Are you already running Google Chrome OS?

There’s been a lot of discussion around the Web following Google’s announcement that it plans to introduce its own operating system, Google Chrome OS. It has thrown down a gauntlet to the three other main systems – Windows, Mac and Linux. Where Google plans to be completely different is that apart from a small system kernel (Linux-based), almost nothing will reside on your computer. Everything will be done in what has become known as “the cloud” – in other words, online. If the vision comes fully to pass, your computer will have no other software. All your documents will be stored online. No more buying Word, Excel, PhotoShop or anything else, or upgrading them at ridiculous prices every year or so. All those applications will be internet-based.
In fact, if you use Google Chrome and the web applications Google has already released, then you're effectively already running Google Chrome OS. Just maximize Google Chrome's window and imagine that each tab is an instance of an application. Gmail is your mail client, Google Calendar is the calendaring application, Google Docs is the office suite and the file explorer. Google Chrome's new tab page is the desktop, the dashboard that lists frequently used applications and lets you add widgets.
Besides those, there are hundreds if not thousands of other online applications, from image editing programs to media players (and not just YouTube).
By the time Chrome is released towards the end of next year, you will be so used to working in this way, you’ll barely notice the transition – or so they hope. The only two questions maybe left to ask: Do you trust the cloud to store all your critical data; and do you have adequate broadband at a reasonable price to cope with the traffic?

10 tips for Google image search

Google System Blog says Google Image Search could be used in many ways beyond the obvious. For instance:
If you want to know if a person is a man or a woman and the name doesn't help, do a search for the name.
It provides a better search for Flickr. Google uses information from other sites that link to Flickr photos, so you may find Google search better.
Find a new wallpaper for your desktop by restricting your search to large images. You can automate this using an application.
Find random personal pictures, using standard file names from digital cameras.
Type the name of a painter and you can take an art class.
Install a Greasemonkey script so you can view the original version of the image directly by clicking on the thumbnail. (Greasemonkey is a Firefox add-on that provides thousands of scripts to perform a vast range of functions not normally part of the browser experience.)

Quote of the Day

"Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor." ~ NASA in 1965

Finding recent documents

Because I easily forget where I have stored a document or file, I frequently use the My Recent Documents feature of Windows. You find this under the start menu, at the top of the RH column (although if you are using the Classic mode of XP, it is just called Documents, and found on the LH side). The last 15 documents you have worked on or opened - which includes photos, Excel spreadsheets, pdf files, etc - are listed, saving you the need to go hunting all round the computer. Personally, I find the maximum 15 rather limiting, specially when I am working with photographs. Reading the online help forums, there does appear to be a way to expand this in XP, but it involves altering the computer's Registry, and when I tried it I lost all items completely, so obviously I didn't implement the plan properly. There is a Vista sidebar gadget available which can increase the number of items My Recent Documents will list. Not having Vista, I can't try it, but you will find it here if you want to give it a go. Apparently the new Windows 7 operating system will give you even more control over this helpful feature.

Typing special characters

From time to time, I want to type special characters into my documents. It might be the pound symbol for British currency, or the Euro symbol. Most word processors have the ability to insert special characters - for instance, in Word 2007 if you go to the Insert tab, you will find the Symbol option on the far right. Select the font and then the character you want, and click Insert. That's a rather long-winded way of doing things, but okay if you have only an occasional need. If there are regular characters you use, you might find it helpful to write down the Unicode numbers and use those instead.
To find the number, click on the character and you will see a shortcut key listed at the bottom of the dialogue box. For instance, the code for the French e-acute is Alt+0233. To type this, first check the Number Lock on the numeric pad of your keyboard is on. Then press and hold down the Alt key while keying in 0233. When you release the Alt key, the character will display.
Some characters have a number followed by Alt+X. In this case, you type the number and then press the Alt and X keys simultaneously. Voila! Up pops the correct character. In Word, you can also assign special key combinations to do the same job - just be careful you don't choose a key combination that would block out a normal function in your programs (so avoid any combination using the Ctrl key, for instance).
The Unicode symbols cover a very wide variety of languages, including Arabic and other non-Roman scripts. I happen to be trying to learn Chinese. While it is possible to download a Chinese character set, I mostly use the Pinyin system of Roman letters invented by the Chinese to represent the sounds of the language. Chinese has four tones, which are noted by marks above the vowels. While I could use the method I have outlined above to write these, I have also discovered a great little program which does the job automatically. It is called PinyinInput, and a manual is also available here.

Digital painting

Most free paint programs have very limited options when it comes to creative work, such as painting and manipulation of images. An exception, which I have just come across, is TwistedBrush Digital Painting and Photo Editing. While the main version is a paid-for program, with thousands of brush styles and effects, a free version has 55 filters, 19 paper textures, 14 artsets (with up to 60 brushes per set), and 17 mediums. You can turn a photograph into a hand-made image, or start from scratch. The gallery at the website shows some amazing examples of what you can do with this program. Definitely worth a dabble.

Can you trust free anti-virus software?

The short (although qualified) answer is 'yes' in this very helpful PC World article. The mag puts a range of popular applications through their paces, and notes their good points and their limitations.
Another PC World article looks at yet another security threat, botnets. Thousands of computers in New Zealand have been taken over by these nasties; is yours one of them? Here is a way to tell, and what to do about it.

Disaster recovery

I once spilled a cup of well-sweetened coffee over a control panel at the radio station I worked (back in the days when 3ZB was 3ZB). It's fair to say I was not the technicians' flavour of the month for quite some time. But what do you do if something similar happens to your cellphone or computer? PC World provides a series of nine articles on how to help your gear recover from emergency scenarios.

Quote for the day

"The perfect computer has been developed. You just feed in your problems and they never come out again." ~ Al Goodman

Backing up email data

If you do one manual back-ups of your data files, one of the most difficult and yet most critical tasks is backing up your email system : address books, correspondence, attachments, etc, etc. But where do you find the files? Unfortunately, they can be located in a number of different places, depending on which version of Windows your use.
If you use Firefox and Thunderbird, some really helpful tips are in this article by Gizmo, at TechAlert. (I would really recommend printing this out.)
If you use Outlook, this article will explain the procedures for 2000, 2003 and 2007 versions, as well as for Outlook Express. I do like the nice people who write all this helpful stuff!

When your PC won't boot

It's the stuff to send chills down your spine. Your push the Go button and nothing happens. You check the power cables and other connections and still no go. So you rush to this very helpful article by Phil Spector for some advice. (Of course, you have printed it out beforehand, and saved a hard copy.)

Quote of the day

A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at
kick-boxing. ~ Elmo Philips

Converting audio formats

Let's imagine you want to take a track from a music CD and put it onto an mp3 player or email it a friend (leaving aside discussions about copyright for a moment). Dragging a file from the CD to your computer via Windows Explorer or some other file management utility doesn't work, because what you see in Explorer is a pointer to the music track, not the track itself. To extract the track, you need to "rip" the CD. A very good free tool to do this is CDex, which is quite intuitive, except for where you find the files on your computer after CDex has done its job. You will find them in the folder My Documents\My music\MP3\ and maybe further in at No artist\No title.
The resulting files are in the .wav format, which is an uncompressed format, and an average 3min song will probably be in the region of 35mb in size. To transfer them to an mp3 player, you have to convert the track to the mp3 format, which you can do with a free utility such as Free Mp3 Converter. This is a pretty intuitive piece of software, and you can happily run with the default settings, which will give you a file approximately one-tenth the size of the original. You can compress this even further, if you care to play around with the compression settings, which you will find under Output Configuration\Format Parameter. If you choose, for instance, a sampling frequency of 44 100 Hz and a bitrate of 96kHz you will at least halve the file size again, although with a small sacrifice in quality. Further reductions can get you down to email-size files, although the quality may be a bit dire. On tracks that are voice alone, however, this is not so noticeable.

Retrieving software keys...and more

If you have to reinstall your operating system, you will also need to reinstall all the software you rely on - and that means you need all the software keys. Which normally also means you need the original disks. If you don't have the disks, or you have lost the packaging, you could be in trouble. Fortunately, riding to the rescue is a very helpful free utility called Belarc Advisor. When you run Belarc, it scans your complete system and gives you back (via a web page) an amazing amount of information about your computer. Info includes motherboard type, CPU speed, drive space, Microsoft hotfixes, operating system revision, and Web browser vulnerabilities, as well as third-party software installs. Included in that is a list of keys for all your programs. This is obviously best done before your computer develops problems - so go on, download it now and run a check. You'll be so pleased you did. And then when the technician whom you are paying megabucks to fix your computer, or the man in Malaysia on the software helpdesk, asks the sort of questions that normally make you go hot and cold all over, you'll have the answers.

Spell checking using your browser

More and more of our work is moving from the desktop to online. Online word processors are gaining traction; if you use gmail you type all your correspondence online; this blog is written completely online. So what do we do about spell checking, now that we don't have Word to hold our hand? Thankfully, Firefox comes with a built-in spell checker which is automatically turned on by default. The checker underlines any suspect words in red, and when you right click on that word, you get suggestions for correct spelling, and the option of adding that word to the program's dictionary, just as you would in Word. You can also download other language dictionaries (there are currently more than 70 available). Internet Explorer doesn't have the checker built-in, but a good add-on called IESpell is available for download.

Co-ordinating bookmarks

If you use more than one browser, more than one computer, or more than one operating system, the free Xmarks browser add-on is probably the best thing since sliced bread. (By the way, what was the best thing before sliced bread?) Although it does a lot of nifty things, at its most basic level Xmarks (formerly known as Foxmarks) synchronizes your bookmarks among all your browsers, no matter what computer they're on or what operating system the machines use. For example, I use Firefox and Internet Explorer on my main Windows computer. As you might imagine, trying to keep all of the bookmarks (or Favorites in IE land) synchronized is a tough task - but that's what Xmarks does. You can find versions for Firefox and Internet Explorer on Windows, for Firefox on Linux, and for Firefox and Safari on the Mac. Simply run Xmarks along with your browser, and it synchronizes not just your bookmarks but also your passwords, so you can log in to your favorite sites from any browser you use. Other features include the ability to get detailed information about any site you visit.

The Swiss army knife of image editors

PhotoScape has to be the Swiss army knife of the photo processing world. This free program is becoming a favourite, and I can understand why. It packs in a surprising number of features, at least one of which is not even in PhotoShop (leastways, not the version of PhotoShop that I have). It gives you:
1. A fairly standard viewer (probably its weakest feature).
2. An Editor, where you can apply a multitude of adjustments and effects to your photos. There is everything from one click auto-levels and contrast to advanced color curves, complete with the ability to load and save presets. There are many color and tone adjustments and a number of filter effects from the practical (noise reduction) to fun (cartoon). You can also spruce up your photos with a variety of fun and funky frames. You can add text, shapes, etc. The editor also offers a flexible crop tool with a circular crop option.
3. Batch Editor, you can apply almost all the functions available in the editor to multiple files at once.
4. A multi-photo layout tool with over 100 choices of grid layouts to chose from. Simply drag and drop your photos into the boxes to create a quick collage.
6. AniGif: create a frame-based animation from multiple photos.
7. Splitter: cut your photo into multiple images based on a grid.
8. Screen Capture: take an image of your full desktop, a window, or a region of your screen.
9. Color Picker: sample colors from anywhere on your screen.
10. Raw Converter: simple converter for saving camera RAW files as JPEGs.
11. Rename: batch edit file names with custom text, date, time, serial numbers.
PhotoScape is free for non-commercial use and runs on Windows 98/Me/NT/2000/XP/Vista. The online help contains several videos to demonstrate the program features.

Top 100 virus websites

The NZ Herald today has a list of the top 100 websites around the world that are guaranteed to infect your computer. You don't have to even download anything from them. Simply visiting will dump a load of nasties onto your system, assuming you have no protection. I suspect that none on the list are likely to be visited by you, but one or two have names that I can see could easily trap people into having a look.

More scroll wheel uses

I've posted before how the scroll wheel on your mouse can be used to open browser links in a new tab, to scroll up and down Word, Excell or PowerPoint pages, or in conjunction with the Control key can zoom in and out of Word, PDF files, etc. Here's another function, perhaps slightly less useful - if you place your cursor on the Ribbon bar in Word or other Microsoft 2007 software, using the wheel will scroll across the various tabs (Home, Insert, View, etc).

Recovering deleted photos

Uh oh! You've deleted some photos from your digital camera and now realise you want them back. Thankfully, all is not lost. Most likely, when your camera is hooked up to your computer by a USB or Firewire cable, it will show up as another drive when you go to My Computer. If it does, you can use a software undelete program to read the files on the camera's memory card, and retrieve the pics. For free software to do the job, I would suggest Glary Undelete, or Recuva.

Sometimes the week gangs up...

I had intended to put up a post today, but ran out of time. And I'm going to be out of town for the next three days. See you Friday, hopefully.

iGoogle

I try to have a life outside computers (see post below), which means that I frequently come across things which have been around a long time but just did not cross my path. iGoogle is one of those. iGoogle (formerly Google Personalized Homepage) lets you create a personalized homepage that contains a Google search box at the top, and your choice of any number of gadgets below. It's a big step away from the normally very spartan Google homepage. Gadgets come in lots of different forms and provide access to activities and information from all across the web. For instance, you can view your latest Gmail messages, read headlines from Google News and other news sources, display YouTube videos, store bookmarks for quick access to favourite sites from any computer. In other words, a portal just like Yahoo. Well, not quite like Yahoo - there are way more funky gadgets. Recently iGoogle released a "chat" box at the side of the home page that allows Gmail users to chat from their homepage without going to gmail.com, and a whole lot more "social gadgets" are about to be released, although the roll-out is in the US first and may take a while to get to this side of the world.

Hey ho for a life on the ocean wave

I came the realisation recently that too many of my leisure activities involve computers. So instead of coming away relaxed, they can add to my stress. And while I have a major home landscaping project on the go and coach springboard diving (occasionally competing), sometimes they seem more like work than leisure = more stress. So I have decided to try and build a small sailing dinghy. I love sailing, but only get the opportunity about once a year if I'm lucky, and have always wanted a boat of my own (probably stems from jealousy that when I was a kid my cousin had one but I didn't). I found a book titled Ultrasimple Boat Building in the Christchurch library, and this does a wonderful job of demystifying the whole affair. So tomorrow I'm off to the DIY to hunt materials, and then in to it. Probably appropriate considering the wet forecast for the weekend. I'll keep you posted from time to time.

Including Service Packs in an XP back-up disk

If you're running Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or even Service Pack 3, what happens if you have to perform a system recovery using your original XP CD? It's not easy. The old CD doesn't have all the patches and updates you've downloaded over the years. It could take hours or even days to redownload and reinstall all that extra stuff, during which time your PC is more vulnerable to viruses and outside attacks. (A lot of those patches tackle security issues.)You do have options, though. For example, you can download the Microsoft Service Packs as standalone installers. Another solution is slipstreaming.
Slipstreaming is the process of combining your existing Windows XP CD and the latest Service Pack into a new CD. When you're done, you'll be able to install the whole OS. It is easier to accomplish than you might think, provided you've got your original CD and the standalone Service Pack. For how-to details, check out Lincoln Spector's "Slipstreaming Service Pack 2 on an Old Windows XP CD". Can you do likewise with Vista? Digital Inspiration has instructions on slipstreaming Vista with SP1 (you'll need a DVD for that), and it will probably also work with SP2.

New Google search engine

Search engine developments are coming thick and fast at the moment. Recently, Microsoft launched Bing, and has also announced it is joining with Yahoo. Now only months after a major revamp of its engine, Google has posted a preview of yet another new version. Previews of the new engine are only available at a separate address at the moment. It looks the same as the current one but ranks results differently, which could affect businesses who rely on Google results to drive traffic. In a blog posting late Monday, Google says the new engine, code-named "Caffeine," will be faster, more accurate and more comprehensive.

Help make Microsoft Office better

Two Microsoft employees have created an online suggestion box where users can submit feature or fix requests for the Office suite of programs. MakeOfficeBetter.com, an unsanctioned site, was created by Steve Zaske, a planner on the Office development team, and Luke Foust, a Microsoft developer in the test group. "If you've got a new feature idea or an idea on how to improve Microsoft Office, please share it here," said Zaske and Foust in a debut message on the site. "[And] vote on other ideas you agree with. Through the magic of crowd-sourcing, the best ideas should rise to the top." Zaske and Foust acknowledged MakeOfficeBetter was not an official company effort, but said they would "do our best to get the ideas posted here in front of the right people within the Office development team."
My first suggestion would be to get back to basics and chop out all the features that scarcely anyone uses, so Word becomes less of a memory hog. My next would be a desperate plea to incorporate paragraph style sheets in PowerPoint - talk about antiquated!

Improving your Windows experience

I have still not switched to the Vista operating system, and am not likely to do so. So while I quite like XP (while drooling for a Mac), it has its limitations. For instance, I will believe Windows is as good as a Mac when you can have wild characters (such as ? and &) in file titles, and when you can colour a folder or the text of a file name without going to a 3rd party extension. However, there are millions of little applications which can improve the Windows experience - your biggest problem is sorting out the wheat from the chaff. To help you out, I have just come across an excellent list of 43 Windows enhancements, and I certainly intend to try out a couple of these.

Murphy's Law extended

Murphy ("If anything can go wrong...") is extending his list of laws by the mile. Here's a new set just for computers and associated technology.

Enlarging photos

Here's a tool I've been waiting a long time for. If you work with images you will have doubtless seen situations where you would have liked to use a larger size image than what you had but could not do so because the image quality would degrade too much on enlargement (e.g. pixellization/artifacts/loss of detail). SmillaEnlarger is a free, open source program that enlarges/magnifies images while keeping up the quality. This standalone software uses a number of filters that are designed to remove some of the typical artifacts generated by the enlarging process and “fill in” image information to achieve a much higher quality image than image enlargement algorithms typically employed in most applications. Photoshop and Irfanview - along with just about every imaging program - enlarges images, of course, and of those two I prefer Irfanview's results by a small margin. But one of the drawbacks with both is they are not interactive, and you can't adjust the results, which is a big plus with SmillaEnlarger.

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.

Another arrow in your image-editing quiver

I've extolled the virtues of Irfanview for photo editing several times, and use it regularly myself. But it does have real limitations, particularly in its colour-correcting abilities. So I was pleased to come across what we might call a companion program, Fotografix, which makes up for much of what Irfanview lacks. The first big virtue of Fotografix is that it is tiny, and it runs without needing to be installed, so you can carry it on a memory stick. Although it's a no-frills program, it has many of the functions of PhotoShop, such as brush shapes, layers and masking. Its interface is pretty basic, but used in conjunction with Irfanview, I would say the pair would do 90 percent of your normal imaging tasks, and at a very reasonably price (like, free).

When Windows goes bad

Most of the time we don't want to be bothered with the hassle of understanding what goes on under the bonnet of our computer. Like cars, they should run with the minimum of fuss and the occasional check of tyres, oil and water. Sadly, there are times when we have to delve into the innards - or else pay a technician megabucks. Here are a couple of helpful articles from PC World. I suggest you bookmark them for that rainy day when needed, or even print them out and put in a handy file.
What to do when Windows gets really messed up
Repair or reinstall your Windows PC

Will video games and daily life merge?

My eldest son - he with an xbox - lives in a video gaming world I barely know exists. The last couple of weeks he has been introducing me to some of the offerings, such as Guitar Hero and Fable. The graphics, virtual reality world development and storyline of Fable were an eye-opener for me. The coding underlying it must be phenomenal. I had not realised to what degree some of these games have developed. But then last night he showed me a YouTube video of Project Natal, which steps the whole video interactive world into a totally new dimension. This stuff is quite mind-blowing. This video was a presentation by a Microsoft engineer to a small select group, but by the looks of it may not be too far off making an entry into the average living room. But the developers are thinking way beyond gaming: they believe the technology will change daily life the same way that the internet changed it. Here's a look at other potential uses of the technology.

How to salvage a wet gadget

Ever spilt a cup of coffee over your keyboard? I went even better (worse) once, when working as a radio journalist. I tipped a full cup of coffee over a studio control panel. Needless to say, I was extremely unpopular with the technicians. A printing firm I worked for banned open cups at the desk - we were allowed only sipper cups with lids. Any drink containing sugar is going to do greater nasties to your appliances. But no matter what the dunking you give your gadget - whether it be keyboard, ipod or cell phone - there are reasonable possibilities of salvaging it. This PC World video has some practical suggestions.

DIY heaven

I have just found DIY heaven! At Instructables, you can find ideas and plans to make just about anything you could possibly imagine, and thousands of things you would not have imagined. It particularly specialises in finding new uses for old objects lying around the house. How about a tiny transparent kite from broom bristles, earphones to listen to your mp3 player in the shower, or a medieval trebuchet made from cardboard?

YouTube expert tips

"YouTube is a great place to watch the funny viral video du jour." writes Adam Ash at PC World. "But it can be a lot more than that. If you love preparing and sharing your own video creations, for instance, YouTube has lots of tips and tools to help you do it with ease. Even if you just want to learn to find and watch groups of videos with minimal hassle, YouTube has what you need." Adam has compiled a list of helpful tips for YouTube "superusers."

Free daily software

There are many websites where you can find free software. Many of the applications are wonderful value for money (I have raved about some of them before). In other cases, I can see why they are free - no-one in the their right mind would pay for them.
Needless to say, and quite rightly, the majority of the computer world's best software is only available for a price. However, there are some websites where you can obtain legal, free copies of applications you would otherwise pay for. One such that I monitor daily is giveawayoftheday. The deal is that one application per day is offered, and you have just 24 hours to install it and download an unlocking code; after that, it is no longer free. I have picked up a few very good bargains here; the downside is that if/when I reinstall my operating system or buy a new computer, I will lose access to these programs, as the code will no longer work (it also stops you sharing the files with another person). New items are entered each day about 7pm NZ time.
Daily Freeware is a similar service, except the offerings are not fresh daily. However, there have been some very good packages on offer over the past month.
A last mention to LastDownload software archive. This is different from the others in making all titles available all the time. You can download over 30,000 software titles, from audio/video converters to CRM and accounting software, and there are applications here I have not seen anywhere else.
Happy hunting!

Portable applications

Most computer technicians use USB flash drives to store useful diagnostic/cleaning/maintenance tools and utilities, but what about the average home user? Portable applications (or portable apps) are computer programs that can be stored on and run from a flash drive, mp3 player, CD, or whatever without having to be installed onto the host computer. What are the advantages of portable applications? Apart from the obvious, that the device on which they reside can be moved from computer to computer they save valuable hard drive space, do not create any registry entries or store files on the host machine, so no uninstall is necessary; removal is simply a matter of deleting any associated files from the portable device. All kinds of portable applications are available: browsers, media players, email clients, security products, office components and lots of lovely tools and utilities. Portable applications will generally download in a zip package which can then be unpacked to the flash drive. Or you can download to the computer and then move the file onto the flash drive. Quite a few sites are dedicated to listing free portable apps, for example App-Stick, and PortableApps.com.

Video editors - you get what you pay for

Since I splashed out on a home video camera a year or two back, I have spent a lot of time exploring editing programs, after upgrading my computer to provide more grunt. At the time, I bought Adobe Premiere Elements, which is mid-way between a low-end program such as MovieMaker (Windows) and iMovie (Mac) and the fully professional programs. Mid-range software of this kind is sometimes called "prosumer". Premiere Elements has most features you would need to produce a very respectable end product, although it has one or two funny quirks that frustrate me. But I wondered whether there were any free programs that could do a bit better than MovieMaker or iMovie. The particular limitation of these two is they only allow one video track (although the Vista version of MovieMaker has expanded that) which renders it impossible to do many standard effects.
After a long search, I can tell you one thing for sure - you get what you pay for, in this field at least. After testing close to a dozen free programs, I found only two that were better than what I already had.
TrakAxPC is a well designed piece of software, whose best feature is the ability to match music with picture. It shows you each bar, so you can change photos on the beat. Sadly, it still allows only one video track, but it is a nice hybrid between video editor and music sequencer.
Photostage slideshow is another beautifully designed program that specialises in making slideshows of still photographs. It has a particularly good pan and zoom control that is just so easy to use. Beats anything else I have seen.
Of the rest - in a word, don't waste your time. Here are some of my conclusions:
Jahshaka: An open-source project, which appears to be still very much under development. The interface looks promising, but the program kept crashing every time I tried to do anything.
t@b ZweiStein: This used to be called just ZweiStein, but has some fancy new marketing. Unfortunately, despite getting good reviews all over the place, the interface is totally inscrutable, and despite a fair amount of experience using video editors, I could not figure out how to use it. The help files were also hopeless.
SuperDVD creator - An attractive interface, but the free version offers nothing more than MovieMaker or iMovie.
SuperDVD Video Maker - Same comments as above.
Here is a very full list of video editors, both free and commercial. Surprisingly, it leaves off the main choice of professionals, the Mac-based Final Cut Pro.

EndItAll before you end it all

We've all got to that stage with Windows where we feel like ending it all (or buying a Mac). As you sit in front of your PC with a gun to the screen, you might first like to try this free program, though. EndItAll is a Windows process killer than attempts to rid your system of those files that have either frozen your system or simply refuse to budge. However, unlike Windows very basic process manager, it also indicates what programs each process relates to. The program will not close everything - it will stop short of closing anything essential, so it's fairly idiot proof. The interface is simple and if you need to suddenly free up some RAM, it's a much better option and vastly more powerful.

Repairing Word documents

If you've been working on a Word document for a long time, it's a nightmare when it suddenly corrupts or won't open. The reasons for this are numerous and usually it's not your fault. If you've ever received any of the following messages then you'll know what I'm talking about: "The document name or path is not valid..."; "Word cannot open the document...."; "Word cannot open the document: user does not have access privileges."; ...and so on. Fortunately, a number of programs are available that attempt to repair a document so you can at least extract the main body of text. They do this with varying degrees of success, but two to try are Kernel for Word, and Word-Repair. The latter is free, while the first has a free evaluation version.

Dreamweaver to PDF

A while ago I was stumped by the question of how to convert web pages authored in Dreamweaver to pdf files. This is probably not on the horizon of most of you, however for the record there is a simple answer. Microsoft Word opens html documents happily, and for the most part renders them fairly faithfully, although it sometimes struggles with images used as a background in a table. It is a simple matter then to convert the Word document to a pdf.

Accessing Favourites and Bookmarks

I have collected thousands of website addresses over the years, storing them as either Favourites (Internet Explorer) or Bookmarks (Firefox). Being a tidy Kiwi, I have created a fairly extensive filing system, creating a folder for each area of interest, and storing the Bookmarks in the appropriate folder. I drag and drop folders (and items within folders) to order them according to frequency of use. So far, so good. The problem is that when I use a Bookmarks folder down the bottom of the pile, I face a long scroll to get to the bottom, and often have to repeat that long scroll each time I want to call up a new website. There are two solutions to the problem. IE has a Favourites Bar and Firefox a Bookmarks Toolbar, to which you can drag folders for easy access (you reach both through the browser's View menu). Alternatively, you can have a sidebar at the left-hand side of your screen, similar to the History sidebar, which is easily scrollable and can be easily shown or removed. The IE sidebar is found at View/Explorer Bars/Favourites, and the Firefox version at View/Sidebar/Bookmarks. Incidentally, a Firefox add-on called FEBE can automatically back up all your Bookmarks (I back up weekly, because I would hate to lose all those years of work collecting).

Using email as to-do list

Have you ever thought of using your email program as a to-do list? I am constantly thinking of important things needing to be done when I am away from my work desk, but I am getting to that stage in life where if I don't write something down it is as quickly forgotten again. I always carry a small pocket diary and jot essential things into that, but if I am at home, I send myself an email with a reminder, and then it's waiting for me when I get to work. It saves losing scraps of paper, or remembering to look at them. Even at work, I will email myself a reminder of some important task. Because I monitor my emails numerous times through the day, the reminder is constantly there in front of me, and it cuts down the clutter on my desk.
Another solution is electronic post-it notes. A freeware example is Simple Sticky Notes. Double-click the program's icon in your system tray, and it creates a note for you. Type in what you want to remember, and you're done. You can drag the note to any spot on your desktop. There are more complex paid programs, which for instance can post notes inside a Word document or in your web browser, but this one is straightforward and simple to use.

When your PC won't boot

There's nothing to make the blood run cold in your veins like a PC that won't boot - and Murphy's Law ensures that it happens at the most critical time. It happened to me a couple of weeks ago. Fortunately, I had done a major back-up of data a short time previously, so was not rendered a total gibbering wreck on the spot. When I got the machine back from the repair shop, it turned out that a cable from the DVD player was shorting on the case - not something I would immediately have thought of. A simple problem, but it did set me back $90 for the tech's time.
Before you run to the shop, there are quite a few things you can do yourself if your PC won't start. This PC World article by Lincoln Spector gives you a good run-down in simple language. My only comment is that I am surprised he does not recommend pressing the F8 key on start-up (to start the computer in Safe Mode) as a first restort. In the past I have found that effective in at least 50% of cases.

Accessing Access

When I bought Microsoft Office 2000, one of the applications bundled with it was a database program, Access, with which I compiled a quite substantial contacts database. Recently I upgraded to Office 2007, and only after installing it (and deleting Office 2000) did I realise that Access is no longer included in the package, meaning I couldn't access Access. What to do? I tried several options, none of them perfect.
1) Fortunately I still had the old Office 2000 disks, so I reinstalled the suite. I tried to install just Access, but it insisted on installing the whole shebang. At least I can open the database again, but I don't want or need all the other old applications. Neither can I find a way of uninstalling everything except Access.
2) However, once in the database, I can export the contents to a comma-separated file which most other databases and spreadsheets will read, or to an Excel file.
3) I also tried simply opening the database in Excel. It opens okay, but Excel did a rather nasty job of re-ordering all the columns, so they bore almost no resemblance to the way I had constructed the database. I can re-order the columns in Excel, but it's going to be a bit of a cumbersome business (sigh!).
4) There is a big range of 3rd party software which can convert Access files to other formats. I tried several freeware ones, but none gave me any better results than the above. I hope the paid-for versions are better behaved.

Google operating system announced

The internet is abuzz with the announcement by Google that it will be releasing its own operating system (OS) next year, firstly for Netbooks and later for other PCs. Some say that this pitches Google head-on with Microsoft, which massively dominates the OS market (with Apple and Linux distant second and third respectively). The new OS will be called Google Chrome OS, in line with the release a few months ago of their Chrome browser, and the company claims it will be focused on speed and security.
The announcement raises more questions than answers. It is unlikely that those who write software will want to rewrite their programs for yet another system, and anyway, Google is pushing hard for a world in which all applications are internet-based, and nothing resides on your home computer except the operating system. But while the number and variety of internet-based applications is exploding, are we ready for a world where all your confidential data is accessible to someone else (no matter what they say about online security)? And while that might work for people who have cheap and high-quality broadband, what about the vast majority whose broadband is at best patchy and expensive, or who can't even get adequate dial-up?
Some articles to help you sift through the issues: FAQ re Google Chrome; Five reasons Google Chrome will succeed; Five reasons Google Chrome will fail.

Support your local camera

One of the tricks to taking good photographs is supporting your camera well. Professionals use tripods, but they can be clumsy. Here are two simple ideas that slip in your pocket.
1. Make up a string as long as the distance from your eye to your foot. Put a loop in one end large enough to slip your foot into, and at the other end attach a screw that can fit into the bottom of your camera. Pull the string taut and you have a simple "monopod"-like brace which helps to reduce camera shake.
2. Make (or buy) a camera bean bag. This allows you to rest the camera on just about any surface, sloping or uneven. Here are some simple instructions, and here is a pic of a commercial version in action.

New critical vulnerability in Internet Explorer

You'd think that the world's largest and richest software company could write software that doesn't currently need to patch "critical flaws"? Wrong. There is even an event called "Microsoft Tuesday" when they release the month's new batches of patches. But they've excelled themselves this time: Microsoft has taken the rare step of warning about a serious security flaw it hasn't fixed yet. The vulnerability affects Internet Explorer users whose computers run Windows XP or Windows Server 2003. It can allow hackers to remotely take control of victims' machines. The victims don't need to do anything to get infected, just visit a website that's been hacked. Security experts say criminals have been attacking the vulnerability for nearly a week. Thousands of sites have been hacked to serve up malicious software that exploits the vulnerability. People are drawn to these sites by clicking a link in spam e-mail. The so-called "zero day" vulnerability affects a part of software used to play video. The problem arises from the way the software interacts with Internet Explorer, which opens a hole for hackers to tunnel into. Microsoft urges vulnerable users to disable the problematic part of its software, which can be done from Microsoft's website, while the company works on a "patch" - or software fix - for the problem.
On the subject of browsers, I should note that Firefox has just released version 3.5, which has some important new features, and is supposed to load faster.

Google squared

Google is constantly pushing out in new directions. It takes some dedicated watchers to even vaguely keep up with its constant developers - but they're out there, like here, and here... (be warned, though, these are serious geeks, who speak a rarified language I can barely fathom). Onward, however...
One of the next frontiers of search is taking all the unstructured data spread helter-skelter across the Web and treating it like it's sitting in a nice, structured database. It is easier to get answers out of a database where everything is neatly labeled, stamped, and categorised. As the sheer volume of stuff on the Web keeps growing, keyword search keeps getting closer to its breaking point. Adding structure to the Web is one way to make sense of all that data, and Google is starting the tackle the problem with a Google Labs project called Google Squared. Google Squared extracts data from Web pages and presents them in search results as squares in an online spreadsheet. It's hard to explain, but clicking on a few of the front page suggestions will quickly give you the idea.

Recycling old electronic equipment

Old computers, TVs and cellphones comprise one of the fastest growing waste streams around the world. Rapid technological advances mean that the average computer has a lifespan of less than 5 years. Trouble is, computers contain an array of substances such as lead, mercury, cadmium, hexavalent chromium or brominated flame retardants, which are all harmful to humans and damaging to the environment. In New Zealand, most redundant electronic equipment is being landfilled. Some small moves are being made to combat this. At a local level, some individuals and firms are making big efforts to extend the usable life of equipment. Organisations such as The Ark Recycling, and RCN in Auckland as well as Remarkit Solutions in Wellington will take old computers for refurbishment and reuse in schools and charitable organisations. There will probably be a small charge for dropping stuff off to them. Dell has initiated a recycling program in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. Re-usable computers and Tvs can be dropped at any of the Christchurch rubbish transfer stations or the Big Shed. Computer Recycling, operating principally in Auckland says it will dispose free of charge all computers, printers, monitors & telephone equipment. If there is any life left in the equipment, many volunteer organisations would be delighted to take it over, and of course you can also try to sell the old gear on TradeMe - it's amazing what prices some stuff that you thought you couldn't give away will fetch.

Wiping confidential data when you sell your PC

If you are selling or otherwise disposing of an old PC, have you removed all the critical/confidential data? Just dumping all the files in the Recycle bin/trash can and deleting them is no where near adequate. The cheapest data recovery program can get those files back. They can even get files off a freshly-formatted hard drive. So if you want to be absolutely certain that your old PC's new owner won't get your private information, you need to wipe the sensitive files by overwriting them with new 1s and 0s. Here's some tips on what to do, courtesy of PC World.

Viral videos

Viral videos are those YouTube-type videos that people can't resist sending to each other. For instance, the Susan Boyle audition on Britain's Got Talent has registered nearly 70-million hits so far, and rising. But apart from the occasional ones that the media pick up on, how do you find these treasures? A website called butterscotch.com has done some of the hard work for you. They have a regular blog picking out some of the best.
And to give you a bit of light relief, here are some links to a few of the best that I have come across:
Matrix-style table tennis
Bob Newhart - "stop it"
The Two Ronnies Mastermind
Russian portable toilet practical joke
Parkour - free running

Preventing embarrassing emails

"Sometimes I send messages I shouldn't send," writes Gmail engineer John Perlow. "Like the time I told that girl I had a crush on her over text message. Or the time I sent that late night email to my ex-girlfriend that we should get back together. Gmail can't always prevent you from sending messages you might later regret, but today we're launching a new Labs feature I wrote called Mail Goggles which may help. When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you're really sure you want to send that late night Friday email. And what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you're in the right state of mind?"

Enlarging thumbnails

Some time ago I posted about ways to change the views of your Windows folders. I mostly use the "Details" option, because I need such information as the date a file was created, and its size. However, I switch to thumbnails for a quick scan of photographs. Only trouble is, the thumbnails are really too small. There is no native method in Windows to enlarge them, but there is a handy add-on provided free by Microsoft, called TweakUI (one of a number of handy little applications which come under the banner Microsoft Power Toys and which can perform a variety of changes to how XP works on your machine. This link is for the XP version, by the way). After you download TweakUI, you need to install it (double click on the icon). This, however, does not automatically start the program, and it manages to hide itself quite well, not putting a program icon on your desktop. I suggest go to Start menu/Programs/Microsoft Power Toys/ and right-click on TweakUI. You can then drag a copy of the icon to your desktop, from where you can launch the application. When the application is running, you will see a list of items on the LH side - 4th down is "Explorer". Click on the + sign, and then choose Thumbnails. Now you can choose how large you want them to be. Note: Windows stores thumbnail information in its memory cache, so the larger the icons, the more memory the system will require, but you can choose lower resolution to offset this. Also, if you have viewed thumbnails previously in a window, they will not automatically adopt the new size. You can force this, though. Go to the top menu in a folder window, choose Tools/Folder options/View and then check "Do not cache thumbnails". Click on "Reset all folders", and bingo.
Incidentally, you can have a full-size slideshow of all or selected photos in a folder, by right-clicking on them, and then choosing "Preview", which brings up the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer. This is another feature I use a lot, as it's faster than launching most other viewing programs.

Highlight web page passages

Ever wish you could take a yellow highlighter to a Web page - for instance, a particularly noteworthy passage in a really witty or helpful blog post - so you could easily retrieve the information later on? That's the idea behind WebNotes, which adds a virtual highlighter and sticky-notes to your browsing experience. The service was designed to help people like students and researchers to mark up Web pages the way they'd mark up books or journals - but obviously it's useful for anyone who wants to record and organize information for future use. Find out more on how to use it here. (PS: Another great free service.)

Stumble on some great websites

Ever get the feeling you're missing out on some great websites? Often, the best discoveries come from random hopping around the web. Now there's a website devoted to helping you find those undiscovered treasures. It's called StumbleUpon. Clicking on the Stumble! button in the site's upper-left corner will take you to a random page. If you prefer a bit more targeted randomisation, you can select within a range of preferred topics, and you can share recommendations with friends.

Five free system restore tools

If your computer suffers a major catastrophe, your best insurance against a heart attack is having previously backed up all your essential data. Even better, if you have backed up your entire disk. That's a lot easier to say than to do, of course. But Lifehacker offers five free tools to help you avoid disaster. I recently bought a 160Gb external hard drive for $100, specifically for back-ups. I figured it was a lot cheaper than paying a computer company 2-3 times that amount or more to recover my data in the face of a meltdown. So far I have been doing the back-ups manually, so now it's time to get down and learn how to actually use an appropriate back-up software package.

9 great uses for a binder clip

Binder clips are the underdog of the office supply world. The even humbler paper clip gets more attention - and inventiveness. So Lifehacker redresses the balance with nine great uses for a binder clip (apart from holding together a bundle of papers - that's too obvious). How about: emergency cuff links, keeping the toothpaste tube squeezed, or an i-phone dock?

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.

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?

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.

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.)

Placing pics in Word

Word is not the easiest tool when it comes to designing pages. Some things that are simple operations in any page layout program are a nightmare to try and do in Word. Fortunately, one operation that has been improved in Word 2007 is the handling of images. If you want to place a photograph, for instance, in a Word document, from the Insert menu click on "Picture", and then choose from the dialogue box that opens. When you okay the choice, Word automatically inserts it wherever you had your text cursor in the document, and if the cursor is in the middle of a line, it will break the text at that point to accommodate the image. The result is something akin to a skyscraper in a treeless landscape. But there is much you can do to improve things. When the image is imported, you will see a dotted blue line around it, which means it is selected. And the menu bar will have changed to Format. One of the most important options there is Text Wrapping, and you have many possibilities to choose from. For simple work, I suggest "Square", which allows you to drag the image around anywhere on the page, and the text will wrap around it. If you click and drag on a corner of the image, you can resize it. I also suggest playing around with the Edit Wrap Points and More Layout Options, which give a lot more control over how the image the text interact with each other.
Embedded images: One word of caution - when Word imports an image, by default it embeds it in the document. This means that all the image information is stored within the document. It has the advantage that when you send the document to another person, you don't need to send the image as well. The disadantage is that if you try to extract and save the image as a separate item, there is a massive loss of quality. And the file size of the Word document increases by the size of the image - so it takes only a few images to quickly bloat the size of the Word document to massive amounts, certainly more than most email systems will comfortably handle. There are some alternatives, which Microsoft cleverly hides until you click on a tiny triangle next to the "Insert" button at the bottom right of the dialogue box when you choose a picture to insert. Here is some help on what the alternatives mean.

Amazing online photo editing tool

I have just come across a website called Aviary. Aviary makes web-based image editing tools, which allow you to do Photoshop-type work on an image just using your internet browser. Some of the options they offer are jaw-droppingly good, and way ahead of even Photoshop. The effects editor in particular is outstanding. If you are daunted by the idea of coming to grips with such complexity, they have done their best to make the process very intuitive, and a series of well-designed video tutorials walk you through everything you need to know. The company also recently launched a Firefox add-on that lets you right-click on any image in your web browser to edit it with Aviary. And all this for free!!! I don't know how they do it, but this site is going straight into my Favourites. In addition, it's believed that Aviary will soon be launching a suite of online audio production tools. I can't wait.

Recover deleted files

It's the stuff to rival your worst nightmares. You send a file to the Recycle/Trash bin, empty the bin, and suddenly realise you have just deleted a vital document. Fortunately, help is at hand. There are numerous programs that can recover these files, and most often they work very well. The reason they can recover files is because a deleted file is not actually wiped from your computer's hard drive immediately. All you have done is give the computer permission to use that space when it runs out of room elsewhere. So if you have not done any work in the meantime, the chances are probably better than 99% you can get the file back. The caveat is that you should attempt recovery as soon as you realise your mistake. Recuva, a free utility, offers to restore files emptied from the Recycle bin as well as images and other files that have been deleted by user error from digital camera memory cards or MP3 players. "It will even bring back files that have been deleted by bugs, crashes and viruses!"
Incidentally, if you have merely sent a file to Recycle/Trash and not emptied the bin, you don't need a recovery utility at all. Open the bin, locate and select the file, then right-click and choose "restore". That will return the file to the place from whence it came.

Archiving web pages

One of the advantages of Internet Explorer is its ability to save/archive a web page as a single archive file (to which it gives the extension .mht), a feature it has had from the early days. To do this, you simply choose File/Save As, and then the option "Web archive, single file". You can view the archived pages at any time, not necessarily when connected to the internet. If you do much research work on the internet, this archive format is a real boon.
Firefox does not have this feature built in - you get only the options to save a page as a text file (with images missing), or as a "Web page, complete". If you choose the latter, images and other bits and pieces from the page are stored in a new folder the browser automatically creates. However, an archive add-on is available which does the same job as Internet Explorer, and which appears to be able to store multiple pages in the same archive (I haven't tried this latter feature yet).

If Bill Gates ran the auto industry

The following has been going the rounds for years, but it's worth recycling. (PS: It's a joke that has taken on the quality of urban myth, as the folk at Snopes explain.)
At a recent computer expo (COMDEX) Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated, "If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry as, we would all be driving 25.00 dollars cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon." In response to Bill's comments, General Motors issued a press release stating: If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:
1. For no reason whatsoever, your cash would crash twice a day.
2. Every time they repainted the lines on the road, you would have to buy a new car.
3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull over to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue.4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to restart the engine.
5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the syun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive, but would run on only five percent of the roads.
6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single "This car has performed An Illegal Operation."
7. The airbag system would ask "Are you sure" before deploying.
8. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed ahold of the radio attenna.
9. Every time a new car was introduced, car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
10. You'd have to press the "Start" button to turn on the engine.
On the theme of Microsoft jokes, this is my second favourite:
Q: How many Microsoft technicians does it take to change a light bulb?
A: None. They redefine darkness as the industry standard.

Converting web documents to pdf

A couple of weeks ago I was searching for a way to turn web documents I had authored in Dreamweaver into pdf files. The answer is actually fairly simple.
Microsoft Word can open any web (html) document. The results may not display exactly as in the original, but a little tweaking will probably fix that. Then it is a simple matter to turn the Word document into a pdf, using the "Save As..." command. You will need to install the pdf add-in from Microsoft if you do not already have it, but it is a free download.

Solve Word 2003-2007 incompatibilities

Microsoft changed Word's format with version 2007. Word documents created with Office 2007 are given the file extension .docx, which is a different standard from the .doc format of all previous versions. (At least the suffix does you a clue that you are dealing with two different animals.) The downside is that if you have only Word 2003 or earlier - and I have Word 2000 still chugging along happily on one machine - you cannot open the new format. Fortunately, there are several solutions.
1. If you're using Word 2007, you can still save your files as .doc files so that anyone can read them. To save an individual file this way, in the Save As dialog box's 'Save as type' pull-down menu, select Word 97-2003 Document. You can also set that format as your default. Click the Office logo in the top-left corner of the Word screen, then select Word Options (bottom right of the dialogue box that pops up). In left pane, click Save. In right pane, for 'Save files in this format,' select Word 97-2003 Document (*.doc). Click OK.
2. If you're using Word 2000, 2002, or 2003, you can download and install the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats. The downloads are free.
3. Another option is to use OpenOffice.org as your word processor. Version 3 recently released can open .docx files quite happily. If you have only an earlier version (hey, it's a free download), you can use the updated Word Viewer from the Microsoft website and use it to open the .docx document. This document can then be copied and pasted into OpenOffice. Another possibility is to use the free online service called docx-converter which converts documents into the format readable by OpenOffice.
I should note in passing that OpenOffice's default format is called "open doc", which saves files with the extension .odt. This format can be read by virtually every word processor, even including Word!

Recovering a lost Windows password

Nothing can freeze the blood like losing the logon password to your computer. It's all-too-easy to forget these things, particularly if you have set up multiple user accounts and you use some only infrequently. Or you have set up a user account for your kids who are as good at remembering things as they are at putting their clothes away. Fortunately, help is at hand. This video at PC World explains a range of options you can follow to regain your sanity.

Free word processors

A colleague has an ageing computer, which can run only an old version of Word. She can't afford to purchase a new version, so what to do? Fortunately, there is a large range of open source (ie, free) word processors available, some of which give Microsoft Office a hefty run for its money. The most popular is probably OpenOffice.org, which almost matches Word feature-for-feature, and in addition adds a few which Office does not have, such as a drawing program. In addition, it has an installed user base of millions of people, so there is plenty of help if you strike difficulties. A list of the best-known word processors is here, and most of these run on Mac and Linux as well as Windows.
A new Office package I have only just heard of, and which is not included in the above list, is The Fifth Element, from Ssuite Software. It apparently packs in even more features than OpenOffice.org. Certainly you can't lose by trying any of these (except maybe if you exceed your broadband download cap).

How secure is your "secret question"?

Many websites that require passwords recognise that most of us have a fit of forgetfulness from time to time. So they offer a "secret question" option when you sign up, for use when you have lost or forgotten the original logon. The theory is that only you know the answer to the secret question - except that many hackers are very adept at working out the answers to these questions, especially if the question is something like "where were you born", or "what is your pet's name"? Technology Review looks further into the issue in this article.
There are other ways to solve the problem, as there are numerous programs which can store you passwords securely. Some free examples are Password Safe, Key Folder and Secret Server.

Free typefaces

I posted yesterday on clip art. Today, it's time to look at typefaces. The right typeface can really enhance the look of a document (indeed, some graphic designers consider that typography is the most important part of good design). Conversely, inappropriate typefaces - or too many different ones in the same document - can work against good design. While Mac, PC and Linux systems all come with a range of typefaces pre-installed, they are fairly limited, and I draw on a big stable of others I have gathered over the years. These days, there are plenty of websites offering huge ranges.
One of the best collection of "classic" (ie, well-designed or well-known) typefaces is at http://www.fontcenter.de
SearchFreeFonts has more than 13,000 typefaces, including many classics.
Fontyukle claims to be the world's biggest repository of type faces, and has many that are otherwise hard to get. However, its procedure for locating and downloading is clumsy. (Hints: use the search engine to locate by name, and you will have to endure a Capchacode when you start to download.)
Betterfonts claims to have over 10,000 typefaces.
There are 6500+ fonts at WebPageFonts
And a big selection at this site.
Once you have installed all these fonts, how can you view them easily, to decide which to use? Word gives you a representation when you click on the menu bar, but it may not be convenient to go into Word to see the list. A better alternative is a little program called FontView. It finds all the typefaces in your system, and displays them in an alphabet or short sentence (you can type whatever you want, and it will display those letters).
Finally, a note about the difference between a typeface and a font. Technically, the typeface is the family (eg, Arial, Helvetica, Times). The font is the individual member within that typeface family (eg, Arial Bold, Times Italic). These days, the distinction has been all but lost, and people generally use "font" to mean "typeface".

NZ's top 10 risky online behaviours

We're used to not clicking on sex drug emails, we know that sending vast sums of money to people in Nigeria isn't very clever, and most now understand that loading a Facebook photo of yourself sitting on a beach while you're meant to be off sick could get you in trouble with the boss, says The NZ Herald.

"But while Kiwis are getting better at not being screwed by cybercrooks, the internet security boffins at Trend Micro say we're still making big mistakes in our often-risky online behaviour.
Trend Micro's security experts have identified the top ten mistakes that New Zealanders are still making in their online lives - putting our finances, our PCs and our private lives at risk."

Here's the list...

Clip art

Clip art can be a real help in dressing up otherwise bland reports, newsletters and the like. In the old days (like, 10 years ago), I bought Corel Draw simply to get access to a good collection of clip art and typefaces. This has been rendered completely redundant by the internet, where you can find almost unlimited resources for free. There are scads of sites containing clip art these days, although the quality is pretty awful in many cases. Here are few in my browser's address book:
i-clipart says it has 30,000+ images in its collection.
A major resource is at Public Domain Clip Art, with 25,000+.
A newly revamped site is the Open Clipart project, which now has 11,000+ images.
And of course we can't ignore the 50,000 or so images and sounds on offer at Microsoft, for use in Word, Publisher, etc.

I surf unprotected...

...writes Michael Scalisi. "That's right. I don't use any anti-malware applications," he says.

"In over two years, I haven’t gotten a single virus or piece of malware. The only protection I have is that I’m behind a Linksys firewall and I have my Windows firewall enabled. On this computer I’ve used Windows XP, Vista, and currently Windows 7 Beta.
"How have I managed this dangerous and reckless feat without any consequences? Simple. I trust no one. If for some reason a pop up Window comes up asking me to click OK or Cancel, I click on ‘X’ instead, I never open e-mail from people I don’t know regarding products I didn’t buy. I keep my system updated with the newest security updates from Microsoft. I use Chrome as my main browser, but I also use Firefox and IE only when I have to."

AVG accidentally harms PCs

According to Ian Paul, PC World, users of AVG's virus scanner received a bit of a shock in the past week from the antivirus program, which instructed them to delete a core Windows file that their PCs actually needed. AVG mistakenly believed the file, called "user32.dll," contained several viruses. Users were instructed to delete it, which caused their computers to jump into an endless loop of reboot cycles. The only way out of this is to boot the computer from the original Windows CD and run the repair option.
AVG is wildly popular because of the free version it offers to home users. However, this is not the first time that AVG has had a problem with user32.dll. Last year, AVG alerted users that user32.dll had been "changed" and could be infected. At the time, the program did not recommend any action, but did cause users to post a frenzy of worried messages on some Internet forums. Earlier this month, AVG was also registering a false positive on ZoneAlarm, another security product. AVG says it has fixed the current user32.dll problem and apologized for the mishap on its forum.

Deleting email attachments

A friend who is a Mac owner would like to slim down her email inbox by deleting all the attachments from the emails, but keeping the main body of the message. (She has already saved important attachments to folders elsewhere on her hard drive.) As far as my investigations can tell, the Mac Mail program does not have this facility. However, the Thunderbird email program (which I use at home) does have that ability, and a Mac version of Thunderbird is available. When you install Thunderbird, it gives you the option to import your emails and address books from your other program, so you don't have to lose any important contacts. On a PC, Microsoft Outlook 2007 has the ability to delete attachments (not sure about earlier versions), but Outlook Express does not. Again, the PC version of Thunderbird does. For Mac owners who do not want to move away from Mail, I can think of two other work-arounds (both a bit clumsy). One is to forward the email to your own address, deleting the attachment at that point. The other is to save the email as a text-only file in an appropriate folder on the hard drive.

Salvaging the accidents

The "oh crumbs!" moment is a fact of life when you work with computers. (Ok, I'll admit it, the strength of the expletive is in direct proportion to the severity of the stuff-up.) How many times have I accidentally deleted text I have slaved over, or destroyed a work of art in Photoshop with a slip of the mouse?
When this happens, I try hard not to panic, stop everything, take a deep breath, and then hit "undo" keys, Ctrl-Z. (I wish life had a Ctrl-Z key to erase those dumb things I do or say.) Some programs, such as Word, have almost unlimited levels of undo. Just keep hitting Ctrl-Z, and you can go back a long way down the path you have come. If you undo too much, you can redo by going to the Edit menu and choosing that option. Some programs, like PhotoShop, by default have only one level of undo. Then, Ctrl-Z becomes a toggle between undoing and redoing. However, PhotoShop also has a History function, found under the Window menu, which allows you to go back to any particular action and alter it.
Some programs have a Revert function (usually found under the File menu). Choosing this takes the document back to the last-saved version. Depending on how frequently you save, this may take you back further than you wanted to go, but it can salvage many worst-case scenarios. As I have got myself into the habit of saving text documents at least every five minutes, Revert has been my saviour on many occasions.
Word does not have a Revert feature, but one more option is open to you, which also works for every other program without exception. Simply close the document, and when you are prompted, do not save the changes. That will take the document back to its last-saved version.

Restoring browser defaults

According to reports, a glitch in Internet Explorer 6 forced the new Microsoft search engine Bing onto users as the default search engine. Even when users manually altered their preferences, Bing came back. Micosoft says it has now fixed the problem, but similar problems have occurred before.
When one of the early versions of Windows 7 was released a month or so back, IE8 was automatically pushed as the default browser. This caused competitors Opera and Firefox to complain. If that has happened to you, and you want to reset Firefox or Opera as your default, there is a solution.
1. Close Internet Explorer if it's running, then start Firefox.
2. Click Tools, Options, then click the Advanced icon in the Options toolbar.
3. Click the General tab if it's not already selected, then make sure "Always check to see if Firefox is the default browser on startup" is enabled.
4. Click Check Now, then confirm that you want to make Firefox your default browser.
5. Click OK and you're done.

When an unwanted program lacks an uninstaller

A fairly regular annoyance in the Windows world crops up when you want to uninstall an unwanted program. Most programs either have an uninstall option, or you can delete them using the control panel "Add or remove programs". But from time to time, the uninstall routine becomes corrupted, or is even missing completely. (It's certainly happened to me on a number of occasions.) Lincoln Spector has some helpful tips on what to do in such cases.
In addition, a marvellous free utility called Revo Uninstaller, can assist in tidying up the nasty left-overs from messy uninstalls.

Dreamweaver to PDF - help wanted

This might be a bit specialised for many, but I could use some help. I am creating some web documents in Dreamweaver and would like to convert them to pdf files. Alternatively, convert to some format that I can email to others so they can view the finished product. Any ideas greatly received.

Bing debuts

Microsoft's new search engine, Bing (formerly known as Kumo), has come online, though primarily still in Beta mode (ie, not fully developed). It has one or two nice features. For instance, when doing an image search you can specify a lot more exactly what you are looking for; eg, a cartoon or live image. But I don't like the fact you can't tell the web address or size of the image until you hover your mouse pointer over it. The web pages search has got quite a way to go to compete with Google's new features, and the whole engine still has a not-quite-finished feel about it. As for the name: maybe that says it all. (To be fair, perhaps we laughed at the name Google when it first launched.) Will it break Google's dominance? I suspect not, but in the topsy-turvy internet world, who can be certain about anything?

How to Insert StumbleUpon into your Blogger Footer

If someone stumbles your blog it can bring a lot of traffic to your site so it is a good idea to make it easier for visitors to your site to stumble it.

But have you ever tried to add a StumbleUpon button to your blogger template only to find that the instructions are impossible to follow, you cannot work out where to put the code or your icon sits higher than your text? I have played around with the code provided by StumbleUpon and got it sitting how and where I want it, see here, and have now created this simple tutorial so you can too.

Log in to Blogger

Click on 'Layout'

Click on 'edit HTML'

Click on 'download full template' and save a backup of your blog to your hard-drive in case anything goes wrong

Check the 'expand widget templates box' (you are still in 'Layout', 'edit HTML')

Click anywhere in the actual code then press 'ctrl' and 'f' at the same time (which will bring up the find box)

Enter post-footer-line-1; into the find box and click next to find the line of code that should either be identical with or look a lot like:
<p class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-1'>

Make some space under this line by clicking at the end of it and hitting 'enter' a few times then past the following code into your template:

<span style='float: left; background: url(http://cdn.stumble-upon.com/images/16x16_su_round.gif) left no-repeat; padding-left: 20px;'><a expr:href='&quot;http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=&quot;+ data:post.url + &quot;&amp;title=&quot; + data:post.title' target='_blank'>Stumble it! </a></span><br/>

Save your template. Easy peasy. You can change the background url to any button you want to use.

Previewing Word files

There's always something you can learn! Here's a tip I have just discovered that allows you to see what's inside a Word document without actually opening it. Use the Open command in Word (File menu/Open or Ctrl-O). In the dialogue box that pops up, single click on a document title, and then from the Views menu, top right, choose Preview. The content is displayed in a new pane on the RH side of the dialogue box.

If you want to preview files created by other programs, Vista lets you adda preview pane to its Explorer. XP users will need a special utility such as Universal Viewer. This lets you peek inside a variety of common file types (graphics, PDF, HTML, and many more) just by right-clicking and choosing the Universal Viewer command. Install the plugin for Microsoft Office (a separate free download), and you can view Word and Excel files as well. Navigation buttons make it easy to skim through all files in a folder.