Goodies from the past week

It's back in harness at the desk, and here are a few goodies noted around the traps:
1. Create a Flash-based website. Most websites are constructed using a mark-up language called html, which while not as complicated as computer programming still takes a bit of learning, even for the basics. Wix aims to bypass that, and let you construct a free website just by dragging and dropping elements.
2. Web conferencing. More and more organisations are using web conferencing (sometimes called webinars) to keep their members in touch, especially if they are scattered geographically. How do you go about it? Dimdim is one answer.
3. Online collaboration is another way to get things done. Glasscubes is a new online system allowing you to do that free of charge.
4. Unstick "stuck" applications. One of the frustrations of computers is a programme that refuses to quit no matter how hard you try to close it down. Jessica Dolcourt at CNet has a solution.
5. Automatically refresh Firefox tabs. I would love some of my tabs to refresh automatically, for instance when I am bidding on TradeMe, or following breaking news on Stuff or the NZ Herald. Thankfully, there is a handy Firefox extension called ReloadEvery, which can automatically reload a browser tab at designated intervals.
6. The Greatest Windows Tips of All Time. "If you don't know every one of these 26 classic tricks, utilities, and shortcuts for XP, Vista, or Windows 7, you're not getting your money's worth out of Windows," writes Patrick Miller at PCWorld.
7. Compress PNG format photos. PNG (pronounced "Ping") is becoming an increasingly popular format for photos, largely because you can have transparent areas, which is a boon for graphic and web designers. But the file sizes are much bigger than JPG pics. Fortunately, tools are available to compress a PNG image without losing quality, and PNGGauntlet is an easy-to-use one. You can choose levels of compression,but be aware that the higher the compression, the slower the processing time. If you don't like PNGGauntlet, an alternative is PunyPNG.
8. Email attachment reminder. I constantly forget to attach a document when I email. So here's a great face-saver if you use Thunderbird - Attachment Reminder. It pops up when you hit the Send button if it thinks you have omitted to add your file to the email.
9. Bigger thumbnails in Google's image search. The default setting for Google image search produces pretty tiny thumbnails, but there's a very simple way to enlarge them. Hold down the Control key, rotate the scroll wheel away from you, and bingo! the thumbnails increase in size.

View two Word documents at once

Here's a helpful tip that lets you view two Word documents side-by-side without using the Document Compare function. "In other words, the documents aren’t compared and marked up as with Doc Compare—they are laid out side-by-side so you can do a visual check of them. And you can synchronize the scrolling of the documents too so that you don’t have to change focus or jump between each one as you work through them."