Adjust Your PC Volume By Scrolling The Mouse Wheel

Most keyboards, if not all of them, have dedicated keys for managing the volume and brightness on your system. For anyone who doesn’t have these keys, you can use controls in Windows to manage volume and brightness. If you’re looking for an even easier way to manage volume, one which involves no clicks and is super convenient, meet WheelsOfVolume. It’s a free Windows app that lets you increase or decrease the system volume by scrolling the mouse wheel over an active area.

Install WheelsOnVolume and run it. When you scroll the mouse wheel on its active areas, you will be able to increase/decrease the volume, as shown in the GIF below. The volume slider itself will not pop-up and is shown for the sake of illustrating the app’s working.

The active areas where scrolling your mouse wheel will increase/decrease the volume are the Taskbar, Desktop, and the upper-right corner of the screen.

We normally link to the developer’s site when we write about apps but we had to make an exception because the developer site for WheelsOnVolume is a puzzle at best where it’s impossible to figure out which is the download link. We are therefore linking to a software repository site.

Download WheelsOnVolume From Softpedia

Credit cards will change forever starting next month: What you need to know

You may not realize it, but the beginning of the end of traditional credit cards is near. Business Insider has put together a massive guide about credit cards’ shift to EMV technology starting next month and what it means for everyday credit card users. Let’s go through some of the most important points below.

First, what is EMV technology? You know how stores have traditionally processed your credit card by reading its magnetic strip? Well that’s going away starting in October. Instead, newly issued credit cards will use microchips installed on the front of cards to register payments with stores. This technology will supposedly reduce instances of credit card fraud.

How will I get my EMV-compatible card? Your bank is responsible for sending it to you, but don’t freak out if you don’t get one next month — this will be a staggered rollout and you’ll still be able to pay using your magnetic stripe credit cards after October 1st. There have been an estimated 120 million EMV cards shipped in the United States already and another 500 million should be shipped by the end of the year, according to the Smart Card Alliance.

How will using the new cards be different? You won’t be sliding your card so much as dipping it into a slot, similar to how you slot cards inside many ATMs right now. And don’t worry if the place where you’re shopping doesn’t have an EMV-compatible terminal set up — the new cards will still have magnetic strips you can use for merchants who haven’t upgraded yet.

Will this new technology protect me more against online credit card fraud? Absolutely not. This is only going to make it harder to commit credit card fraud for in-store purchases. The process of paying for things online will remain the same and thus you’ll face the same dangers as before.

These are just the bare basics of what you need to know about the upcoming EMV upgrade. To learn more, check out Business Insider’s full guide here.

So how good is the lens on that camera?

Whoever Canon has working long hours in their R&D labs deserves a raise. Just about a month after the company introduced a video camera that can record HD color video in the dark comes another mind boggling advancement – a 250 megapixel monster of a sensor.

Earlier today Canon formally unveiled a 250 megapixel image sensor small enough that it can fit inside of a DSLR camera. Highlighting how powerful the new sensor is, Canon writes that it can distinguish the lettering on the side of an airplane flying 11 miles away “from the shooting location.”

The company’s new sensor is also no slouch when it comes to recording video. Specifically, Canon relays that it can capture video footage at a resolution 125 greater than standard 1080p (1,920 x 1,080 pixels) and 30 times greater than what’s possible with 4K (3,840 x 2,160 pixels). As a result, the sensor makes it possible to really magnify video footage without sacrificing image resolution or clarity.

The press release, which also touts the new sensor’s speed, reads in part:

With CMOS sensors, increases in pixel counts result in increased signal volume, which can cause such problems as signal delays and slight discrepancies in timing. The new Canon-developed CMOS sensor, however, despite its exceptionally high pixel count, achieves an ultra-high signal readout speed of 1.25 billion pixels per second, made possible through such advancements as circuit miniaturization and enhanced signal-processing technology. Accordingly, the sensor enables the capture of ultra-high-pixel-count video at a speed of five frames per second. Additionally, despite the exceptionally high pixel count, Canon applied its sensor technologies cultivated over many years to realize an architecture adapted for miniaturized pixels that delivers high-sensitivity, low-noise imaging performance.

Without question, a sensor of this magnitude will be just a tad too expensive for the consumer market. As a result, Canon envisions it ultimately finding a use in areas like specialized surveillance and crime prevention tools and in ultra-high-resolution measuring instruments.

Flash may finally be dead!!!

Some programs — cough Windows cough — are full of security bugs, but they’re so popular we can’t get rid of them. That is why Adobe Flash continues to be widely used. But it could be that the end is near at last for the bug-ridden multimedia platform.

Flash, of course, though widely used, is also vehemently hated in some quarters. Steve Jobs famously trashed Flash twice. First, in 2008, he said that Flash for desktops and notebooks “performs too slow to be useful” on the iPhone, and the mobile version “is not capable of being used with the Web.” Then, far more famously, in 2010, he declared that Flash wasn’t good enough for iPhones and he wouldn’t have it in his devices.

He was far from the only hater, but it didn’t do any good. Today, you can still run Flash on iOS using third-party programs like the Puffin Web browser to get your Flash fix.

It’s no secret that when it comes to security, Flash leaks like a sieve. And while that cliche is appropriate, it doesn’t capture the magnitude of the problem. We’re all techies here; let’s look at some hard numbers. Computerworld’s Michael Horowitz counted up Flash’s bugs through mid-May for 2015. Take a guess how many he found. I’ll wait.

Give up? He found 78 Flash bugs in the first five months of the year.

And has a chagrined Adobe done much better since then? Not on your life. In the last three months alone, 86 more Flash bugs have been found. That’s 164 all together, which means a bug was being discovered every day and a half, on average, or one bug every day for the five-day business week.

That’s got to be some kind of record — but not one that anyone will want to match anytime soon.

If you’re an Adobe Flash programmer, this is all great news; you’ve got excellent job security as long as advertisers and websites continue to use Flash. If you’re anyone else, there’s nothing great about it.

But Flash’s days may be numbered.

You might find that hard to believe if you have any idea how much Flash is still being used. When I browse the Web with Google Chrome, I block Adobe Flash content automatically, so instead of Flash content, I see gray boxes. And I see them everywhere. There are few sites I visit that don’t have Flash-based ads. According to Ad Age, who should know, 84% of banner ads are still built from Flash.

People are also still playing Flash games. Jerome Segura, senior security researcher at Malwarebytes Labs, says that developers are still using Flash for games. “There are people in the gaming industry who are still very attached to Flash,” he says.

And while YouTube dropped Flash for HTML5-based video in January 2015, many other video sites still use Flash. Last, but oh I how wish this were least, some websites’ user interfaces are still written in Flash. Oh, the humanity!

But Web companies have had enough.

First, Mozilla began blocking all versions of Flash Player from running automatically in Firefox in mid July. Then Facebook admitted in an SEC 10-Q that Flash vulnerabilities are affecting its “ability to generate Payments revenue.” This prompted fed-up Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos to tweet, “It is time for Adobe to announce the end-of-life date for Flash and to ask the browsers to set killbits on the same day.”

You think?

Then, on Aug. 27, the grumbling about Flash got serious. Google announced in its AdWords Google+ page that “Chrome will begin pausing many Flash ads by default to improve performance for users. This change is scheduled to start rolling out on September 1, 2015.”

That means all those splashy video Flash ads will stop in their tracks. That’s no way to impress the punters.

Google will automatically translate some of these ads into HTML5 video. But some ads won’t convert. The only way you can tell beforehand is to test the ads with Google’s Swiffy. If your ads don’t come over — well, Google suggests you get cracking in creating HTML5 ads.

Yikes! Sept. 1 is tomorrow. Sorry I didn’t warn you sooner, but you really should have been paying attention.

This move is going to be the real Flash killer. Google AdWords accounts for about two out of three ads seen on the U.S. Web. If vendors can’t reach their customers with Flash ads, they’re going to abandon Flash in a jiffy.

Flash is finally coming to the end of its road. Adobe has no one to blame but itself for this. Flash is almost 20 years old, and still a month doesn’t go by without a serious security problem. That’s why I seriously doubt it will live to see its 21^st birthday.

Chrome to Kill Automatic Flash Playback

Earlier this year, Google added a setting in Chrome that allowed users to switch off specific plugin content, such as Flash-based ads, to help speed up page loads and reduce power consumption. Chrome users could access this setting by clicking the menu button, choosing “Settings,” “Show Advanced Settings,” and then the “Content Settings” button within the “Privacy” section. Users could elect Chrome to run all plugin content, let the user choose what content can run freely on web pages, or allow Chrome to detect and run “important” plugin content.

Back in June, Google offered advertisers three methods for getting ads to the eyes of Chrome users without using Flash: letting Google’s AdWords to automatically convert Flash to HTML5, create an ad from scratch using HTML5 tools supplied by Google, or upload their own HTML5 ads that were produced without Google-supplied tools.

Now Google is reporting that Flash ads will be paused by default starting September 1. According to Google AdWords, the company’s online ad network, “most” Flash ads will be converted to HTML5 by default, however, if they’re not, advertisers need to identify the Flash ads that can’t be altered and begin converting those ads to HTML5 using third-party tools.

“If you already have Flash ads uploaded to AdWords, we highly recommend that you create new image ads instead,” Google states. “Eligible Flash campaigns are automatically converted to HTML5 when you upload them in AdWords, AdWords Editor, and many third-party tools.”

Many websites use Flash to “wow” potential customers and at times require the visitor to wait a short duration until the full Flash-laden site is loaded on the screen. While this method is truly annoying, what’s worse is that many advertisers use audio in Flash ads that can be hard to locate in open tabs. To remedy that, Google added an icon to Chrome that shows up whenever a tab is playing unwanted audio.

Web surfers may agree that the use of Flash has become a bit dated and out-of-hand. Over the years, hackers have taken advantage of the security flaws found in Flash, allowing them to steal identities and install malware, hence the need to move away from Adobe’s cash cow and use the supposedly safer HTML5 technology instead.

With that all said, is Google canning the use of all Flash media altogether? Not yet. Chrome will “pause” all minor Flash files, allowing the visitor to click and play the Flash elements if desired. Again, the change will begin to roll out next week.

Windows 10 installed on 75 million devices after just a month of availability

The free upgrade from Windows 7 and 8 to Windows 10 is doing wonders: In just under a month of general availability, Windows 10 is now running on 75 million devices.

Unsurprisingly, Windows 10 appears to be doing better than Windows 8: back in 2012, only 40 million Windows 8 licences were sold in the first month of availability. After six months, Windows 8 had risen to 100 million licences sold—but "sold" is likely to be a very different figure from how many devices were actually running Windows 8. So, 75 million devices running Windows 10 after a month is pretty darn good.

Your very own personal assistant, a better browser... and something called the Start menu.

The 75 million figure comes directly from Yusuf Mehdi, a marketing chief at Microsoft. Mehdi also shared a few other semi-interesting Windows 10 tidbits: 90,000 different PC and tablet models have upgraded to Windows 10; Windows 10 has a presence in 192 countries (I wonder which one of the 193 UN member states is missing?); the Windows 10 Store has seen six times more downloads per device than Windows 8; and, most importantly, Cortana has told over half a million jokes.

Microsoft continues to roll out the free Windows 10 upgrade in waves. If you want to skip the queue, you can download Windows 10 directly. If you want to use your free Windows 10 upgrade licence to perform a clean installation, it's a little more complex but still doable. Oh, and of course, you should read our excellent review of Windows 10 while you wait for it to download.