The Gmail team has been adding features to Google’s web-based email program at a gallop. A quick click of Gmail’s Settings link unveils an impressive array. By clicking the Labs tab and enabling some of Gmail’s experimental features, you’ll find yourself with even more options. There’s plenty worth exploring in the Gmail Labs, but some [...]
Computer manufacturers love to load up new systems with “helpful” utilities and features. Of course, what they regard as helpful, you may regard as rubbish. Whenever I set up a new computer for myself or someone else, I go through a routine to eliminate vendor-generated clutter and bias. This checklist is something you might find [...]
Two of the Kindle’s most appealing features are its wireless connection, which lets you download new books any time of the day from most places in the US, and the rapidly expanding treasure trove of ebooks available on Amazon. So it’s a sad, sad day when you switch on your Kindle’s wireless and get…nothing. No [...]
Most text selection in Word involves selecting horizontally – selecting a line or a paragraph of text. Sometimes, though, you need to select a vertical slab of text. To do that, hold down the Alt key while you click and drag your mouse over the text. This comes in handy when someone sends you an [...]
Microsoft Outlook comes with a collection of command-line switches which let you determine how the program starts. By default, Outlook opens to either your Inbox or the Outlook Today page, using a command-line that looks something like this: “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\OUTLOOK.EXE” /recycle The /recycle at the end of that line is a switch which tells [...]
One of Word’s quirky, tucked-away features is the rand() function. It lets you quickly insert a block of text in a document. To use the function in pre-2007 versions of Word, at the beginning of a line type =rand() and press Enter. Word inserts three paragraphs, each containing five sentences like this: The quick brown [...]
I’ve been away for a week in the wilds of Wyoming. For the trip, my suitcase was jam packed as usual, so I was delighted that instead of loading up further with a handful of books, all the reading matter I took was in my Kindle. On the road is where the Kindle really shows [...]
I try not to look behind my desk. It is one very scary place. There’s a rat’s nest of cables back there that grows more snarled and intertwined by the month. Every new device I add to my setup seems to add at least two, sometimes three more cables, and I have a bank of [...]
Second Life makes me sick. Literally. When I enter its 3D environment, my brain can’t believe what my eyes are seeing and, within seconds, I start to feel woozy. By the end of 10 minutes, I have the start of a nasty headache. If I stay longer than that, the vertigo when I finally return [...]
I’ve now had a chance to play with the Sony Reader PRS-505, Sony’s revamped ebook reader. When you look at the 505 side by side with its predecessor, the PRS-500, it doesn’t look like a whole lot has changed. Appearances are misleading. Cosmetically, the changes look minor, but in terms of usablity, they’re crucial. The [...]
I’ve put the Kindle and the Sony Reader aside for a day to finish writing my latest comparative review of database software for Australian PC User magazine. I’ve been writing such reviews since the early 1980s, when dBASE was top dog in the database stakes. It was a seriously buggy program, but in the very [...]
The Kindle and the Sony Reader are both flawed products. They have version 1 written all over them. And it doesn’t matter. Get either one of them into your hands, and chances are you’ll be hooked. The convenience factor is sky high, far outweighing the rough edges and design disappointments. So, how do the two [...]
So, Amazon has finally released its ebook reader, the Kindle. Within 24 hours of its launch, there were a couple of hundred customer “reviews” of the Kindle on Amazon.com, the majority of them uncomplimentary and almost all of them written by people who haven’t even seen the Kindle, let alone used it. Despite the detractors, [...]