I have two cats, Charlie and Chloe. Charlie is very talkative, especially when he’s hungry (which is most of the time), and indeed you can often have lengthy conversations with him. So when, in 2009, YouTube user Andrew Grantham (klaatu42) put out a call for clips of talking animals to appear in a new Christmas video, I filmed Charlie requesting more food and uploaded the 30-second snippet. I was very fortunate, because not only was my submission accepted but my cat was used to sing the opening lines to Deck the Halls.

It was a fun video, and clearly found an audience -- as to date over nine million people have watched it. But Charlie’s fleeting fame wasn’t to stop there. A few weeks ago, out of the blue, I received a slew of increasingly frantic messages in my YouTube inbox from the Leo Burnett advertising agency.

Microsoft officially unveiled Windows 8 and its ARM counterpart little more than a month ago. But even today apps like Twitter are still missing from the official Store selection. However, third-party alternative, Tweetro+ should be available soon for die-hard users of the social network.

Previously available as a free app on Windows Store, Tweetro was pulled due to the 100,000 access token limit, imposed by the Twitter API. The developers announced that Tweetro+ will take its place, but as a paid app due to the associated costs. This appears to be the preferred solution instead of going the ad-supported route.

Microsoft's search engine Bing launched an aggressive information campaign against Google on Wednesday, accusing the leading search engine of dishonesty in its shopping search functionality.

Earlier this year, Google Product Search was renamed Google Shopping. This name change was no superficial affair because Google was completely changing the business model of the service. Under Google Shopping, only retailers who paid for product listing would turn up in search results.

BurnAware 5.5 Free and Home, are now available for Windows. Version 5.5 adds DVD-Video as an option to the file system selection when compiling ISO files, plus adds other minor features and resolves a number of issues and bugs that surfaced after version 5.4 was released 15 days earlier.

The key new feature in BurnAware 5.5 is the new DVD-Video mode option when selecting a file system for ISO compilation, allowing users to create video DVDs. It’s joined by support for BIN image files when creating boot discs.

If you're one of the lucky few Google Nexus 4 or Nexus 10 owners around the world that prefer a third-party ROM to Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, then you're in luck. Today the team behind the popular CyanogenMod custom distribution released an official CM10.1 build for the LG-made smartphone, with another on the way for its tablet sibling.

The CyanogenMod 10.1 build for the Nexus 4 comes in response to unofficial custom distributions, that recently surfaced, built using the former's source code. The first release available to the general public is based on Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, rather than the newest version issued yesterday. However a missing December in the People app is unlikely to hinder its success considering CyanogenMod's popularity among the modding community.

Understanding a PC’s security status normally involves considering many separate factors. Does it have an antivirus program installed, for instance? A backup tool? A firewall? Are they set up correctly, and being used on a regular basis? Evaluating every possibility could take you a very long time.

Or alternatively, you could just run OPSWAT’s Security Score, a free and portable tool that will quickly report on your target PC’s security, and give advice on how it could be improved.

It seems to have been in beta for a very long time, but, at last, HTML and CSS editor TopStyle 5 finally is released. And there’s a very lengthy list of new features to explore.

Strong CSS3 support, for instance, now makes it easy to create one stylesheet for large displays, perhaps, and another for mobile devices. A CSS Gradient Generator means you can use gradients in CSS3, no images required; you can add text shadows in a couple of clicks, and the new Prefixr handles the tricky business of converting your tidy CSS3 code into something which will work on all the main browsers.

If you wonder why "A Google User" suddenly is the most popular review commenter at Play, he (or she) is not. Today the store started a radical change, requiring Google Profile to place stars and comments for apps and other content. The days of anonymity are over, and good riddance.

Others disagree, and the move definitely isn't popular with some writers in our newsroom. All the typical justifications are back: People need anonymity to protect their jobs. So on and so on. Blah, blah, blah. I've heard these crap excuses before. You got an opinion, stand by it with your identity -- particularly something like an app, movie or music review.

Software developer Piriform Ltd has announced the release ofCCleaner 3.25, the latest build of its Windows freeware cleaning tool. Version 3.25, which is also available in portable form as CCleaner 3.25 Portable, adds Google Chrome Extension management to its feature roster amid a number of compatibility and cleaning improvements.

The update follows hot on the heels of Recuva 1.44, a new version of Piriform’s free data recovery tool, which offers improved recovery of large files and Outlook Express messages as well as a host of other minor tweaks and improvements.

The LG-manufactured Nexus 4 is nearly perfect. Unless you have no other choice, perhaps because of unsupported cellular carrier and binding contractual commitment, put Google's newest smartphone at the top of your must-buy list. The device satisfies in all the right places -- battery life, call quality, display clarity, size and visibility, operating system and performance. There are other Androids with comparable or better hardware, but they typically slap on a secondary UI and ship with older OS. It's not the measure of one attribute, or even a couple, but many combined that make Nexus 4 so good.

But nearly isn't perfect. Nexus 4's flaws, while subtle, will be serious for some potential buyers. There is no 4G LTE, for example. The feature is built-in to the Snapdragon processor but not properly enabled. The phone is HSPA+ for data, which works on GSM carriers like AT&T and T-Mobile USA. No LTE is a deal-breaker for some people, as seen in commments here and elsewhere. Something else: LG copied Apple, which put glass on the back of iPhone 4 and 4S and rightly abandoned the design with the newest handset. Double-sided glass makes the phone less durable than should be, particularly if dropped. Finally, many Galaxy Nexus users won't find its successor to be a compelling upgrade; much depends on what they use their phones for.

It's another cloudy day in the technology world. No, I am not referring to the rain-snow event we are experiencing here in my beloved mid-Atlantic region, but instead to the IT version of the "cloud", the buzzword with which you should all be well familiar. Dell, formerly a leading hardware provider, is also a player in this game.

The Wyse PocketCloud service isn't new, but its name may not be as well known as other cloud services. With today's announcement, Dell is trying hard to make PocketCloud more recognizable so it may capitalize on the "BYOD" trend.

German Linux pioneer SUSE announced on Tuesday that it has entered into a partnership with Inktank to bring the Ceph Distributed Storage System to the SUSE Cloud private enterprise cloud platform.

Inktank made headlines last September when Canonical co-founder Mark Shuttlesworth put a million dollars behind the development of Ceph, so it could be used as a cheaper storage alternative to Amazon's S3 cloud storage.

Red Hat on Tuesday announced the general availability of OpenShift Enterprise, the company's Platform-as-a-Service offering first unveiled last May as a part of Red Hat's roadmap for 2013.

OpenShift Enterprise is a cloud application platform for enterprises that can handle public, private, or hybrid cloud environments. It is based upon the OpenShift Origin codebase which was used to power Red Hat's public cloud PaaS OpenShift Online. The platform offers developers a choice of languages (Java, PHP, Python, Ruby,) frameworks (Spring, Seam, Weld, CDI, Rails, Rack, Symfony, Zend Framework, Twisted, Django, Java EE), and application lifecycle tools.

Today Amazon kicks off the first-ever AWS (Amazon Web Services) conference in Las Vegas. Sure, it is too late to get to AWS re:Invent now and the Technical Bootcamps are all sold out anyway, but that doesn't mean you need to miss everything. Some of the event will be live-streamed right to your computer. The show kicks off today and runs through November 29th.

This conference is tailor-made for those looking to integrate the Amazon cloud services into their business. There are workgroups surrounding the use of AWS in building web-scale apps, a talk given by Adrian Cockcroft, the Director of Cloud Architecture at Netflix, AWS cloud security and a whole lot more. In fact, there will be over 150 different sessions.

Your hard drive’s filling up? There’s no shortage of tools around to help find out why, but the need to crawl through every single folder on your system means they can be a little tedious to use.

Now there’s a much faster alternative, though, in the shape ofWizTree, a free and portable application which can deliver a detailed report on your space hogs in just a second or two.