Friday, June 26, 2009

Unclogging the hard drive

I got a surprise today while inspecting the Add & Remove programs feature of my computer to discover five Java updates listed, one of them occupying 137mb of space. My next-door tech friends tell me I only need the most recent update, so in effect Java has been leaving a whole lot of outdated material on my computer while they keep adding in the new. This prompted me to look more closely at what else is there. I admit that I am a software junkie, and like trying out programs. Often I delete them, but not always - being a hoarder, I think that one day I'll have a use for that. I did a quick total, to discover 120 items listed, totalling around 3.3 gigabytes. (Admittedly, a lot of these are system files, or essential add-ons such as a Flash player and video codecs.) The largest single item is Microsoft Office, which weighs in at 408mb, but OpenOffice is only marginally better at 349mb, and quite a number of others (particularly Adobe products) occupy around 100mb of real estate. Adobe Reader, for instance, is 88mb, whereas many alternative programs come in at a third of that.
I am now setting out on a major clean-out. If you have a mind to do the same, before you do, set up a System Restore point, so that if things go wrong, you can revert your system. (Access System Restore via Start/Help & Support.) To delete unwanted programs in XP, go Start/Settings/Control Panels/Add or Remove Programs.

Thursday, June 25, 2009

More on capturing streaming audio/video

Further to yesterday's post about capturing streaming audio and video, I have just discovered an add-on for Internet Explorer similar in function to Firefox's DownloadHelper. It's called the Ask & Record toolbar, a free utility put out by Applian. It makes saving a video no harder than selecting record, then from the dialog that pops up, choosing the video and saving it. Unlike DownloadHelper, however, if you leave the page the video is being played on, A&R stops recording. This means you must watch every video you want to download in its entirety. A word of caution when installing: A&R asks you if you'd like to make Ask your default search engine and home page (it defaults to this), so watch as you click through the install (good advice with any program). Applian also includes its free FLV player (the majority of online files are Flash video these days) for its own playback use.

Closing Word documents

I can never understand why programmers continually fix things that aren't broken. Microsoft continually changes bits of the Office interface, so that things go missing or don't work the way they did before. A case in point: In previous versions of Word, if you had only one document open and clicked on the X at upper right to close the document, the program remained loaded. In Word 2007, if you do the same, the entire program closes. I have watched frustrated users do this time and again. The simplest answer is to close a document using the keyboard command Ctrl-W (a shortcut which works with many applications, by the way, including web browser tabs). But why should you have to?

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Recording streaming audio

I posted last week about the difficulties I had in recording streaming audio from an internet feed, such as from Radio Live. But some gremlin has hit my blog, and the post has been lost. Suffice to say that the usual method I used to record such audio (using the record facility in Audacity), did not work in this case, and I resorted to a very clumsy work-around. We won't go there this time. Since then, I have discovered two simple solutions. Firstly, the DownloadHelper add-on to Firefox - which I have used for several years, but did not realise worked equally well with audio as video - can save the stream to your hard drive. And a new utility I have just come across does the same. Called Multimedia Web Recorder, it can record any audio or video stream, and gives you many options for saving. It's a very neat utility.

Using the Windows key

I have never been a great one for using the Windows key on the keyboard (that's the one with the little picture, between the Control and Alt keys). All it seems to do is pop up an intrusive menu when I accidentally hit it instead of one of the other two. However, it does have a useful feature which I am beginning to like. Instead of mousing over to the Start button, and then waving the mouse around more to choose various items on the menu, or in the Programs pop-out, you can use the arrow keys on your keyboard instead. Simply press the Windows key, and then the arrow-up, arrow-right, etc, to move to the item you want.

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Another way to move text in Word

We're all familiar with the copy and paste commands in Word and other word processors. But there is an even simply way to move lines of text or paragraphs around, using a keyboard shortcut. The shortcut is Shift-Alt + the up or down arrows.
Here is how it works: Highlight a paragraph, press Shift-Alt+up arrow or down arrow, and the paragraph will move up or down the page. If you are working in a table, the cell of the table will move. In a table, you don’t even have to select the row or item that you want to move… just make sure your cursor is somewhere in the row.
This tip also works in Excel. (Hat-tip to How-To Geek.)