’s CEO Ian Rogers issues a thank you to those who have stuck with it, and to show his gratitude he made a special offer. "To thank you for being early we are extending the 7 day trial to 14 days for all customers who sign up before Saturday evening".

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Some Windows computers are infecting Android devices with malware

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Since Android is based on Linux, many users consider it rather safe and secure. However, this is not at all true -- most malware that targets mobile devices, targets Android. For the most part though, it is easy to stay safe by only installing reputable apps from the Play Store.

What if, however, your desktop operating system was infecting your Android device without you knowing? Sadly, this can happen, as some Windows users are finding out. Symantec announces it has found such a case, and it is really nasty.

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