It’s taken almost five years to get there, but disk cleanup and shredding tool BleachBit has finally reached version 1.0 with some welcome new features.

The Windows installer and executable are now digitally signed, so users shouldn’t be hassled with "unknown publisher" alerts any more.

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Android's success, in the smartphone and tablet markets, makes the operating system's users a popular target for malware writers. Some of the concerns which researchers and security firms frequently expose translate into real threats, while others will likely never see the light of day as they're squashed in their infancy.

Luckily, Google is taking a proactive stance to improving Android's security as the search giant has expanded the patch reward program that was introduced in early October, to also include its Android Open Source Project.

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Reinstalling Windows and your applications is a hassle for many reasons, but the greatest is probably the time it takes to find your various license keys. Are they on a CD box, a sleeve, in an email, online, somewhere else? You’ll have hours of fun finding out.

Windows License Key Dump can help by finding the product key for Windows, along with many other applications (Acrobat, Creative Suite, Photoshop, Norton Internet Security, TuneUp Utilities, VMWare Workstation and so on), and displaying them all in a single report.

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Email is often cited as being the killer application that made the internet take off, and there's no denying it has changed the way the world does business. But using email for business means keeping an archive so that you have a record of conversations. Over time that archive can become substantial and take up a lot of expensive disk space so storing it in the cloud begins to look like an attractive solution.

To help with moving mail to the cloud Metalogix is launching its Total Email Management and Migration product for Amazon Web Services. It delivers a complete service for mail archiving, backup, security, migration and continuity in the cloud.

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If you’ve tried more than your share of source code editors, then Brackets probably won’t make much of a first impression. It may have been launched by Adobe in 2012, but this open-source tool still looks a little basic, not something you’d want to use for serious work.

Actually try the program, though, and you’ll soon feel very differently. It’s very much a work-in-progress (the project is still only at version 0.34), but already Brackets is proving to be a capable editor with some very interesting features.

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Microsoft Research's latest app makes it easier than ever to give a presentation without having to hunch over your laptop. Like the idea of wandering the stage gesticulating wildly as you skip between PowerPoint slides? Fancy being able to scroll through Word and Excel documents without the need to find your mouse? This is what Office Remote has been designed for. This is a simple app for Windows Phone, but one that will be welcomed with open arms by anyone who has to give presentations as part of their job.

The app is described by Microsoft as transforming a cell phone into a "magic wand" and it untethers presenters so they are free to walk the stage and interact with their audience. While the most obvious app to use Office Remote with may be PowerPoint, it can be used with Word and Excel too -- the 2013 and 365 versions of the office suite are supported (although not the RT version of Office).

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Hot on the heels of the recently released Uninstaller 3, IObit has launched the first public pre-release version of its forthcoming commercial system and security suite, IObit Advanced SystemCare Ultimate 7 Beta 1. The new build adds official support for Windows 8, 8.1 and Internet Explorer 11, but also bundles a new anti-virus engine with real-time protection.

The update also debuts a revamped user interface similar to found in IObit Uninstaller (and in Advanced SystemCare 7 Free), and throws in some potentially useful new tools along with performance improvements.

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Successful sales strategy is dependent on understanding the customer. But for small and medium businesses building up the kind of intelligence database needed can be time consuming and take staff away from the task of actually selling. It can be many months before the implementation of a traditional sales intelligence platform bears fruit.

Software company InsightSquared has used the Dreamforce 2013 conference to launch the latest version of its analytics tool aimed at helping smaller enterprises stay competitive. Designed to work with the Salesforce CRM application, InsightSquared 3.0 has been put together based on feedback from experienced CEOs, along with sales and marketing professionals, in order to provide best practice reports and drive effective sales management.

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After launching Android 4.4 KitKat alongside the Nexus 5, Google released the latest version of the mobile OS for the Nexus 4, Nexus 7 and Nexus 10. The roll-out of the OTA upgrade kicked off on November 13 and the factory images arrived a couple of days later. Since I have already explained how to use the OTA files to get KitKat up and running, in this article I will show you how to do the same by leveraging the factory images.

Aside from allowing users to install Android 4.4, the KitKat factory images also come in handy for those who wish to upgrade, return their Nexus device to stock before selling it, and install various bits (the radios, the bootloader, etc.) to use with custom Android distributions. As you can tell, the factory images have a broader scope and, therefore, I will also cover the other most important ways you can benefit.

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With both models of the new Kindle Fire HDX tablets now out in the wild, Amazon can concentrate on tweaking the system to add features and fix bugs. The device, while considered to be a competitor to the Nexus 7, is really more about media, specifically that from the retail giant's ecosystem.

The latest update, which rolls out today, takes the OS to version 3.1 and adds several new features to enhance the 'media device' perception even more.

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Yay! The PlayStation 4 is out in the wild! Yippee! Oh…. It's broken. Boo! Sound familiar? Think back to the Xbox 360 and Microsoft was blighted by the infamous RRoD (Red Ring of Death) that signified cooked hardware. It's looking as though the much anticipated launch of the PS4 is suffering a similar fate as more and more users complain about consoles that will not turn on, and exhibit nothing more exciting than a pulsing blue light -- the imaginatively name Blue Light of Death, or BLoD.

Sony may have been rubbing its hands with glee as more than a million consoles flew off the shelves in the first day on sale, but things very quickly took a turn for the worse. Take a look at the PlayStation 4 support forums and you'll find a large number of complaints from disgruntled gamers annoyed at the fact their console is not working. The hashtag #PS4broken has been trending on Twitter on and off as users take to the web to voice their annoyance.

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Google Glass is still being tested by a limited number of lucky users, and Apple’s rumored smart watch remains ever elusive, but wearables is clearly one of the fastest growing areas in technology, so it’s inevitable that an exhibition would be set up to showcase it.

The Wearable Technology Show will be held on the 18th and 19th March 2014, at the Olympia Conference Centre in London, and include three dedicated conference rooms, over 70 sessions on fashion, sports and fitness, health, M2M, live product demos, a developer hackfest and a business startup track.

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It's an indication of the impact of social media that Twitter is now often the first place where people learn of major news stories. But that's a double-edged sword because it can be hard to know how accurate the information you're reading is.

From today Twitter is making it easier for government organizations and charities in the UK and Ireland to make timely and accurate information available via Twitter Alerts. The alerts service launched in the US, Japan and Korea in September of this year and has already been used by a number of public services to share information during emergencies involving public safety, bad weather and so on.

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To help fight the problem of child pornography online, Google and Microsoft are joining forces to block access to illegal content in the UK and then globally. Writing in the Daily Mail, Google's Eric Scmidt explains how new search filtering techniques now prevent more than 100,000 search terms relating to child pornography from returning any results. The filtering is starting in English speaking countries, but will soon roll out to more than 150 languages.

He explains that Google and Microsoft have worked with law enforcement agencies for many years and are proactively involved in the removal of illegal images. More than 200 extra employees have been assigned the tasks of developing new technologies over the last three months. This is very much a joint venture between the two companies, and Schmidt recognizes the input of Microsoft, saying that the company "deserves a lot of credit for developing and sharing its picture detection technology".

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The Raspberry Pi has been at the top of my ten year old nephew's Christmas list for months now, and every time he comes to visit he asks me to power up the Model B I bought back in March, and of course I’m more than happy to do so -- any excuse.

The super-affordable uncased ARM GNU/Linux computer has been enjoying huge success since it launched in 2012, selling a million units in its first year (see the Q&A we ran with the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s Liz Upton following that milestone) and we reported sales had hit 1.75 million a little over a month ago, so it’s impressive to hear that the British-made board has just smashed through the two million mark.

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