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.