Keep Your Data Local: Free Offline Alternatives to 6 Popular Web Apps

Web apps are all the rage, but offline apps still have their place. Whether you want better offline support or you just want to keep your sensitive data on your PC, there’s a free desktop app that can replace your web-based productivity app.

We’ve looked at web-based alternatives to desktop apps, and now we’ll do the opposite. Here  are some solid — and completely free — offline desktop alternatives to popular web apps.

Be sure to perform regular backups if you store your only copies of important data locally. You wouldn’t want to lose it all when your hard drive inevitably bites the dust.

Development on offline email programs has slowed down, but there are still solid options. These programs will allow you to access your email from your desktop computer, entirely offline. Modern email accounts use IMAP by default, where your email stays stored online, but you can also configure your email client to use POP3 and set your email service to delete messages as soon as they’re downloaded, if you would rather just store your email history on your computer.

For offline email, we recommend Mozilla Thunderbird. It’s no longer being actively developed with new features, but it’s a solid, stable email program with all the features you would likely need. Additional features can be added via add-ons, just as with Firefox.

10 VirtualBox Tricks and Advanced Features You Should Know About

VirtualBox is packed with features that you may have never used, even if you frequently use it to run virtual machines. VMware keeps many of its best features to its paid versions, but all of VirtualBox’s features are completely free.

Many of the features here require Guest Additions installed in your virtual machine. This is good to do anyway, as installing the Guest Additions package will speed up your virtual machines.

VirtualBox can create snapshots that save a virtual machine’s state. You can revert to the saved state at any time by restoring a snapshot. Snapshots are similar to leaving a virtual machine in a saved state, but you can have multiple saved states and restore from them at any time.

To create a snapshot, click the Machine menu while the virtual machine is running and select Take snapshot or use the Snapshots panel. You can restore snapshots from this interface later.

Snapshots are particularly useful if you want to do something to a virtual machine and then erase your changes. For example, if you use a virtual machine to test software, you can create a snapshot of a clean Windows system, then install the software and play with it. When you’re done, you can restore the original snapshot and all traces of the software will be erased. You don’t have to reinstall your guest operating system or manually back up and restore a virtual machine’s files.

HTG Explains: Can You Use Any Charger With Any Device?

Every device — smartphone, tablet, eReader, laptop — seems to come with its own charger. But do you really need all these chargers? Can you re-use the same charger for multiple devices?

The Micro-USB connectors and chargers shipped with most modern smartphones and tablets are now supposed to be standardized. This is a topic that’s more confusing than it should be, given this standardization.

Types of Chargers

While chargers are becoming more standardized over time, there are still a variety of different charger types in wide use:

• Laptop Chargers: Unfortunately, there’s still no standard type of charger for laptops. You’ll want to get a charger designed specifically for your laptop. Connectors aren’t standardized, so you probably won’t be able to accidentally plug the wrong charger into your laptop.
• Apple Lightning Connector: Apple has now standardized on the Lightning connector, introduced in 2012, for their devices. iPhones, iPads, iPod Touches, iPad Nanos — all the new iDevices use the Lightning connector and can be connected to any Lightning charger certified or developed by Apple. Older devices use Apple’s 30-pin dock connector. Apple makes a connector that allows you to connect new devices with a Lightning connector to older charges with a 30-pin dock connector, if you really want to do this.
• Micro USB Chargers: Most smartphones — including Android, Windows Phone, and Blackberry phones — and Android tablets use standard Micro USB connectors. These replace the proprietary chargers that old cell phones used to use. To comply with the European Union’s directives on a common type of charger for smartphones, Apple offers a Lightning-to-Micro-USB adapter.

Laptop chargers aren’t compatible, while Lightning connectors can be shared between Apple devices. (Note that iPad chargers will have a higher amperage than iPhone chargers, see below for more about that.)

16 Android Voice Actions to Make Android Your Own Personal Assistant

Performing Voice Actions

To start a voice action, either tap the microphone icon on the Google search widget at the top of your home screen or open Google Now and say “Google” out loud.

Your phone or tablet will start listening to your voice. You can now say something out loud to perform a voice action.

Perform a Google Search

The most basic – and obvious – of voice actions is as a simple Google Search. If you say something that Google doesn’t recognize as another voice action, it will perform a simple Google search for it. If you say something like “photos of narwhals”, Google will perform a search for narwhal photos and show them to you.

However, this feature also works hand-in-hand with Google’s new knowledge graph. If you search for something Google knows the answer to – like “How many people live on Earth?” – Google will show you the answer to your question and speak it back to you. This feature will only get more powerful as Google’s knowledge graph improves.

How to Make Windows Start the Screensaver Immediately When Locked

Are you one of those people that loves to see the screensaver come on when you get up from your computer? Here’s an easy way to make the screensaver show up as soon as you lock your PC.

To lock your computer, if you’ve never tried it, just use the WIN + L shortcut key combination, and your computer will be locked – you’ll have to enter the password to get back in. It’s a really good idea to do so at work, or if your friends are the type that will mess with your PC while you’re in the other room.

You can also create a shortcut that will lock your computer, if you are the type of user that prefers using a mouse to tediously do things instead of a nearly-instant shortcut key. Just paste this into the location box when creating the shortcut:

rundll32.exe user32.dll, LockWorkStation

Note: according to some very technical documentation, it’s possibly not a good idea to create shortcuts to lock the desktop. Plus, again, WIN + L is a much better solution.

Now that you know how to lock your PC, it’s time to make sure your screensaver is enabled. If it already is enabled, then skip down a bit.

Right-click on the desktop, choose Personalize, and then click on Screen Saver on the bottom right-hand side of the window.

What You Need to Know About Using UEFI Instead of the BIOS

New Windows 8 PCs don’t include the traditional BIOS. They use UEFI firmware instead, just as Macs have for years. How you go about doing common system tasks has changed.

If you’re interested in why UEFI is replacing the BIOS, take a look at our overview of UEFI and how it’s different from the traditional BIOS.

UEFI applies to new computers. You won’t see the UEFI Firmware Settings option here if you installed Windows 8 on an older computer that came with a BIOS instead of UEFI — you’ll just have to access the BIOS in the same way you always have.

Note that this boot menu option option may not be present on all UEFI PCs. On some UEFI PCs, you may have to access the UEFI settings screen in a different way — check your PC’s documentation for instructions if you don’t see the button here.

How to Remove uTorrent’s EpicScale Crapware From Your Computer

The internet went crazy today when somebody figured out that uTorrent was bundling a piece of crapware called EpicScale that uses your computer to mine for Bitcoins, and according to many reports, was silently installed. The even bigger problem is that it doesn’t uninstall clean, so we’re going to show you how to do that today.