Most capable video editors provide at least some kind of subtitling ability, and this is usually very straightforward: position the video, type some text, it appears on the screen and is saved as a part of the clip.

Simple? Yes, but this approach has problems: the video must be re-encoded, reducing image quality; the subtitles will probably become a little blurred, and the file size is likely to increase.

These days, most people find themselves browsing on a variety of devices: computers, smartphones and tablets. It’s why most browsers have developed tools for automatically keeping everything in sync across all your tech, but the downside is you normally have to tie yourself into one service or browser.

If you’re a Mac user, that usually means tying yourself into Apple’s Safari web browser for iCloud Tab syncing, but you can access the pages you’ve got open on your iOS device on any browser you like with a free app called CloudyTabs 1.0.

Preme for Windows is a clever free tool which extends your windows desktop with a host of time-saving tricks.

There are new ways to open files and applications, for example. You get special mouse actions to arrange, dock, maximize or minimize program windows. And there are functions to adjust volume, close windows, remap hotkeys, and more. A Settings screen helps you decide which of Preme’s features you’d like to use. Check "Scroll any windows", perhaps, and you’re able to scroll any window, even if it’s not active. Just move the mouse cursor over it, and spin the mouse wheel.

Independent testing group AV-Comparatives has released its 2014 Internet Security Survey.

The survey asked 5,845 users from around the world their views on security and reveals that when it comes to antivirus protection Americans like to get it for free whilst Europeans prefer to pay.

Kaspersky Lab has announced the first public betas of Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2015 and Kaspersky Internet Security 2015.

There are no details on new features, as we write, but the most obvious change so far is the simplified, subdued interface. Plain buttons highlight four key task areas -- "Scan", "Updater", "Reports" and "Virtual Keyboard", for Anti-Virus 2015 -- and clicking any of these causes a new task pane to fade into view.

Team XBMC has unveiled the first public beta of XBMC 13.0, its open-source, cross-platform media server and center. Version 13.0, codenamed "Gotham", ships after more than a year of development, and is packed full of new and improved features.

Chief among these are limited support for stereoscopic 3D rendering, improved touchscreen and UPnP capabilities, Android hardware decoding and what Team XBMC terms "dramatic" audio engine enhancements.

Evernote Corporation has released Evernote 5.2 for Windows Desktop, the latest build of its cloud-based note-taking tool that’s also available on Mac and other platforms.

There are two improvements of note in version 5.2: image annotation, whereby users can now annotate images from within Evernote itself, while Evernote for Business users show now enjoy vastly improved sync performance.

Backing up the contents of a USB key is simple enough: plug it in, open Explorer, select any important files and copy them wherever you like.

The process can become a little tedious, especially if you’re doing it all the time. But there could be a very easy solution. Just get the free-for-personal-use USBFlashCopy to automatically run any backups for you.

The image viewer market is a tough and competitive place, and it’s extremely difficult for newcomers to stand out from the crowd. You might try to pack in the features, for instance -- but it probably won’t make any difference. A big-name contender like IrfanView has been around for almost 18 years, and creating something even a fraction as powerful would take a very long time.

Fortunately, Fragment Image Viewer took another route. It’s not crammed with functions, there are no editing or batch processing tools: compared to many viewers, it’s really quite basic. But the program does have a few interesting and unusual tricks, which might, perhaps, persuade you to give it a try.

FastStone Software has released FastStone Image Viewer 5.0 and FastStone Image Viewer Portable 5.0 for Windows PCs. The free-for-personal-use tool provides image browsing, converting and editing capabilities.

Version 5.0 adds a number of minor new features, tweaks some existing settings and comes with various minor bug fixes and improvements.

NirSoft has announced the availability of ImageCacheViewer, a simple tool which scans your web browser caches (IE, Firefox and Chrome are supported), and lists any images it finds.

The program's report is presented in the usual NirSoft table, and includes the URL of each image, the browser used to access it, the image type, the date and time of the image file, the date and time it was viewed, and the file size.

Last week we wrote about PNGmini, a useful tool which can cut PNG file sizes without any loss in image quality.

Developer Voralent has now released JPGmini 1.0, which applies similar lossless compression technology to crunch down your JPEGs. (No relation to the commercial JPEGmini, apparently. We predict Voralent will be hearing from them soon.)

As you’ll probably guess from its name, Crap Killer is a tool which scans your PC, trying to find browser toolbars and other junk, then offers to help you remove them.

This is all extremely basic, though. There’s no special detection of spyware here; if a program doesn’t appear in the Add/ Remove Programs applet then Crap Killer won’t find it. And there’s nothing to remove unwanted programs, either. All you can do is launch their official uninstaller.

If you regularly troubleshoot other people’s PCs then you’ll know you can’t rely on them having the programs you need. It’s much better to build up a portable toolkit of your own, something you can take anywhere and which (hopefully) will help you cope with just about any situation.

Finding the right tools can be a challenge, of course -- most just don’t have the versatility you need -- but a quick glance at its feature list suggests CloneDisk could be a very good candidate.

Piriform has released CCleaner 4.11 and CCleaner Portable 4.11, its popular free and paid-for cleaning tool for Windows. Version 4.11 is a significant update with a number of interesting new features.

These include adding support for start-up item management to the new Opera browser, the ability to scan for duplicated files based on their content and various other tweaks and improvements. Unlike recent updates, the bulk of the changes apply to free and paid-for versions of CCleaner.