Optical media is in a weird place right now. Thanks to cloud storage and flash drives, fewer folks are backing up data to CD, DVD, and Blu-ray. Because of streaming media -- from services like Netflix and Hulu -- fewer consumers are buying movies and music on optical media. Does this mean that optical media is totally dead? Hardly.

As burning/mastering products such as Nero and Ashampoo become more and more bloated, however, it is getting harder for PC users to find a simple and rewarding solution. BurnAware is one such program that remains lightweight while offering a lot of useful functionality. The software recently hit version 10, and I have been trying the "Pro" version on my Windows 10 machine with great success.

Continue reading →

Shortcut Scanner is a free tool which scans your PC for potentially malicious shortcuts.

The program looks for multiple indicators. Does the shortcut point to PowerShell, cmd.exe or some other command prompt? Does it include dangerous keywords, have unusually long commands, is larger than 4KB in size?

Continue reading →

Vivaldi 1.7 has been released for Windows, Mac and Linux. It’s the brainchild of Opera co-founder Jon S von Tetzhner, and makes a good claim to be the most customizable web browser out there.

The new release debuts some significant new features, including a fully functional built-in screenshot tool, more flexible options for muting sounds across multiple tabs and a host of other minor tweaks and enhancements.

Continue reading →

Video Clip QuickTool is a simple utility for cutting, rotating and cropping individual digital video files. Installation is quick and hassle-free. There’s no adware, no bulky dependencies and the package takes minimal space on your hard drive.

Video Clip QuickTool’s interface is basic. There are no button-packed ribbon controls, no toolbars or function-packed dialogs -- it’s just a couple of video preview panes, with a scattering of buttons and controls.

Continue reading →

Avast Software has unveiled its 2017 suite of security programs with the simultaneous release of Avast Free Antivirus 2017, Avast Internet Security 2017 and Avast Premier 2017.

The 2017 releases, all marked versions 17.1, are the first since Avast acquired AVG in September 2016 and includes combined threat detection technologies from both products among numerous other changes and improvements. Read on to discover how to purchase them for 50 percent off the MSRP!

Continue reading →

Opera Software has released Opera 43 to the stable channel with enhanced performance-boosting tools and a welcome productivity tweak.

Instant page loading is a pre-rendering technology which attempts to predict URLs as you type, and starts to load the site in the background before you even hit enter.

Continue reading →

Freeware machine NirSoft has unveiled its latest system tool, LoadedDLLsView (32-bit version).

If you don’t know what the program does from the name then you’re not in the target audience, but essentially it scans all the running processes on your system, detecting and listing whatever DLLs they’re using.

Continue reading →

The XBMC Foundation has unveiled Kodi 17.0. Codenamed "Krypton", the new release is available on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and (jailbroken) iOS devices.

The new release unveils new default skins for both regular and touch devices. It also unveils significant improves to audio and video, music libraries, live TV and PVR.

Continue reading →

Artpip is a free Windows and Mac app which sets your desktop background to a beautiful new artwork every day.

We’re not sure how large the library of images might be, but artists include Manet, Munch, Renoir, Whistler, Van Gogh, Gruner, Pissarro, Cezanne and more.

Continue reading →

The Document Foundation has unveiled LibreOffice 5.3 64-bit and LibreOffice 5.3 32-bit. Despite the point update, LibreOffice 5.3 is billed as "one of the most feature-rich releases in the history of the office suite", and is packed full of major changes affecting all parts of the application.

Highlights include a new experimental (and optional) ribbon-based UI, plus a new cross-platform text layout engine. It’s also accompanied by the first source release of LibreOffice Online, for basic collaborative document editing in a browser.

Continue reading →

Many organizations rely on databases to support their decision making processes, but the process of importing, analyzing and then acting on the data can inhibit fast action.

In-memory SQL database specialist, VoltDB is releasing version 7.0 of its to offer increased scalability for managing transactions and generating analytics while ensuring high availability and strict data consistency.

Continue reading →

LightBulb is a f.lux-like application which smoothly adjusts screen gamma to make colors seem warmer at night, reducing eye strain and making your PC more comfortable to use.

Install the program and it goes to work automatically, detecting your location, figuring out the sunrise and sunset time and updating your display color temperature to match.

Continue reading →

Bing Wallpaper is an open-source application which sets your wallpaper as Bing’s image of the day, then keeps it up-to-date.

Download, unzip and run BingWallPaper.exe and it immediately updates your wallpaper, displays a notification and minimizes to your system tray.

Continue reading →

Pingo is a free PNG and JPEG optimizer which supports both lossless and lossy compression. There are plenty of similar tools around, but pingo stands out from the competition in several ways -- some good, some not.

The program is a compact 521KB download, unpacking to a single executable which you must run from the command line.

Continue reading →

Last month we wrote about DevDocs for Chrome, a free extension which gives access to API documentation for around 200 programming languages and technologies.

Now an unofficial Electron-based applet, DevDocs, brings the service specifically to the desktop, with downloads available for Windows, Linux and Mac.

Continue reading →