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.