Computer News

Happy Hump Day!

Microsoft Security Intelligence Report Volume 16 Regional Threat Assessment
“These documents provide specific threat information by region for the time period July to December 2013.”
Click the link above. It will take you to a download page.
There you can check off the country or countries of your choice.

Stuff I’m Doing
Installing security cameras using Raspberry Pi for one and my old Droid X for another.
If you’ve done something like this and have some advice, please let me know ( tweakblog@gmail.com ).

I’m sure all you Star Wars fans know the old crew is coming back for the new movie!

Watching The Watchers?
AV-Comparatives has a PDF that spills the beans on what info your anti-virus may be collecting about you.

New Adblocker
Help EFF Test Privacy Badger, Our New Tool to Stop Creepy Online Tracking

Sysinternals Freeware Updates
AccessChk, PsExec, Sigcheck, and VMMap were all updated.

Well, TweakHound.com has been around for 12 years this month!
Here is the first logo I made for this site:

Interesting Reads:
PC Review – How much RAM do I really need for gaming?
Everything you need to know about High-Resolution Audio, the future of music
Stephen Hawking: ‘Transcendence looks at the implications of artificial intelligence – but are we taking AI seriously enough?’

March Madness begins tonight!
I wonder how bad my picks will do this year?
:banghead:

Mozilla Updates
Firefox 28
Release Notes
Download other languages and operating systems
– – –
Thunderbird 24.4.0
Release Notes
Download other languages and operating systems

Somewhere Between Alpha and Gamma
The last non-beta drivers from AMD were version 13.12 released on 18DEC2013.
After several beta releases AMD Catalyst 14.3 Beta V1.0 are available for Windows and Linux.

Freebie
Microsoft OneNote is now free for everyone.

What I’m Working On
I’m finalizing an End of Support XP guide.
If you’ve got any tips you would like to share drop me a note.

Pawn Stars
All major browsers fell at Pwn2Own.
Gooogle quickly patched Chrome in response.

SSD Deals
There are great deals to be had on SSDs right now.
I check TechBargains, and [H]ardOCP Hot Deals forum for the latest deals.

Downloads
Intel Chipset Device Software 10.0.13

Cloud Storage Wars
No, this isn’t the next horrid Star Wars prequel. Google has price cut the competition severely.
Google Drive – 100GB = $1.99 per month

No Lines
Google has removed underlines from hyperlinks from Google Search.

A Better Portable Music Player?
I’m not much of a Neil Young fan but his kickstarter project has hit $2,000,000 in only 2 days. His product is the Pono Music Player. I’m all for better quality music but the player looks bulky, our phones have largely taken place of separate mp3 players, and everything associated with it seems expensive. An Apple fanboi throw some water on Neil’s fire here.

Benchmark Programs Updated
3DMark 1.2.362 – 5 bugfixes, SystemInfo module updated.
PCMark 8 2.0.228 – 3 bugfixes, SystemInfo module updated
Passmark 8.0.Build 1031 – 2 bugfixes, 2 new features.

Other Software
LibreOffice 4.2.2– Mostly minor bugfixes.
Adobe Shockwave Player 12.0.9.149 – Security fixes.

Get Yer Science Geek On
I’ve been waiting for this! COSMOS: A Spacetime Odyssey starts tonight.

Windows 8.1 Update 1, Spring Update, Or Whatever You Call It
I’ve installed both the 32 and 64-bit versions. One in a VM and one on real hardware. If you love using the desktop and Metro then you may like this update. For everyone else it is most likely going to be one giant “MEH!”
See:
Ars Technica – Windows 8.1 Update 1: More interface concessions that still won’t make people happy

Sysinternals Freeware Updated
Mostly minor updates including Process Explorer, Process Monitor.
See: The Sysinternals Blog

Kinda boring out there this week.

Interesting:
Neowin – Windows 8 UX designer on Metro: “It is the antithesis of a power user”
“Windows 7 couldn’t have existed without the lessons we learned from the mess that was vista. Xp couldn’t have existed without 2000. Hopefully Windows 9 will be a solid refinement on all this” – Miller

Downloads:
HWiNFO32 & HWiNFO64 v4.34 – “Comprehensive Hardware Analysis, Monitoring and Reporting for Windows”
CCEnhancer 3.9 – Adds more cleaners to CCleaner (be careful).
TeamViewer 9.0.26297 – Remote control any computer over the internet. “New scaling mode: best fit, Other minor improvements and fixes.“

Paul Thurrott has a great article up entiled What the Heck is Happening to Windows?. Yep, as I’ve said here before the PC is not a phone, tablet, or phablet.
As to fixing Windows 8, 8.1, 8.1 Update 1, as Ron White says, “You can’t fix stupid.”
Oh, and the 8.1 Update 1 non-official release date posted around the web is now April 8th.
p.s. – Paul, Neil Young sucks 😉

Futuremark updated PCMark8 and 3dMark11.

Introducing Mozilla Firefox Accounts

It was one degree at my house this morning with 3 inches of snow on the ground.
As a former Michigander I ought to be able to deal with this.
But this is Central Virginia and I’m over it.

The [H]ardOCP boys are fawning over the ASRock Z87 KILLER FATAL1TY mobo.
I’m digging the color scheme too 😉

Speaking of [H]ardOCP. Steve over there is collecting old computer parts for the underprivileged:
“I know that a lot of upgrades took place over the holidays and that means there is going to be a lot of “old” PC parts lying around collecting dust. Since the parts you and I consider “old” are 100x better than what most people are using now, I figured this would be a great way to put those “old” parts to good use!”
Help him out if you can. Announcement here. Forum post here.

LibreOffice has been updated to version 4.2. Download.

Yes, I’ve ditched all the social media associated with this site. I wasn’t getting anything out of it.