Latest downloads & apps

A piece about buckyballs catches your eye on the ABC web site. As you read it, you find a link to a Wikipedia article about carbon nanotubes. Opening that page, you find yourself clicking on references to buckypaper, nanoflowers, tensegrity spheres and a biography of Buckminster Fuller. Soon, you have half a dozen tabs open in your browser, filled with fascinating information and no time to read any of it. The old solution would have been to bookmark each of those pages in the hope that you’d eventually find time to sit down at your computer and read them.

In the early days, you were pretty safe taking your smartphone online; now you can’t afford to be complacent. As we’ve said before, smartphones are just tiny computers that fit in your hand. And just like any other computer, they’re susceptible to virus attacks and hackers. Here we look at three free Android security apps and other tips.

Some larger software downloads, such as the Windows slipstreaming tool Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK), are distributed as as an .iso file, which you need to burn to a CD or DVD in order to use. Or do you? To save you the bother of burning a disc, or to test it first, you can 'mount' the .iso file (turn it into a virtual CD or DVD),which makes it appear to Windows as an optical disc drive. All you need is an ISO mounting program such as Virtual CloneDrive from www.slysoft.com/en/.

Dropbox has become extremely popular as an automatic way of backing up data to the Internet and making it accessible from multiple computers. While it works very well and on a wide variety of operating systems and devices, it has two potential annoyances. The first is that by default, it only duplicates files in the set Dropbox folder, which the software itself sets up. The other is that it only gives you 2GB of online storage for free. Here we'll show how sync files from outside your Dropbox folder, and how to gain some more storage for free.