A better clipboard

One of the deficiencies of the Windows operating system is that it allows you to copy and paste only one item at a time. The one (sort of) exception I know is that in Word you can hold down the Control key and select discontinuous pieces of text. Fortunately, there are numerous free utilities that will hold a bank of clipped items, which you can copy and paste from with ease. Some examples are ClipMagic, M8, and Clipboarder.

Creating secure passwords you can remember

A study of more than 30 million passwords found that almost half use names, common dictionary words, or sequential characters like "qwerty". Fingerprint scanners and other biometric controls are becoming more mainstream, but the password will still be the main barrier between hackers and your data for the foreseeable future. With that in mind, here is how to create a secure password that you can actually remember in "12345" easy steps.

Create your own 3D pics

The first 3D movie I saw was a Mighty Mouse cartoon back in the 1950s. The second was Michael Jackson's Captain Eo at Disneyland three decades later. There has been a quantum leap in the technology since, and suddenly 3D movies are the rage. Dozens are being released this year, although the number of cinemas fitted to screen them is still small. But you can make your own 3D photographs using the free program Anaglyph Maker.
You can also create your own 3D movie using easily available software, although the process is a bit more complex. Not that complex, though - this article gives the simplest instructions I've yet seen.

Public domain music

1,193,526 public domain songs by 10,253 artists, boasts the website Dewey Music. You can listen to, download, remix, and share anything you see on this site legally and for free.
But if you are into music, the best website in the world for my money is GrooveShark, which plays streaming audio of every conceivable genre. You can tailor the site to send you just exactly what you want to hear, and it is so easy to use. If there is an award for "smooth", GrooveShark gets it.

Cleaning a monitor

Computer screens get dusty, dirty, and dingy just like windows. But unlike glass windows, computer screens are complex, sensitive electronic devices that can be damaged by incorrect cleaning. Here's how to clean various types of computer screens safely.

Cleaning a monitor

Computer screens get dusty, dirty, and dingy just like windows. But unlike glass windows, computer screens are complex, sensitive electronic devices that can be damaged by incorrect cleaning. Here's how to clean various types of computer screens safely.

Sudden computer slowdowns

Sometimes your computer seemingly goes to sleep for no apparent reason. Lincoln Spector has some trouble-shooting tips.

9 Gmail tips that will let you take a longer lunch

Gmail is not bad as an internet-based email system - better than most of its competitors, possibly. But it's not perfect. Here are 9 tips to improve it.
One tip not covered: If you have an "ordinary" email client (ie, program, like Outlook or Thunderbird), you can gather your incoming Gmail emails through that, without visiting Gmail at all. Here's an article that shows you simply how to do it.
Another PC World article lists 10 Gmail Labs features you may not know about but could benefit from.

15 internet annoyances and how to fix them

It seems that every day we go online and there's some new type of nagging Web annoyance to deal with, says Jared Newman. In a perfect world, we wouldn't have to worry about auto-playing video ads, leaping pay walls to read the news, fake emails phishing for our bank details, or Farmville spam from Facebook. But for now, we're on our own. Here are 15 of the most annoying things on the Internet, and how to work around, ignore, improve or fix them.

Why the internet has gone sour

"The central mistake of recent digital culture is to chop up a network of individuals so finely that you end up with a mush," writes Nick Galvin of the Sydney Morning Herald. "You then start to care about the abstraction of the network more than the real people who are networked, even though the network by itself is meaningless. Only the people were ever meaningful." He looks at why the internet has gone sour, and what effect it's having on us.

Computer maintenance on a flash drive

You can keep a toolkit on a flash drive for those times when things go wrong and you need some fix-it tools. Lincoln Spector shares his list of must-haves.

How to cope with email overload

"If you're suffering from email overload, I bet you didn't know you have a solution at your fingertips. In fact you have your very own personal inbox secretary at your disposal. One waiting to read all the emails you receive (and send); then manage them for you.," writes Debbie Mayo-Smith.

Some goodies spotted

1. Are you annoying at having to register on a free web site just to read some news or view some information? Here is a simple method to get access to protected content without need to endure the annoyance of signing up for an account.
2. Restart Windows without restarting your computer. The trick is to hold down the SHIFT key when invoking the restart. Windows Vista: Select Start, then hover over the right arrow that is to the right of the padlock icon until the pop-up menu appears that contains “restart” as one of it’s choices. Hold down the SHIFT key while clicking on the “restart” choice. Windows XP: Select Start. Select “Shut Down…”. Change the drop-down combo box under “What do you want the computer to do?” to “Restart”. Hold down the SHIFT key while clicking on the “OK” button.
3. 15 coolest Firefox tricks. Browser Firefox is great right out of the box. And by adding some of the awesome extensions available out there, it just gets better and better. But look under the hood, and there are a bunch of hidden (and some not-so-secret) tips and tricks available that will crank Firefox up and pimp your browser, writes Leo Babauta. Make it faster, cooler, more efficient. Get to be a Jedi master with the following cool Firefox tricks.
4. Carry an entire operating system in your pocket. Scott Dunn says that running applications from a USB flash drive on a public computer is convenient but exposes you to malware and other limitations of the host PC. By installing a Windows-like version of Linux on a flash drive, you can take a complete operating system wherever you go and work in a safe, secure environment, even in an Internet café.

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."

Some Christmas goodies

With holidays looming, this will probably be the last last posting for 2009, as a major work project around the house beckons over the next couple of weeks. To tide you over, here are a few gleanings...
Have you ever wished for a magic wand that could make annoying Windows problems disappear? Like, say, a missing Recycle Bin icon, or those pesky Runtime Error messages in Internet Explorer? FixWin is that magic wand. This ingenious free utility requires just over 500KB of space, runs without installation, and quickly fixes 50 different Windows glitches--many of which would normally require a trip to the Registry. These are divided among five categories, including Windows Explorer, Internet & Connectivity, and System Tools.
Have you been looking for a quick and easy way to take partial or full screenshots of a webpage in Firefox? Now you can have either type with just a couple of clicks using the Abduction! extension for Firefox. (Instructions courtesy of the HowTo Geek).
And here's a way to add a built-in QuickNote function to Firefox.
Locked or restricted PDF files cannot be accessed without a password. If you want to remove passwords of protected PDF files, Try PDF password remover. It can be used to remove passwords and restrictions of locked PDF files. This is a Christmas special giveaway from PCsPlace.
And finally, Sean Silverthorne at Harvard Business writes on how information overload is an addiction:

We’ve discussed in this space the many methods available for controlling information overload. Scheduling meetings with yourself. Setting up action folders. Checking e-mail just a few times a day. You know the tips.
So you’ve conquered info overload, right? You always have a plan, a schedule, a process for getting things done.
No, of course not. Tom Davenport writes on Harvard Business Publishing that if we wanted to tame this problem we would have done so. It’s not that we enjoy 24/7 availability, but rather we hunger for what it brings us. Davenport doesn’t use the analogy, but I will:
We want to kick the drug, but we like the rush too much.

Have a great Christmas and be back early next year.

Pimp your browser

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

Duplicate tabs in Firefox, IE

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

Firefox macros

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

Treat USB drives with care

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