New online picture viewer

Microsoft has launched a new picture tool called Seadragon. Available at http://seadragon.com/, you can point Seadragon to any image on the Web, and get a zoomable viewer. It works very simply: give Seadragon the URL (web address) to an image file, and it’ll be fetched. It’ll then process the file and give you a nice page containing your image along with tools to zoom in on it to get fine detail. (You may need to allow a bit of time for the image to come to full resolution on screen, particularly if you have a slow internet connection.) You can also pan the image, pop out to a full-page view, look at the original image, etc.

Higher quality on YouTube

YouTube has apparently been quietly upgrading the quality of its video clips, while improving the compression methods to get the size of files down. Which is good news on at least two counts, particularly as it doesn't take long to chew up your download package if you watch too many of them. If you want to watch better quality than what initially comes up when you push the play button, though, there are several options.
Firstly, there is an "HQ" button at the bottom right of the play bar, which will play the video in higher quality.
Secondly, you can add a little bit of code to the address bar at the top of your browser which will also improve things, particularly for older videos, which have been heavily reduced in quality from what was uploaded to YouTube by the video maker. Try adding one of the following codes: &fmt=5, &fmt=18, &fmt=22, or &fmt=35. These represent increasingly higher degrees of quality (the last one is HD or high-definition). Not every video will show an improvement, but many will.
Incidentally, rather than watch the same popular video over again on YouTube, download it to your computer with a utility such as DownloadHelper (a Firefox add-on), and then you can view as many times as you want without costing yourself bandwidth. Windows Media Player might not play some of them, but there are good free alternatives in FLV Player and GOM Media Player.

Finding files and folders

I keep my computer fairly well organised, but it's amazing how often I forget where I have put a particular file or folder. Mostly I go to the Copernic Desktop Search tool, which can search inside documents for text strings - an invaluable aid. But Copernic does have its limitations, in particular it doesn't use wildcard characters in searches, which makes life difficult if you can't remember the exact wording or title you are looking for. Which is where the Everything utility can step up. Everything is a free search tool that specialises in finding files in a hurry. After spending a while first time up indexing all your drives, it can show every file and folder on your system. Just type in the file you’re looking for in the search box and results are displayed as you type them. You can use wildcard characters and can easily sort results by Name, Size, Date Modified etc. When you click on a file in the results window it will open with its associated application and folders will open up in Windows Explorer. It also supports boolean operators in searches.

Solving Rubik's Cube

The Rubik's Cube seems to have come back into fashion. I only ever solved it once, many moons ago, and that took a lot of close attention to a little book I bought (and have probably since lost). These days you can find instruction videos online to help, including this one.

Backing up is hard to do?

Backing up is like Mark Twain's famous quip about the weather: everybody talks about it, but nobody does anything about it. We all pay lip service to the idea, but a meltdown on our computer frequently finds us out. If you are like me, I suspect it's because there is a significant price to pay, either in dollars for something like a separate back-up hard drive or tapes, time (if you are backing up to disks), or the complexity of the best way to do it. I used to just back up my essential data to CDs, and then DVDs, but because I do a lot of graphics intensive work and video, the size of the essential data has now rendered that impractical. Which is why I bought an extra hard drive. But there are still lots of things I am very hazy about. For instance, when you start reading the literature, you come across terms like "imaging a disk", or "cloning a disk", which leave you none the wiser. And how much should you back up anyway? So I am thankful to have come across a triad of helpful articles at PC World which might also answer some of your questions:
What's the best way to back up what I need to back up?
Should I Image the Hard Drive or Clone it?
More on Image Backups

Is there life beyond Word?

Microsoft Word is ubiquitous, even with all its competitors (such as OpenOffice.org). It is almost universal because most people have to have it to be able to send and receive documents to other people. But what if that way of working became irrelevant? After all, I am not using Word to write this blog, and I don't use it for a lot of other tasks these days. Jeremy Reimer envisages a different way of working that completely by-passes Word (or any other word processor). He is coming to the conclusion that it is like the typewriter of old, near to being superseded.

Four alternative PDF readers

Adobe's free PDF reader has long been a standard for handling its extremely popular document format, but it's a bloated animal, and the version incorporated in your web browser can take a long time to load. Fortunately, you aren't limited to using it to view PDF files. Here are four alternatives:
Sumatra PDF is an ultra-lightweight and open-source portable application. The emphasis with Sumatra PDF is not on the number of features and the wide-ranging abilities of the application, but instead on speed. It loads almost instantly, renders pages extremely quickly, and thanks to a huge number of keyboard shortcuts, you can zip through nearly any document with ease.
Preview is Apple's free PDF viewer, built into the OS. Preview has quite a few features often only found in commercial PDF software, like the ability to drag and drop pages between documents, page extraction, encryption, and text annotation. In addition to viewing PDF files, Preview can display over two dozen other file formats making it quite a versatile little viewer.
Foxit is a polished Acrobat-alternative that, on top of cleanly displaying PDF files with a minimal interface, also has a host of handy features — all packed into a lightweight 6MB package. For instance, when filling out PDF forms, you can save your progress in the form and return later to finish filling it out. While both the free and the Pro version allow you to annotate text, insert graphics and drawings, and insert links, the free version adds a Foxit stamp on each page you annotate; the pro version removes the marking.
PDF-XChange boasts fast load times and basic functionality that outpaces the basic functionality of Adobe Reader. With PDF-XChange you can open and browse PDF documents, perform simple page annotations with drawings and text, and type outside of preset form boxes by using the PDF-XChange typewriter tool to place text wherever you want. Advanced features like reorganizing pages and text extraction are only available in with the Pro upgrade. PDF-Xchange is available as a portable application.