Friday, December 18, 2009

Some Christmas goodies

With holidays looming, this will probably be the last last posting for 2009, as a major work project around the house beckons over the next couple of weeks. To tide you over, here are a few gleanings...
Have you ever wished for a magic wand that could make annoying Windows problems disappear? Like, say, a missing Recycle Bin icon, or those pesky Runtime Error messages in Internet Explorer? FixWin is that magic wand. This ingenious free utility requires just over 500KB of space, runs without installation, and quickly fixes 50 different Windows glitches--many of which would normally require a trip to the Registry. These are divided among five categories, including Windows Explorer, Internet & Connectivity, and System Tools.
Have you been looking for a quick and easy way to take partial or full screenshots of a webpage in Firefox? Now you can have either type with just a couple of clicks using the Abduction! extension for Firefox. (Instructions courtesy of the HowTo Geek).
And here's a way to add a built-in QuickNote function to Firefox.
Locked or restricted PDF files cannot be accessed without a password. If you want to remove passwords of protected PDF files, Try PDF password remover. It can be used to remove passwords and restrictions of locked PDF files. This is a Christmas special giveaway from PCsPlace.
And finally, Sean Silverthorne at Harvard Business writes on how information overload is an addiction:
We’ve discussed in this space the many methods available for controlling information overload. Scheduling meetings with yourself. Setting up action folders. Checking e-mail just a few times a day. You know the tips.
So you’ve conquered info overload, right? You always have a plan, a schedule, a process for getting things done.
No, of course not. Tom Davenport writes on Harvard Business Publishing that if we wanted to tame this problem we would have done so. It’s not that we enjoy 24/7 availability, but rather we hunger for what it brings us. Davenport doesn’t use the analogy, but I will:
We want to kick the drug, but we like the rush too much.

Have a great Christmas and be back early next year.

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Pimp your browser

"Thanks to online video, Web apps, social networking, and so on, the humble Web browser is being pushed to do more and to do it faster," writes Chris Brandrick in PC World. With a few simple tweaks and tools, you can improve your browsing experience and save yourself some time in the process.

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Duplicate tabs in Firefox, IE

Sometimes you want to duplicate a tab in your favourite browser. Here's a very simple means to do it.
1. Insert your cursor in the address field at the top of the screen.
2. Press Alt-Enter.
This works in both Firefox and Internet Explorer.
Incidentally, you can use the keyboard command Ctrl-T to create a new blank tab.

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Firefox macros

Sometimes when working the web, you have to go through a lot of repetitive actions, like entering long addresses, or going through numerous checks to get to a particular page. DejaClick is a Firefox add-on that aims to automate these tasks. I have been searching for a long time without success to find a good freeware macro recorder. This might be the closest thing around, even though it only works in your browser.

Treat USB drives with care

USB drives (pen drives, flash drives, memory sticks - they have almost as many names as styles) have revolutionised portable media. How many of you still use a floppy disk? And they can carry massive amounts of data, or even bootable operating systems. But as Dave Thompson points out in The Press, they can fail if not handled carefully, potentially leading to as much grief as a failed hard drive.

Monday, December 14, 2009

Privacy is dead

So what's scary? The day when you can quickly point your smartphone at a person in the street and know within seconds that person's name and particulars may not be all that far off.

That's the logical consequence of a new technology called Google Goggles, being run out now by - who else? - Google. At the moment the technology is very much in its infancy, but the promise is that one day you will be able to upload an image - any image - and Google will be able to tell you loads of information about it. So someone will snap my face with their cellphone while I am walking down the street, upload it to Google, and within seconds know who I am and all about me. Think of the power that would give anyone trying to sell you something on the street, for instance; or a Mongrel Mob member who is acting as a none-too-subtle enforcer for a debt-collecting agency; or Inland Revenue agents tracking down payment defaulters; or .......

Friday, December 11, 2009

Best free... firewalls, photo editing

If you are confused about which firewalls to install on your computer, Gizmo has a very helpful article listing the best free utilities available. And also gives some good pointers about how they work.
And seeing it's nearly Christmas, here's a list of 10 free alternatives to Photoshop (a number of them are Mac only, but it's about time the Mac got some attention). Surprisingly, the article does not mention either PhotoFiltre or Photoscape, both of which I would recommend.

Recovering files erased from memory stick

I accidentally erased some files from a memory stick this week. Normally, when you delete files from your hard drive, they reside in the computer's Trash Can until you finally empty the trash. And before that, if you realise you still want them, you can restore the files from there. But files erased from a memory don't go to the Trash in the same way - they are gone. Well, not exactly. A good recovery utility can still get them back. So I tried the free program Recuva, and it did an excellent job. Some of the files were not recoverable, but 90%-95% were, so I'm, a happy chappy again. Incidentally, you can perform the same rescue operation from a digital camera. In both cases, make sure you save the recovered files to a different disk. The Piriform website is also the home of CCleaner, an indispensable anti-spyware utility, and some other goodies worth investigating.

Thursday, December 10, 2009

New Thunderbird features

The Thunderbird email program (for some obscure reason in the computer world, email programs are called "clients") has just had a major upgrade. Thunderbird is a stablemate to Firefox, and I use it very successfully at home, so the new features sound welcome. I'll be downloading the new version asap.

Troubleshooting PC problems

I have been having some major hassles with my home computer lately. All of a sudden it has taken to switching itself off in mid-flight, or rebooting randomly, often at quite frequent intervals. I have begun running all the usual checks (spyware, viruses, etc), but so far nothing obvious has shown up. If you're in the position where your technology is refusing to cooperate, you might find this advice from Rick Broida helpful. Don't get mad, he says, get methodical.

Monday, December 7, 2009

Google and Bing leapfrogging

It seems that Google and Bing release new features almost every second week, in a bid to try and establish dominance.
Bing has a new Visual Maps feature, which tries to outdo Google Earth and Google Maps. It's similar to Google Street View, but adds some mash-ups, many of which are more applicable to the USA than here, but no doubt will migrate before long. One particularly clever app is Photosynth, a photo-management tool from Microsoft that stitches together digital images to create "synths" - 3D renderings of multiple photos of the same scene. Bing users can rotate and view the synths from many angles. The more photos supplied by Bing users, the better the 3D effect.
Meanwhile, Google has a released two new features: a dictionary in English and 27 other languages, plus the ability to search in English across websites written in other languages.

Friday, December 4, 2009

Steampunk and the SCA

People cope with the technological world in a variety of fascinating ways. Some, for instance, live a good deal of their time in the past - or an invented past.

My three children are all members of the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), which endeavours to re-enact the more fun parts of mediaeval times (ignoring the plagues, famines, poor health care, hovels, etc). So they regularly don armour and knock the stuffing out of each other in tournaments. Their big event is a week-long Canterbury Fair at Waipara over Waitangi weekend, which is well worth a day's visit. The costumes are amazing. Others get into Steampunk Tech, which puts a Victorian spin on modern technology. There is even Steampunk music, which comes in a wide variety of colours. I particularly liked this YouTube cartoon movie about a Steampunk duel. A little reminiscent of Will Smith's film Wild Wild West.

Thursday, December 3, 2009

The Black Screen of Death

I don't know whether it's coincidence, or whether I've become a victim. Just days after reading that many people round the world have apparently suffered a Black Screen of Death on their PC following the latest Microsoft patch download, the same happened to our home machine this morning. Software firm Prevx claim millions have been infected; others say the victims number only in the thousands, and Microsoft denies that it's latest patch release is responsible. Because my computer would not even boot, I could not try my own usual run of resuscitation techniques, so I've rushed it to the repair shop, and I'm still waiting to hear the diagnosis. But if you suspect you have been similarly caught, Prevx have a fix here, that might work, provided you can see something on your screen.

Embedding video and audio in PowerPoint

I've spent much of the last couple of weeks building a presentation in PowerPoint for my organisation. The aim was to create an interactive presentation that would play video and audio clips automatically at some points, while allowing viewers to choose options and links at other points. It's been a high learning curve, but I think I've largely cracked it. While PowerPoint is a bit clumsy in the way it does things, it can do them. However, after sending a copy of the presentation to a colleague, I discovered that while PowerPoint embeds photographs and graphics, it does not embed video or audio tracks. This means they do not play on any machine other than mine. After some online searching, I have discovered that the solution is to place the audio and video clips in the same folder (directory) as the presentation, which then happily links to them. You can then place everything in a Zip folder, cut to a disk, or send on a memory stick, and the recipient can happily play your creation.

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Sharing documents online

In the brave new world of cloud computing, when you have several colleagues all needing to access the same document as a work in progress, there are several options now available. Email attachments is the most obvious and basic, but other newer file-sharing tools are quicker and easier. Pattie Pegler gives a run-down on some of them.

Coping with a new mobile phone

The staff of the organisation I work for have just been given new phones by 2 Degrees as part of a sponsorship from the phone company. The Nokia I have chosen is a world away from the old very basic Nokia I have otherwise had for the past 3 years. But I need a week-long seminar to learn how to use even the basic features. Fortunately, we have a 19-year-old Chinese young woman boarding with us who needless to say knows all about these things and she has been schooling me up. Whether I will ever use all the higher-end features is problematic. One thing frustrating me, though, is that some of the basic features of the old model are either missing or much harder to implement. Take, for example, adding details to Contacts. The old phone allowed me to enter home, work and mobile numbers at the one time. The new phone allows me to enter only home and mobile numbers at the first attempt. I thought initially that it was not possible at all to enter work phone numbers, but have just discovered it is possible - along with many other details - but it is a two-stage process. After entering the first set of contact details, click on the Options button and then choose Add Details. Voila, new fields come up. I presume something similar is the case for most mobile phones these days.

Thursday, November 26, 2009

Christmas lights

Just about all the malls are in full Christmas regalia now, but I haven't seen many homes in suburbia that have yet dusted off the deorations. For several years the good folk at Westlake in Halswell decorated their houses magically, until the hoons and vandals destroyed it for everybody. However, a private home at 370 Cashmere Rd, Christchurch, has opened up and for a small donation to a charity you can visit the owner's extensive Christmas display, mostly between the hours of 6-9pm over the next week or two. And Spreydon Baptist Church's wonderful Christmas Grotto opens again on 13 December - last year, 23,000 people went through. Meanwhile, if you'd like to try making something a little different in the Christmas lights line, here's some instructions on how to make a lighted Christmas ball.

Creating 3D photos

3D is making a strong comeback in the movies. Maybe we'll see a return as well to those wonderful stereoscope 3D photo viewing devices that were the delight of your grandparents. If you can't find a stereoscope, you can create your own 3D photos, using the instructions at this web page. Now... I'm really hanging out for when they show us how to create our own home 3D movies.

Ripped off, hacked and taken to the cleaners

Simon Hendry in the NZ Herald has some words of caution, and some helpful advice, on avoiding becoming another identity hacker's statistic.
Twenty years ago the typical hacker was a bedroom-based teenager with an IBM clone 386 PC, a dial-up modem, whose goal was to gain geek kudos by infiltrating and disrupting an unsuspecting corporate computer system. Today's more scary incarnation, says Owen Johnston of security company Blue Coat Systems, is a very smart IT graduate, probably living in Eastern Europe, who is in the hacking business to make money - lots of money.

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Google Chrome and image searching

Google is constantly in the news these days. Last week the industry got a first look at Google's proposed new Chrome operating system (OS). Many were unimpressed and said it will never replace Windows or Macintosh. However, Robert Strohmeyer says they are missing the point - Google has designed Chrome OS as a platform for people who use computers primarily online, not for those wanting myriad desktop applications. And that has implications for the growing number who work on the move.
Meanwhile, back at the coalface, Google has introduced a new clustering system for when you do an image search. Up to now, for instance, if you entered the word "Jaguar", it was unable to distinguish between the make of car and the animal. That's changed, and you get a little "Find similar images" below the thumbnails, which helps to narrow searches down quickly. The idea's very much in its infancy, and not all searches get this option. But it's a big help where it does come up.

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

What is the Web teaching our brains?

Spending so much time in front of computers, and particularly on the Internet, is changing us, in some perhaps surprising ways. This NZ Herald article traces one researcher's line of thought.

Simple flash movie creator

Creating a Flash movie is not for the faint-hearted. (Flash in this case does not mean fancy - it's short for Shockwave Flash, which is a movie format used to produce streaming videos, animations for websites, and so on.) You can use a Flash movie to create more complex titles for your home videos, or to build advertisements for a website. It's only limited by your imagination. Most of them are created using the Adobe Flash program (which was originally developed by Macromedia before Adobe bought that company out). But it's hideously expensive, and very difficult to learn. However, I have just discovered and have been trying out a much simpler program called Powerbullet, which has the added advantage of being free. Because it's not as complex as the Adobe version, it has some limitations, but nonetheless it seems to be capable of some quite good results. It talks about being able to create multi-page presentations, but I haven't plumbed that far yet - still getting to grips with the basics.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

How to stop Firefox stealing your focus

While I love Firefox, it has an annoying little habit. When you click on a hyperlink inside a program or document - for instance in an email - it launches a Firefox window and puts the other program in the background. There are a couple of fixes for this annoyance, which Rhiannon explains over at the Gizmo website.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Creating better email presentations

These days a lot of selling is done by email. I use "selling" in the broadest sense of the term - whether you are promoting a club, your own interests, or a business, you just want your email to look more attractive. But most email programs are not up to the job of formatting them attractively. And most of the professional emails you receive have been created with expensive software, or using specialised marketing services. The organisation I work for does indeed utilise such a service, but recently I needed to send out a promotion for another person. It took a lot of hunting, but I managed to track down a free program that does the job simply and well. It's called Email Marketing Pro, and not only does it help you to create the email presentation, it also manages the distribution process nicely. It's reasonably intuitive to use, although it pays to look at the instructional videos the makers helpfully provide, particularly to set up the sending and receiving accounts. A knowledge of html and web authoring will enable you to get the best out of the program, but you can get by using the visual tools which are pretty similar to what you have already become familiar with in Word.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Overwhelming social media, slow computers, retrieving lost data, and so on...

A few sightings from the last day or two:
Feeling overwhelmed by social media? You're not alone
Why is My Computer Slowing Down? Lincoln Spector provides answers to some of the most common reasons why a once-fast PC is slowing down. Surprisingly, though, he omits one of the most common - an email program that has become clogged with messages. The simple solution: clean out the Sent and the Deleted Items folders.
My data is gone. How do I recover it? First, don't panic, writes Bob Rankin. Data is incredibly durable and seldom unrecoverable. In fact, it's extremely difficult to erase data when you want to. Government agents have recovered data from hard drives that have been reformatted and had new data written over their entire surfaces nine times or more! Your presentation is probably still there; the key to the storage locker is just a little bent out of shape, is all.
What to do about Windows Registry errors. (Another helpful article from Bob Rankin.) The Windows registry is a database of settings and options for Windows features, programs, data files, and computer hardware. You can think of the registry as Windows' way of remembering which printer you prefer; what files you accessed most recently; where to find your hard drive; etc. When errors creep into the registry, Windows may behave oddly or not work at all.
10 of the Best Free Webmail Services. Sean Aune provides a list of 10 of the best free Web-based email solutions currently on the market.

Friday, November 13, 2009

Essential Freeware

I have been doing an audit to see what free software I use on my computer. I was staggered at how vast the list is. All the following are programs I use regularly, in many cases could not do without. Often there is no commercial equivalent or the paid-for version costs way too much. In every case, these programs do an excellent job and come well within the "essential" category. Some of them just run in the background, like Java and Taskbar Shuffle, but are great add-ons nonetheless (in fact, much of what we now consider normal on the internet would be impossible without Java).
Security: Microsoft Security Essentials,
Threatfire, WinPatrol, Ad-Aware, CCleaner, Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware, Spybot.
System helps: Glary Undelete, PasswordFox, 7-Zip File Manager,Moffsoft Free Calc, Copernic Desktop Search, Taskbar Shuffle, TweakUI, Java.
Browser: Firefox. Firefox extensions/add-ons: Xmarks, Table2Clipboard, Firebug, FireFTP, DownloadHelper, Adblock Plus.
RSS feeds: RSS Bandit.
Word processing: Editpad lite, OpenOffice.org, Simple OCR.
PDF: Foxit Reader, Koolwire.com
Media players: GOM player, Media Jukebox, VLC Media Player.
Image editing: Irfanview, Pos Panorama Pro, MW Snap,
Photoscape, SmillaEnlarger.
Video: Free Video Converter, Photo Story 3, MovieMaker.
Audio: Audacity, free-midi-converter.com, Goldwave, mp3 workshop, Free Mp3 Wma Converter, CDex.
Design: Scribus, Fontview, PDF Fill – Writer and Tools.
Photo management: XnView.

Entertainment: Google Earth.

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Uninstalling hard-to-get-rid-of programs

Some programs just refuse to uninstall properly from your computer, no matter what you try to do to get rid of them. Some programs you install never make it to the Windows Add/Remove control panel, others simply disappear from the list. Making things worse is that some well-known apps don't create uninstallers on your machine. For instance, AVG Free, the antivirus program, puts its uninstaller into the downloaded installation package -- something many users zap right after they have a successful install. So to uninstall AVG, you'd need to download and install the program again, then select uninstall from the installation options list. Steve Bass has some very helpful tips on how to deal with these nuisances.

File Properties

Sometimes it's helpful to know the properties of a particular file on your computer: eg, how large it is, where is the original file located if it's a shortcut, and so on. The usual way to find out is to right click on the file and then choose Properties from the dialogue box. Here's a simple shortcut: Alt-left click on the file, and it brings up the same dialogue box.
Incidentally, checking the properties of an email in your inbox can reveal some otherwise hard to find information, like addresses that are obscured in the "From" line. The Alt-click tip above doesn't work here, though - for that you have to right click on the file name.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Increase the number of image search results

Most search engines (eg, Google, Yahoo, etc) allow you to alter the number of search results that show up on each page, by going into Preferences and choosing a number. However, this does not apply to image searches. So Google gives you a stock 20 results per page, for instance, and that can't be changed. Bing, the new Microsoft engine, is more bizarre. It gives you every result on one screen, which you can continuously scroll down. The problem is, if there are millions of results, your computer is in for a very long download session. As an example, I searched for images related to "debt", and got more than 19-million results. There was no way to stop them all downloading except to quit the page. I don't think my broadband account would have stood that amount of downloading.
Fortunately, there is ONE search engine that allows you to alter the number of images displayed per page. It is called Imagery, and it is actually a front end that some enterprising person has constructed for the Google engine. Imagery allows you to choose to display 20, 40, 60, 80 or 100 images per page, and you can also choose other standard preferences such as file size, type, etc. It also gives good sized thumbnail views. Sadly for Internet Explorer users, it only works in Firefox - another reason to change browsers.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Office Tabs

Tabs are an absolutely essential part of my life when using Firefox. I can't imagine how I lived without them before they were introduced. I wish I could say the same about Microsoft Word. Instead, when I have multiple Word documents open, I have to fish among a piled up set of icons on the Task Bar. It should have been an obvious feature for Microsoft to incorporate in 2007. However, there is a free utility, Office Tabs, which does the job, and on my quick test does it well. It can also give you tabs in Excel and PowerPoint. There are a few points to be aware of: The software has been written by a Chinese techie, but an English version is available. A few users report problems with the feature, but mine works fine. And some people find that it pops up a dialogue for a video program. (Again, it doesn't on my machine.) I guess, like with most public domain software, it's user-beware, but the utility seems to outweigh the potential problems. If you have difficulties, you can always use Windows' System Restore to go back.

Pin recent documents, & Office Tabs

I'm astounded how often I discover obvious things that I had previously missed. Latest case in point: In the Microsoft Word "Recent Documents" list, you can pin a document so that it doesn't get bumped off. Just click on the little pin icon at the right of the document title. And deselect it when you no longer want the document on the list.

Monday, November 9, 2009

Adding additional places to the "save" dialogue

Here's a handy free utility to solve one of the frustrations of Windows and Microsoft Office. When you go to save a document, or to save a download file to your computer, the dialogue box has only five buttons on the left-hand Explorer-style bar. This bar is known as the Places Bar. Needless to say, the folder you most frequently want to save a file to is not among the five. The fix-it comes by way of PlacesBar Editor, which allows you to change the folders in the Explorer sidebar, or to additional folders in Office. It's very simple to use, and works well.

Friday, November 6, 2009

Friday miscellany

Here's a Friday collection of sighted/cited pieces of interest:
Users running Microsoft Office can stump nearly three-fourths of all known attacks targeting the suite by applying just one three-year-old patch, according to recently published data. Almost three-out-of four attacks -- 71% of all those spotted in the first half of 2009 -- exploited a vulnerability in Word that was patched in June 2006, Microsoft said in its bi-annual security intelligence report, released Monday. The flaw was fixed in the MS06-027 security update issued. (~ PC World)
Here is very brief tutorial showing you how to set Firefox to open your bookmarks in a new tab, rather than taking over the existing one. (~ Simple Help)
"With hundreds of daily updates from friends on Facebook and Twitter, do people actually feel closer to each other? It turns out the average American is more socially isolated today than 20 years ago, as measured by the number of self-reported confidants in a person’s life. Yet contrary to popular opinion, usage of cellphones and the Internet is not to blame, according to a new study." Well yes, except that the study also shows that people who use social networks such as Facebook or Linkedin are 30 percent less likely to know their neighbors. (~ New York Times)
If you turn to your MP3 collection when you're stressed out, you're not alone. The American Psychological Association found that a majority of people polled for the last two years running claim music as their number one stress reliever. (~ Lifehacker)

Renewing the news

On Wednesday, I linked to an article by Clay Shirky about the crisis in the news industry. This piece from Naomi Wolf also looks at what's happening, and suggests where news may come out in the near future.
There is no way to disguise the reality: newspaper readers, in the West at least, are getting older; younger readers prefer to get their information online, where readers spend far less time actually reading news than print readers do; and, most agonizingly of all for the industry, people who were willing to pay for newspapers are unwilling to pay for the same content on a screen.
But does this mean the death of news, or its evolution? I think we are witnessing something new being born.

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

A time of epochal shift

We are living in a time of epochal shift. It's hard to believe that the internet as an essential everyday part of life for almost everybody has effectively only been around for little more than 10 years. I began working life as a cadet journalist on a small-town newspaper (The Marlborough Express, in Blenheim). Journalist courses of any kind did not exist in NZ in those days. Since then I have seen whole industries associated with printing come and go - including hot type, print bureaux and prepress film stripping. In fact, the newspaper industry as a whole as we know it is in serious straits, and could conceivably vanish over the next 20 years. Clay Shirky has written a very thoughtful piece on the underlying reasons, and what might (not) replace it. This could be essential reading in helping to understand the process of technological shift that leads to societal shift.

Creating PDF forms

I've just learned a (relatively) simple way to create a PDF form that can be emailed for others to fill out electronically and return by email. I've been wanting to be able to do this for ages, but was stumped because I thought it required expensive software. (While you can create fillable forms in Word and Excel, the process is clumsy and daunting. It also allows for little design capability, you have to choose "safe" fonts the recipient is guaranteed to have on their computer, and of course the recipient also needs Word and/or Excel installed on their machine.) You can certainly do it with Adobe Acrobat, which is very expensive, but the great discovery that it is easy to do with the public domain program Scribus, a page layout program that comes close to emulating market leaders such as Adobe InDesign and QuarkXpress. What is surprising is that to my knowledge, neither InDesign nor QuarkXpress can do this. Another case where open source software is actually better than a commercial program. By using Scribus, you are not limited in design, so you can let your creativity rip. Click here to see a simple video tutorial on using Scribus to create a fillable PDF form.

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Creating smaller PDF files

Among the many advantages of PDF files are that you can open them on any computer and they look just the way they were created - you don't need the original software which created the document, nor the fonts - and generally the file size of the PDF is smaller than the original. But not always. Sometimes, they come out bigger, which can be a frustration. This usually occurs because the document contains multiple images. Here are several tips to get the PDF file size down:
1. Images are often imported into the original larger than needed, and then scaled down. Unfortunately, all the original image information is still retained. So use an image editing program to resize the graphic before importing. Also consider reducing the resolution of the graphic. Any resolution greater than 225 dpi is unnecessarily high, and if the document is only going to be seen on a computer (ie, it won't be printed), then a resolution as low as 72 dpi is probably adequate.
2. Images are often also cropped when they are imported into the document. Crop before importing and you will save a lot.
3. When you export or save the file as a PDF, check the compression. For many purposes, medium or even low compression values will be adequate, making a huge difference in file size.
4. Another way to reduce file sizes is to do a "Save As" of the original document before making the PDF. This purges unneeded information which otherwise keeps getting added to the document but is not deleted. (For instance, all those changes you make while editing the document are actually held in the file, unseen but clogging up the document.)
5. If you're making a PDF for the Web and/or if you're not concerned about printing colors, use the RGB color space. RGB has one less data channel than CMYK, so your files will be that much smaller.
6. Embedded fonts also take up space, so keep the number of fonts to a minimum.
All that being said, you may be saddled with a PDF made by someone else (as happened to me this week), and you want to reduce the file size. There are numerous programs that can edit PDF files, the best-known being Adobe Acrobat. But that's very expensive. PDFill PDF Editor comes out a lot cheaper, but it's still commercial software. Fortunately, from the same stable comes a tool that did the job for me nicely. PDFill Writer is a free print driver that has a lot of options when saving the file. Once it was installed, I opened the over-sized PDF file, hit the Print button, and chose PDFill Writer as the print driver. It gave me a lot of options for recompressing the graphics, and voila! a 25% saving in size. Another free tool at the site is PDFill Tools, which allows you to do interesting things like split PDF documents, and merge several PDF files.

Monday, November 2, 2009

Saving websites

I frequently save websites I come across for reference purposes. Fortunately, there are several ways to do this, depending on your needs. If you need only the text from a site, in both Firefox and Internet Explorer, you can choose File/Save (Page) As, and the option "Web page, html only". Both browsers also have the option to save the whole page, including graphics, as a web archive. In Firefox, choose File/Save Page As/Web archive MHTML, and in IE choose File/Save As/Web archive, single file (*.mht). Additionally, you can save the whole web page, and this downloads all the graphics and other elements such as Cascading Style Sheets to a separate folder. Choose Save As/Web page complete in both browsers.
Yet a further option is to download an entire site. You could be setting yourself up for a VERY big download, depending on the site, but if you really want to go into the depths of a site it will yield a lot of useful data. To do it, you will need a separate piece of software, for instance HTTrack, a free program that will save all the pages within a domain, including images, while maintaining the link structure. It does not save the pages from external links like those in advertising. Guess if I were an industrial spy, a tool like this would be a must-have in my armoury...

Call centre frustration

You're probably getting to be a rare person if you've never had to deal with a supposed "customer service" (note the irony of the quotes) representative in a call centre located a million miles and a cultural galaxy away from you. Some of the most frustrating hours of my life have been spent trying to find someone who actually spoke a modicum of English and who understood my problem. So I identified with David Armstrong in his account of trying to get an online computer supplier to sort out his order. This is an instructive tale of woe. But I can't understand why a computer expert (Armstrong was formerly the computer editor at The Press in Christchurch) would bother to buy online, when he could have got as good a deal by shopping around local suppliers, with on-hand customer support. My experience of shopping around locally has been excellent (admittedly it helps that I speak a bit of Chinese, but it's not the deciding factor).

Friday, October 30, 2009

Pinning applications to the Task Bar

The new Windows 7 operating system has apparently changed the way you access programs (applications). I'm not familiar with Vista, but in XP, you either go to the Start menu, and then choose All Programs, or you can access them via the Quick Launch feature of the Task Bar, which is a lot quicker. However, when you install a new program, it does not always install an icon on the Task Bar. Never fear - you can easily add it manually. Simply drag an icon from your desktop down to just left of the >> (chevron) symbol.

If you drag the dotted vertical line just to the right of the chevron, you can reduce or increase how many of the Quick Launch icons display. Clicking on the chevron pops up a display of the remainder.
As I use this feature extensively, I rapidly found the list becoming unwieldy, so I created folders into which I could group icons.

Unfortunately, finding where to create those folders is a bit laborious. Go to: Documents & Settings/Owner/Application Data/Microsoft/Internet Explorer/Quick Launch. However, once you have created one, in future you only have to double-click on the folder in Quick Launch and it brings the folder to the desktop, whereupon you can exit up one level and create more.
Of course, if you'd rather your PC looked more like a Mac, there are several free programs that can turn you Task Bar into a Pac look-alike. For instance, choose from ObjectDock, or XWindows Dock.

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Upgrading from XP to Windows 7

The transition from XP to Windows 7 is not going to be smooth - certainly as smooth as from Vista to W7 - if the plethora of online articles is to be believed. I run XP, but don't plan to upgrade until next year at the earliest, probably after the inevitable Service Pack 1 for W7 comes out, and in conjunction with a hardware upgrade, which I'll be due for anyway by then. Hopefully, by then some of the kinks will have been ironed out. Most articles seem to suggest that a clean install is going to work best - that means you effectively wipe your hard drive and start again from scratch. Of course, it also means it's essential to back up all your data. (And let's hope you have the original disks or installation files for all the programs you use!)
If you want to do it sooner, here are a few articles to help you:
First up, an article with lots of screenshots.
Here are five things PC World thinks you should be aware of.
Computerworld has a series of helpful questions and answers.
Assuming the upgrade goes well, PC World explains how the new W7 interface works differently from XP.

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Those annoying hard returns when you paste text from a pdf or email

There's one major reason why I cling to Microsoft Word as my primary word processor. It's the ability to fairly easily deal with the mess that you get when you copy and paste text from either a pdf document or an email.
I am sure you will have already discovered that the text frequently comes across with either a hard return (ie, a paragraph return) or a soft return at the end of every line. It's like someone has pressed the enter key or else shift-enter after each line. And, of course, you want the text to flow on as it should. Here's the method I have developed to sort this out:
1) Enter your cursor at the top of the text, and press Ctrl-H, which brings up the Find and Replace dialogue box.
2) In the top field, enter ^p^p. (The symbol ^ is called a carat, by the way.) This will find all instances where there is a double paragraph return, which usually marks where the real paragraph breaks occur.
3) In the bottom field, enter some characters that don't occur in the text, like ##.
4) Click "Find all". You have now created markers for the real paragraphs.
5) In the top field of Find and Replace, enter a single carat and p, eg ^p.
6) In the bottom field, delete the ## and enter a spacebar space.
7) Click "Find all". You have now stripped out all the paragraph returns.
8) To restore the real paragraph breaks, enter ## in the top field, and ^p^p in the bottom field. Click "Find All".
9) Finally, to tidy up, in the top field enter a double spacebar space, and in the bottom field a single spacebar space. This will strip out all the unwanted double spaces.
Voila! The text is now how it should be.
If the document has come across with soft returns rather than hard (paragraph) returns, the same technique can be used. Just insert the search characters ^l instead of ^p. This may seem rather convoluted the first time you try it, but it becomes second nature pretty quickly.
Sadly, only Word seems to have this ability to search using wild characters for paragraph and soft returns - believe me, I have tried all the others, to no avail. Incidentally, the search characters for tab breaks is/are ^t.

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

USB security, Google, Bing, and technology that makes up dumb

Go away for a couple of days, as I did over the weekend, and when you return your email inbox is filled with several hundred essential emails, at least half of which are not essential at all. In my case, many are newsletters I subscribe to; perhaps I should be more ruthless in unsubscribing.
So it was perhaps good news that Mozilla has launched a software project designed to let people better manage the ever more voluminous stream of messages coming from sources such as Twitter and Facebook into their e-mail. Whether it will help me, as I don't use either Twitter or the social messaging aspects of Facebook, is another matter.
Here are some other interesting items worth checking out...
In a masterpiece of timing, both Google and Microsoft Bing announced new developments with their search engines. (Google seems to be releasing a new development almost every month at the moment. It's hard to keep up. Is it worth keeping up?)
The great thing about today's nearly universal connectivity is how easy it is to share information, pictures and other material with your business associates, friends and family. The bad thing about it is how easy it is for strangers to get access to your data. This is especially true when we carry so much on our USB flash drives, DVDs, laptops and other portable media. A freebie, SafeHouse Explorer, can secure your data on all media, protecting it from unwanted prying eyes.
Like it or not, come Sunday using a handheld mobile phone while driving will be an offence in New Zealand. The lads at the Stuff technology site have some tips on what's allowed, what's not, and how to cope.
Speaking of cellphones, Steve Tobak at BNet asks whether new technologies such as cellphones are making us dumb? (A hint: he believes they are.)
If that's the case, hold on to your hats, because PC World lists five new technologies it believes will change everything. Now can we have a list of the five most significant unintended consequences...

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Something to keep you going

I'm going to be out of town over the next few days, so here is a miscellany of items culled from various IT blogs to keep you going. See you next Tuesday.
Sneak peeks at 8 emerging technologies: From transparent aluminum to billion-year memory chips to household pest-eating robo-furniture, these are some of latest technology trends that promise to affect our lives.
Windows 7 is being released fully this week. But the big elephant in the room is: Will operating systems even matter in the future? Larry Dignan at ZD News ponders the alternatives.
Mitigate the 7 Deadly Sins associated with Windows 7. Lust, gluttony, greed, anger, envy, pride, and sloth - with Microsoft's new OS, you'll find every deadly sin. Here's how to minimize the toll each sin takes.
In Word 2007, you have probably noticed that the default formating for a new document is Calibri, line spacing is expanded, and space is added automatically after a paragraph. The How-to Geek shows you how to change the default document format into a style of your own.
Modern gadget flops - they promised so much yet delivered so little.

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

More on security

Mozilla has now unblocked a Microsoft add-on thought to pose a danger due to a software vulnerability, but a second add-on remains blocked, the organization said on Sunday. (See post yesterday, and today's item at PC World.)
Tens of millions of U.S. computers are loaded with scam security software that their owners may have paid for but which only makes the machines more vulnerable, according to a new Symantec report on cybercrime and reported in The Washington Post. Cyberthieves are increasingly planting fake security alerts that pop up when computer users access a legitimate website. The "alert" warns them of a virus and offers security software, sometimes for free and sometimes for a fee.
Meanwhile, if you are confused about what security you need for your computer, Gizmo has come up with an online Wizard designed to help you select the best free security software for your PC, based on the version of Windows that you use, your technical computer skills and your general level of security risk.

Monday, October 19, 2009

Firefox blocks unwanted Microsoft intrusion

This week is definitely a case of 'you win some, you lose some' for Microsoft. On the win side, Windows 7 (see following post). On the lose side, a real nasty. If you use Firefox browser, in the last couple of days you have probably noticed a pop-up window saying that Firefox is blocking some software installed by Microsoft. The thing is, Microsoft installed the code secretly back in February, and it is making not only Firefox but its own browser, Internet Explorer, vulnerable to attacks. The blogosphere is livid, and this PC World article explains why.

What will Windows 7 deliver?

This week ushers in the new golden age for Microsoft, or no doubt that's what the company would like to have us believe. Behind us will be all the bad news that accompanied the Vista operating system, and we can now sail into the sunset with Windows 7, which is perfect in every way. But if you are wondering what Windows 7 is all about, and will it really make a difference, one of the best articles explaining the difference between it and Vista is this one by Rob Pegorora of The Washington Post.

Friday, October 16, 2009

100+ places for free books online

Wet weekend coming up? Instead of numbing your mind in front of the goggle box, curl up with a good book. Great image, except it's a bit hard to visualise curling up with a computer while reading an online book. That apart, there are thousands if not millions of books now available on the internet, and Stephen Keroff has done us all a favour by compiling an amazingly comprehensive list of sites where you can find them. So far he's unearthed more than 100. Everything from romances to the deepest philosphy, with pretty well all the major classics in-between.
And here's confession time: I am an incurable romantic, and run a spare-time hobby site sharing some of my own favourites, including some of my own writing. Because I am a particular fan of Regency romances and short stories, I have probably picked up a few pieces that Stephen has missed. Come visit!

Probably the best free security list in the world

Gizmo editor Antti Koponen has just finished a major update to his super popular list of the best security products. As Gizmo says, "If there is a more comprehensive list than this on the web, I'm yet to see it."
Caveat: It pays to check on the web for reviews before installing some of these products, as they sometimes do unexpected things to your system or conflict with other security products you are using. And before you install any security feature, set a System Restore Point first, so if things do go pear-shaped, you can set the system back how it was before.

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Understanding Freeview

There are times I feel like a bear with very little brain, and Freeview TV is one of those things I struggle to understand. I get confused because it can come to your house in several different ways, and in the early days there were question-marks over which decoder was best; and then there are issues of what is high-definition and what is not, and how you can record it, etc etc. As you can see, I have not attempted to install it yet, although I do plan to sometime. So I found this article at Geekzone helpful, which is the beginning of a series following three people's experiences with three different MyFreeview|HD devices. I will follow it with interest.

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Keyboard shortcuts

Talking of keyboard shortcuts (see blog below), the NZ Herald has a very good article on simple shortcuts to carry out many of your common tasks. I use the keyboard as much as possible, as it really does speed up work compared with swapping to the mouse.

Creating macros

This is a blog of frustration. Once upon a time, the Mac operating system used to have a very simple facility to record macros, so that you could automate common tasks. You clicked a Record button, carried out the required operation, and clicked the Stop button. Then you assigned a keyboard key. That was it. It worked brilliantly. Sadly, it was dropped around about System 7. The PC has never had a similar facility, and I have spent some frustrating hours trying to find a utility that does the same. There are a number of freeware utilities, but either they require a degree in computing to implement, or they simply don't work. What do I want to do? For example, the PC has no keyboard command to create a new folder (on the Macintosh, Cmd-N does the job). I believe that Windows 7 has implemented this, but why has it taken Microsoft several thousand years to catch up with such a simple operation? So seeing it's going to be a year or more before I purchase Windows 7, it appears I have to languish. If anyone knows of a SIMPLE macro utility that actually works, I would love to hear.

Monday, October 12, 2009

1 billion views a day

I think it's fair to say that YouTube has changed the way we view the world, and in particular has changed the whole entertainment industry. It has rewritten the rules. The staggering fact is that 1 billion hits a day are now made on the site, which is staggering, especially when you consider that the site was officially launched only four years ago. It was taken over a year later by Google. Co-founder Chad Hurley blogs on the milestone. The only thing missing from their perspective, I suppose, is that YouTube still does not make money. But when you're that successful, does it matter?

Friday, October 9, 2009

Easter eggs (and it's nearly Christmas!)

Easter Eggs is a quirky name that techies give to messages or features hidden inside software applications or games. Most of them are amusing, and some are even useful (though being useful is probably the last thing the authors intended). The How-to Geek has a list of some of the better-known ones. There's even a website devoted entirely to the genre, and the range is quite mind-boggling. This could become addictive.

Google offers advice on secure passwords

Who better to give advice, I suppose. Michael Santerre, Google's Consumer Operations Associate detailed Google's password advice in a recent blog post. Read more at PC World.

Thursday, October 8, 2009

Where do tired buttons go to rest?

This webpage really brightened my day.
Do you ever give a thought for all those buttons on the Internet? You know, the things you click. They say things like "Submit" or "Send" or "Reset", and you click them and they take you to another page. Don't you think they might get tired? The Internet is open 24 hours a day! Most web sites never give their buttons a break. Here at EnglishClub.com we don't make our buttons work all day and night. We give them a few hours off and let them come to this special page to have a rest and a hard-earned sleep. On this page you can watch different types of buttons sleeping. But please be very, very quiet and, above all, don't click any buttons that you find here!

Launch programs with MouseExtender

Launching programs in Windows can be a bit clumsy. Mostly, I add program icons to the Taskbar at the foot of the screen and click on those. But that can be quite slow. Just as slow is using the Start button, and you can only in so many items to the Start menu before you run out of real estate. So I am delighted to have discovered a neat way of launching programs called MouseExtender. Once you have installed it, a click of your mouse's middle button opens the MouseExtender window wherever your cursor happens to be. Then you just click the program icon or folder you want. Adding programs to the launcher is very simple: Right-click in the MouseExtender window and choose Add Running Program. You can also choose other files or folders that you commonly use. ME also provides three system buttons - Control Panel, Restart, and Shutdown - which is very handy. If you need your middle mouse button to do other things - like opening new tabs in your web browser - you can "exclude" MouseExtender from specific programs, which means the middle button goes back to its regular function when those programs are active.

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Opening a Word document where you left off

One of the frustrations of Microsoft Word is that it opens at the top of the document, rather than where you left off reading or editing. If it's a long document, it can be a pain trying to find that spot again. Fortunately, there is a solution, using a little-known feature of Word: the Go Back command. No matter where you are in a document, when you press Ctrl+Alt+Z your cursor jumps back to the last place you edited; on the Mac, it's Command-Option-Z. In fact, each time you use the Go Back command, your insertion point jumps among four places: the last three edit spots and your current position. When you re-open a document, pressing Ctrl+Alt+Z will also take the cursor to the last editing point. So if you are reading a long document and have to close it, make a small edit (for instance, adding a spacebar space) and using the Go Back command will take you there when you return. One proviso: When you open the document, hit the Go Back command keys immediately - don't so much as touch your mouse - otherwise it may not work.

Maximise your browser window

Sometimes, your browser window becomes so cluttered with toolbars, there's barely any room left for the actual web page. You can temporarily turn off all the toolbars (those at the bottom as well as the top of the screen) by pressing the F11 key on your keypad. This works in both Firefox and Internet Explorer. On the Macintosh, press Ctrl-B. Bingo - it's like going to wide-screen TV! You can restore the bars by pressing the same key again.

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Free internet phone and video calls

Skype really started something six years ago, when it introduced the world to free phone calls over the internet. Today a huge number of people use either it or many imitators to call friends and family, video conference and the like. It's still not for everybody. Forget it if you don't have broadband or live outside the cities. And New Zealand's slow broadband can make the video part almost a nonsense. Other disadvantages with Skype seem to be problems with compatibility between the PC and Mac systems, and Skype's tendency to insert its own code into html documents. And with all systems, if you want to use video, you need a webcam, although these are pretty cheap.
Skype's not the only player in town, and Stuff has an article today outlining some of the alternatives. There are some surprising omissions from the article, though. For instance:
Probably the best-known alternative is Windows Live Messenger (formerly known as Windows Instant Messenger or MSN). I know this works fairly well because our Chinese daughter uses it to chat with her parents every week. Google is also introducing a new chat system, Google Talk, although I don't think it has been launched in NZ yet.
TokBox is a web-based video chat application that lets you set-up video chat channels with unregistered users in seconds. The application has a simple user interface with controls for volume, muting and camera off. When you want to invite some to a video chat all you have to do is send them an email link or direct them to your user page. You can also add their Facebook application or embed your video chat channel on your website or MySpace page. There were early problems with Tokbox, but a quick check online seems to indicate these have largely been ironed out. Its main advantages appear to be that you don't have to download special software, and that you can talk to several people simultaneously.

Is the internet melting our brains?

Dennis Baron doesn't believe so. The author of "A Better Pencil" explains why he considers such hysterical hand-wringing is as old as communication itself.

Monday, October 5, 2009

Do uninstallers uninstall?

I try out a lot of software, much of which I later uninstall. But the uninstall routines on the PC often leave artifacts behind (bits which the installation has burrowed into your system like tics, and which can cause all sorts of problems later on). This is one area in which the Mackintosh excels, because when you install a program it does not modify the system, so the number of system and software conflicts are greatly reduced. So how can you extract those last bits you don't want? PC World's Lincoln Spector provides one answer.

Migrating Outlook Express's inbox

The days are starting to look numbered for Outlook Express, Microsoft's slimmed-down email client. (Why do they call email programs 'clients'?) It was not added into the Vista suite of programs, and neither is it be in Windows 7. You either buy the full Outlook program, or use one of the many free email clients, like Thunderbird, which is what I use at home. But I still use Express at work, because I like its simple interface, even if it doesn't have all the bells and whistles of its big brother (most of which I find a distraction). So if you are planning to switch, how do you migrate the contents of your Outlook Express inbox? If you switch to Thunderbird, the latter walks you through a simple process. If you switch to Outlook, it's a bit more complicated, but PC World has a good description here.

New Google features

Google has added some new features to its Search Options feature, a list of search-refinement features on the left-hand side of search results page that you can choose to turn on or off. They include the ability to filter for blogs, books, or news; and to see only sites you’ve already visited, or only sites you’ve never visited. For me, the most helpful new features are two that allow you to restrict results to a specific timeframe - for instance the last hour, or any range you specify. This latter one is enormously helpful. It lets you, for instance, find articles about John Key published prior to last year's elections. These new features follow on from others Google added just a few months ago.

Friday, October 2, 2009

DVD not working? Give it a wipe

Ross, like most buyers of DVDs and CDs, had assumed that a new disc would be clean, but that's not my experience. I've found so many wearing all sorts of laser-confusing lint and micro-grit that I now clean every disc I buy before the first playing. Rented movies are far worse. They're so often pock-marked with scratches and fingerprints it's a wonder they play at all, especially in the new-generation Blu-ray players, which are proving to be rather fastidious.

Here are some important tips for cleaning disks, courtesy of The Age, via Stuff.

Thursday, October 1, 2009

Gmail notifier

Email programs like Outlook and Outlook Express have an alert that sounds when new mail arrives. I find that particularly helpful, as I have the program set to automatic download, but I don't have to keep checking while I am working on other things. So how can you get a similar feature if you have a Gmail account? One answer is Gmail Notifier, of which there are two versions. There's a Firefox add-on, which adds an icon to the browser toolbar, and a general version which adds an icon to the toolbar at the foot of the Windows screen and alerts you to incoming mail.

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

New Microsoft security tool

Microsoft today released a new security tool called Security Essentials. It's free, it's XP, Vista and Windows 7 compatible, and it's getting very good reviews. Like this one from PC World.

How to choose the fastest line at the supermarket

Murphy's Supermarket Law states that whichever checkout line you choose, it will be the slowest. However, the folk at Lifehacker have come up with a rule of thumb they reckon will give you a faster through time:
When choosing which line will be the fastest, it might surprise you to learn that the "express" lane may not always be the best choice. Meyer took a scientific look at supermarket checkout times and came to the conclusion that the number of people in line adds more to the wait time than the number of items each person has in their cart.
[W]hen you add one person to the line, you're adding 48 extra seconds to the line length (that's "tender time" added to "other time") without even considering the items in her cart. Meanwhile, an extra item only costs you an extra 2.8 seconds. Therefore, you'd rather add 17 more items to the line than one extra person!

A rule of thumb I learned years ago for McDonalds and other fast food joints is don't choose any line where an adult has children.

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Keeping passwords safe

I remember the first time my mother and father started locking the doors of our house, back in 1963. (I think it was just coincidental it was also the year of President Kennedy's assassination.) Up to that time, the house had always stood unlocked, and as a young kid I couldn't understand why we now had to start locking it. I had a brief return to those days of innocence when I spent two years in what is now Vanuatu, on Volunteer Service Abroad. Crime was almost non-existent there in those days and I didn't even bother shutting the door, let alone lock it. My flat was across the road from the prison, which was surrounded by a low hedge, and the front door stood open all day long. Prisoners were used for public works around the town, and each day you would see them taking their constable out for his daily walk. He would proceed to lay down in the shade and go to sleep while they, armed with machetes, would happily slash the grass around him and do their bit for the community. Most of these men were in prison for wife-beating (a national sport at the time) or drunkenness, but seeing they didn't get drink in prison were perfectly safe. How I long for such crime-free times again.
Sadly, locks, passwords, and multiple layers of security are utterly vital these days, even more so in the digital world. I seem to have hundreds of logins and passwords for the many websites I visit in the course of work, and keeping track of these is a job. Some people use the same password for everything, but it poses the danger that if it is stolen or cracked, the intruders have access to every detail of your life. Keeping passwords secure is even more problematic. The worst thing you could do would be to write them on bits of paper (although I have been guilty of that on occasion). Better is to copy them into a Word document, and then password protect the document. Even better is to keep them inside password-storing software, and I have just started to use a simple open-source applicaton called Password Safe. Password Safe allows you to safely and easily create a secured and encrypted user name/password list - all you have to do is create and remember a single "Master Password" of your choice in order to unlock and access your entire user name/password list.

Panorama photos

I have blogged a couple of times about software to stitch together several photos into a panorama. In the process, I overlooked the obvious. Microsoft has a neat free program called Image Composite Editor that also does the job well. Admittedly, it's one of several rather unsung projects from Microsoft Research that the company doesn't talk about much, so I'm using that as my excuse.

Monday, September 28, 2009

Speed up Firefox

Firefox is my favourite browser, particularly because of the amazing range of really useful add-ons available. But I have become increasingly frustrated lately with the treacle slowness at which it loads, which seems to have got worse over time. Apparently this is a common problem, caused by fragmentation of the profile databases that Firefox uses. If you are a new user of Firefox, it loads fine, but as your usage expands, so the program slows. Thus I was delighted to come across a free utility that really does speed up Firefox. I installed it today, and immediately noticed a major improvement. Thanks to Gizmo for the heads up - you can read his article here, along with a pointer to the download.

Friday, September 25, 2009

Free (and very simple to set up) websites

Back in April I blogged about ways to set up a free website. I have just come across two new services, called Roxer and WebSketch, which blow the rest out of the water. Each is beyond simple to set up - you just drag things around the page. The WebSketch site has a helpful demo video walking you through the process. And you can do many things which are almost impossible in the other free services, for instance layering objects on the page. The gallery of website examples compiled using either Roxer or Websketch contains some very impressive examples. And your web address is much the same as you would get with other services: eg, http://myaddress.roxer.com I suspect this will not be particularly suitable for complex websites (and in the case of WebSketch, you are limited to 15 pages per site), but for home, hobby, club or small business use (and many of the gallery sites are small businesses), these look to be absolutely ideal. Now, how do I convert my club site from Wetpaint to Roxer?

Alternative web browsers

Firefox and Internet Explorer aren't the only way to explore the web. Here are 9 alternative, lesser-known browsers whose unique features make them worth consideration. (Found at TechRadar.)

Thursday, September 24, 2009

Online word processors

Seeing I'm talking a lot about word processors today (see post below), let's look at online word processors. An online word processor gives you the ability to create, edit, save, and access your documents from anywhere. You can start your document in Christchurch, and finish it in Auckland. The best ones also allow you to share documents, track changes, revert to earlier versions, and collaborate with other writers, some of them in real time. Best of all, any reasonably up-to-date computer can access them, usually without installing anything. Some require ActiveX, Flash, or Java — all of which are already present on most computers – but depending on your system or the quality of your broadband, they may sometimes work at slow speed.
A quick search came up with a list of at least 10 free services, of which Google Docs is probably the best known. There are probably almost as many again that work in more specialised ways. But here's my quick list:
Google Docs
Zoho
Buzzword (owned by Adobe)
iNetWord
ThinkFree
EtherPad
ajaxWrite
Box.net Web Documents
docly
Peepel
Many of the above are part of an office suite, containing also spreadsheets and maybe presentation software. The big upsides are the free service and the ability to collaborate with people in different locations without having to shuttle files around. One of the downsides, though, is the big unknowns regarding security, and whether you want critical data stored on the internet rather than on your hard drive.

Word processor war hots up with new (free) arrivals

I have just come across and have been trialling some new word processors, which I want to discuss. But first, have you noticed that of the several dozen word processors and/or office suites now available, the only one you have to pay for is Microsoft's? How long can they withstand the accelerating assault? Okay, Microsoft Office has many features not found in these others, but be honest - how many of those features do you actually use? And there is a big cost attached, not just in price, but in real estate. Office 2007 weighs in at over 400mb, and that's without the recent Service Pack upgrade (which is a 300mb install file). I suspect that Microsoft developed the .docx format to try and lock people into their system, but as many of the new alternatives can happily open .docx files, that's not a bar to using others. Apart from inertia, or the probably misplaced concern that you will lose compatibility if you move away from your Word comfort zone, I can see almost no reason not to change. So here are some of the recent arrivals:
Kingsoft Office is top of my list. It's what OpenOffice.org should have been. At 101mb installed, it's less than a third in size of the Big Two, and it launches much faster. It has all the bells and whistles you need, with a nice interface - very like what Microsoft Word would have looked like if they had not introduced the hateful Ribbon. It comes with spreadsheet module and presentation module as well. And it opens .docx files. I understand it was developed in China, but you would never know.
Jarte was developed from the same engine that drives WordPad (the built-in word processor that comes with Windows and which hardly anyone uses, generally for good reason). Jarte (how do you pronounce it?) is like WordPad on steroids. It has a completely different kind of interface which takes a few minutes to adjust to, but the opening screen gives you some good pointers. Two big pluses - it occupies only 5.5mb of disk space, and launches almost instantaneously. And it opens .docx files. There are limitations. This is a word processor, not a pseudo layout program as Word tries unsuccessfuly to be. So there are no floating text boxes, drawing tools and the like. But nonetheless it has a surprising amount of features.
Softmaker Office is another office suite, but just with word processor (Textmaker) and spreadsheet (Planmaker). In terms of interface, it looks a bit like a slightly more basic OpenOffice.org, but again it has most functions you would require. The amazing thing is that it comes in at a miniscule 2.4mb size, and again launches quickly. It also opens .docx files. If you have an older computer that is struggling to keep up with the increasing system demands of recent software, this would be a good option.
I haven't mentioned AbiWord, an open source project that has been around for years. It's fairly basic, and the interface is looking rather tired now, but it's still fairly popular in the Linux community. In light of the above new entries, I don't think it cuts it the way it once did.

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Reference guides

A couple of helpful ideas from PC World...
1. If you're looking for a quick-reference quide to Word, Photoshop, PowerPoint, etc, check out TechPosters. Some of the stuff at the front page is seriously geeky, produced by people with way too much spare time, but by browsing the Categories section on the righthand side, you'll find guides for plenty of mainstream stufff. Look in MS Office, for instance, for posters on Word, PowerPoint, and the like. Check Browsers for posters on Firefox and Internet Explorer. And so on. Within each category you'll see a large preview of each poster, followed by a link for downloading a PDF you can then print. What's great is that the site has guides for older versions of programs as well, like Publisher 97. (If you can't find something by perusing the Categories, try using the Search field.)
2. And here you'll find an article listing 8 easy extras for Internet Explorer 8.

Monday, September 21, 2009

Web-safe fonts

Practically every personal computer has a set of fonts installed. These fonts are usually the default fonts for the operating system that the computer is using or come with software added by the user. Therefore, different computers can have very different sets of fonts installed. If you are designing a webpage, or sharing documents between computers (and particularly if the document will move between PC and Mac), you need to keep this in mind. If you decide to use a font on your web page that a visitor doesn't have, that font will appear differently (and often unattractively) on the visitor's machine. This is where web safe fonts come in. Web safe fonts are a set of highly common fonts that come installed on most computers. Here is the list to help you on your way:
Serif: Book Antiqua, Bookman Old Style, Courier, Garamond, Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, Times New Roman, Times.
Sans Serif, Arial, Arial Black, Geneva, Impact, Lucida Sans Unicode, MS Sans Serif, MS Serif, Symbol, Tahoma, Trebuchet, Verdana, Webdings, Wingdings.
Incidentally, many type faces have equivalents under different names, simply published by a different type foundry. You can often tell which are equivalents because the names have some common connection. Arial and Helvetica are equivalents (although I can't find a connection between the two words in this case). But Swiss and Geneva are also equivalents to Helvetica, which is easy to pick if you were ever a stamp collector, as Helvetia is the word for Switzerland that appears on their stamps. Similarly, Times and New York are equivalents (Times was designed originally for the New York Times newspaper).

Friday, September 18, 2009

Stop Windows from rebooting after automatic updates

One of the annoyances of Windows is a tendency for the computer to reboot after it has installed an automatic update. If it does this while you are away from the computer - maybe you've gone for a coffee, or off to bed - you can lose work in any unsaved documents, or windows you had open have been closed. Very frustrating. Fortunately, the solution is relatively simple, although it differs depending on whether you are running XP or Vista.
Vista: Click Start, type Windows Update, and then hit Enter.
Click the Change Settings option.
Change the setting to "Download updates but let me choose whether to install them."
Click OK.
XP: Click Start, click Run, type sysdm.cpl, and then press Enter.
Click the Automatic Updates tab, and then check "Download updates for me, but let me choose when to install them."

Opening documents whose programs you don't have

I know Microsoft Publisher is extensively used, often by the office secretary or a club volunteer who is detailed off to produce a staff newsletter or somesuch. But I don't have a copy on either my work or home computer, partly because it no longer comes bundled with Office and partly because while it promises much it delivers very badly, and misbehaves something dreadful every time it goes visiting. My post here explains why. Unfortunately, from time to time documents created in Publisher land on my desk, and then what do I do? One answer is to use the free service Zamzar to convert the document to a format I can open. In fact, Zamzar can take an amazing number of document types - including spreadsheets, music, video, images and PowerPoint type presentations - and change them to formats you can handle. One really helpful one is WordPerfect, which once upon a time used to be king of the word processing world but has been almost completely supplanted by Word. Nonetheless, WordPerfect documents still hit my desk on occasion, and no other program I have will open them. Up to discovering Zamzar, I had to email the sender and ask him/her to resend in an open format such as RTF (Rich Text Format, which any word processor can read).

Thursday, September 17, 2009

Word tips: finding a document path, and hidden text

1) One of the bugbears of Word up to 2003 was difficulty in knowing where documents listed under "Recent items" were located. I frequently store different versions of a document in different locations. Perhaps I should give them separate titles, but there is a method to my madness. However, when I clicked on the File menu, the recent titles would come up but with no indication of their path. The only way to tell was to do a "Save As...", when the dialogue box would show the folder location. Thankfully, that has been corrected in Office 2007. Click on the Office button (very top LH side) and a list of Recent Items pops up. Hover your mouse over an item for a second or two, and it will display the location of the file.
2) Here's a tip on how to hide text or photos in a Word document.
* Select the text or graphic that needs to be hidden.
* Under the ‘Font’ section on the Home tab, click on the small arrow at the right-end corner to open the ‘Font’ dialog box.


* Under the ‘Effects’ section (bottom RH corner), check the box next to ‘Hidden’ and click ‘OK’.
* To make the text visible again, select the whole document by pressing [Ctrl] + [A].
* Then go back to the same options and uncheck the option ‘Hidden’. Your text is back again.
While your data is hidden, all the text closes up, so there are no gaps to give away that something is invisible.

Casualties of technology

With every new technological innovation, an old activity becomes outdated. From heading to the arcade to wearing a calculator watch, here are 40 things either gone or in danger of disappearing.

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Google Fast Flip

Google is trialling a new kind of news feed. Fast Flip is based on Google News, and Google says it came up with it to address the fact that browsing through news sites is usually a slow process – not like the effortless instant gratification of flipping through a magazine or newspaper. Google has partnered with several dozen news sources–including the BBC, BusinessWeek, the Christian Science Monitor, the Daily Beast, Esquire, the New York Times, Newsweek, Salon, Slate, and TechCrunch – to create previews of their stories that live on Fast Flip but which display the first several paragraphs of the article in a form that looks like the originating site. You rifle through these previews by clicking left and right arrows, and the pages zip on and off-screen in high-speed, fluid animation–hence the “Fast Flip” name. Fast Flip is in Beta stage at the moment - and like many Google innovations, only time will tell whether it sticks around.

Read twice, send once

Murphy's Law: what can be misunderstood will be misunderstood. That's why you should be doubly careful with everything you write, especially in email. Things like personal responses to sender's questions, debating a point, or even just trying to be funny. Email guru, Heinz T., has a sound bit of advice on how to reduce miscommunications.

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Overwhelmed by data

One in three organisations cannot recover files from backup tapes and a similar number would not be able to easily retrieve email from 18 months ago, according to research from data storage specialists Hitachi. This article in the NZ Herald probes how many companies are being overwhelmed with electronic data.

Boundaries between real and virtual are blurring

The boundaries between real and virtual, public and private will disintegrate further as augmented reality spreads. That's the prediction of one researcher discussing "augmented reality". Things that might have been considered science fiction even a decade ago are rapidly becoming very possible, or are already here. But what are the implications? This article in the NZ Herald discusses some of them. One trend not mentioned, though, is the tendency for technology to move rapidly along a continuum from the possible, to reality, to the norm, to the obligatory. And each one of these developments make it harder for the individual (that's you and I) to be an autonomous person. The scary thing is that we happily give away so much for the sake of the technological baubles. In a book based on the TV sci-fi programme Red Dwarf, the characters get hooked on a virtual reality system called Better Than Life. Read the book and ponder. Or if you can't get hold of the book, Wikipedia has a summary.

Monday, September 14, 2009

Quote of the Day

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning. ~ Rich Cook

Disposable email addresses

There are times you don't want to divulge your real email address, especially when you are trying an online service for the first time. Maybe you want to take that "free" psychology test online, or test out a new download for your iPhone. There are services that will let you create "disposable" email addresses, where you can disable the address as soon as you want to stop receiving spam messages. About.com introduces you to eight of the best choices here...

Friday, September 11, 2009

Avoiding forgotten email attachments

How many times do I forget to attach a file to an email? Probably at least once a week. Always embarrassing, and usually when I am trying to project a professional impression. PC World has some helpful tips to avoid the problem, at least with Microsoft Outlook. It suggests several free tools that scan your outbound messages for keywords like "file," "attached," and "attachment." If they detect such a word but there's nothing attached, you get an alert - allowing you to attach the intended file and avoid future embarrassment.
Outlook 2007 users can grab the Missing Attachment PowerToy, or the more robust Forgotten Attachment Detector (which supports custom keywords and can even warn you about blank subject lines). If you're using an earlier version of Outlook, try Attached4Sure which supports all versions dating back to 2002.
I don't know of any similar tool for Outlook Express, but Google Mail users get the same service with its Forgotten Attachment Detector, with is a setting within the program.

Thursday, September 10, 2009

Panorama photos

Back in February I posted about the difficulty of finding a good free program to create panorama photos. I use Serif Panorama Plus, which does the job of stitching several pics together very nicely, but it is a paid program. However, I have just come across an updated version of http://www.image-editor.net/Pos-Panorama-Pro-Panoramic-Image-Software.asp?RefName=PosPanoramaPro1.00, which used to be commercial but has now been turned into a free program. Having given it a quick trial, I can thoroughly recommend it. In fact it has a very good feature missing in Serif Panorama - the ability to create vertical panoramas. It also allows greater control over the way in which the pics are combined, and the resolution of the end product. I think I will be switching permanently.
Incidentally, did you realise that the average digital camera has a wide-angle lens? In the old days of film cameras, the average lens had a focal length of 50mm, so the resulting photograph was pretty close to how the eye sees things. But most digital cameras are more like 35mm. This means that you are getting a horizontally compressed photograph which is not true to life. To bring things back to better perspective, I suggest trimming either the top, bottom or both of the photo, which will give a semi-panorama anyway.

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Fold a world record-setting paper airplane

Many years ago I was a journalist with what was then known as the BCNZ, the state corporation that controlled virtually all radio and TV stations, apart from Radio Hauraki and a couple of other new upstarts that were easing apart the bureaucratic log-jam. The Christchurch newsroom was on the top floor of the Manchester Unity building on the corner of Manchester and Worcester Streets, and on lazy, hot Sunday afternoons we had way too much time on our hands - so we made paper airplanes. One of my co-workers had developed a model that would just about hover, and we spent many fun hours pushing these out the windows to see how far they would go. With a decent warm updraft, on at least one occasion we saw the airplane top nearby Christchurch Cathedral. I am therefore delighted to see that a very similar version to Derek's design has appeared online, and there's even a video to show you how to fold it. (Note: the video at Lifehacker does not play properly, so use this link.) Now, if they can develop a radio-controlled model.......

The weirdest USB gadgets


From a dental microscope to electric ties, there's an astounding array of weird and wonderful gizmos you can plug into your computer, reports the Stuff website. There are so many bizarre USB (Universal Serial Bus) gadgets available that people didn't even blink when news of a USB chainsaw recently hit the tech websites.