25 More Tech Tips and Tricks

As a result, everybody, even experts, winds up with knowledge holes—things everybody thinks everybody else knows about the basics of consumer electronics.

When I started writing down the ones I figured everybody should know, my column was twice as long as it’s supposed to be. But hey—on the Web, nobody can hear you exceed your word count. I lopped out half of them and saved them for this e-newsletter.

Think of it as “Today’s Pogue Column (Cont’d).”

Screenshots
*Especially if you’re a beginner (or an expert), it’s frequently useful to capture the image of what’s on the screen — an error message or diagram, for example.

*In Windows, PrintScreen key copies the whole screen image, as a graphic, onto your invisible Clipboard, so you can paste into an e-mail message or any other program (“This is what I’m seeing! What do I do now?!”). If you add the Alt key, you copy only the front window.

*On the Mac, press Command-Shift-3. (Command is the key with the propeller on it, next to the Space bar.) You hear a snapshot sound, and you get a graphics file on your desktop—a picture of the entire screen image.

*If you press Command-Shift-4 instead, you get a crosshair cursor; you can draw across just one portion of the screen. Or, if you now tap the Space bar, you turn the cursor into a little camera icon. You can now click on just one window or toolbar that you want to copy.

*In both cases, you can hold down the Control key to copy the image to the Clipboard instead of leaving a file on the hard drive.

E-mail
* If you get a message from your bank or eBay about a problem with your account, it’s probably a “phishing” scam. It’s a fake, designed to lure you into typing your name and password so the bad guys can have it. Delete it. If you’re concerned, visit the institution’s Web site in your browser by typing in its address (like Citibank.com) — not by clicking the link in e-mail.

* Before you pass on any amazing item you get by e-mail—Obama’s a Muslim, the bubble boy wants greeting cards, the Nieman-Marcus $400 cookie recipe — first check it out at Snopes.com, the world clearinghouse for Internet scams and rumors.

* If a blue underlined link shows up in an e-mail message, you can mouse over it without clicking to see what Web site it plans to open.

* If you get a message from someone you know that relates a horror story about being mugged in England (and needing you to wire money immediately), delete it. It’s a popular scam — even if it’s the correct e-mail address of someone you know.

* File too big to send by e-mail? Then use yousendit.com or transferbigfiles.com. You can transmit huge files, using the site as a free intermediary parking space.

Editing Text
* On your keyboard, there’s a difference between the Backspace and Del keys. Press Backspace to delete the typed character to the left of the blinking insertion-point cursor, as usual. Pressing Del, however, removes the character to its right.

* In Microsoft Word, when you paste in text from another document—say, a Web site — you may not want all the boldface, colors, fonts and other formatting from the original source. Instead of using the regular Paste command, in that case, open the Edit menu and click Paste Special. Click Unformatted Text. You’ll get just the text, without the fanciness.

iPhone
* You can magnify the iPhone’s screen, for ease in reading tiny type, by double-tapping with three fingers. Then pan around by dragging with three fingers.

Of course, you first have to turn this feature on. Do that by tapping Settings, then General, then Accessibility. (On the same screen, you’ll find an option to make the text bigger in the built-in iPhone programs, which is handy in its own way.)

* Has your iPhone screen image suddenly become mysteriously enlarged? There’s nothing quite as alarming as seeing jumbo text and graphics, and nothing restores the phone to the way it’s supposed to be.

I can’t tell you how many people trek off to the Apple Store to get their “broken” iPhones fixed. Of course, the real problem is that you’ve accidentally turned on screen zooming (described in the previous tip). Double-tap with three fingers to restore the screen magnification.

Other Cellphones
* When your phone starts ringing, you can silence it quickly by pressing any key on the sides. (It’s still ringing — you can either answer it or let it go to voicemail — but at least you’ve cut the sound.) That’s good to remember when you’re someplace where phone silence is golden: for example, at a concert, in surgery or in church.

Web
*Don’t reach for the mouse to go back to the previous Web page. Just tap the Backspace key. (Alt+left-arrow key also works for Back, and Alt+right-arrow for Forward. In this article, if you have a Mac, substitute the Option key for Alt.)

* After you type a word or phrase into a Search box, don’t click the Search button. Just press the Enter key.

(The Enter key also works to click “Go” after you’ve typed an address, or the highlighted button, like “O.K.” or “Print,” in most dialog boxes. Yes, there are people who don’t realize that.)

* On brand-name Web sites (eBay, Facebook, Amazon and so on), click the upper-left logo to return to the site’s home page.

* At translate.google.com, you can choose languages you want to translate from and to. Then you paste in some copied text (or the address of a Web site). In a flash, the text is translated — roughly, to be sure, but at no charge.

* Who needs a dictionary? In the Google search box, type “define schadenfreude” (or whatever the word is). Press Enter.

Computers
* The Esc key (top left of the keyboard) means, “close this” or “cancel this.” It can close a menu or a dialog box, for example.

* You can duplicate a file icon (instead of moving it) if you press the Alt key as you drag it out of its window.

* You can switch among open programs by pressing Alt+Tab (or Command-Tab on the Mac). On the Mac, the much less known Command-tilde (the ~ key, upper left corner) switches among windows in a single program.

Mac Specials
* Anything you can print, you can turn into a PDF document — an amazingly convenient feature. Choose the Print command — but instead of choosing Print, click the PDF pop-up menu and choose Save as PDF.

* It’s often very useful to have a document, Web page or e-mail message read aloud to you — to “proof-listen” to it, for example, or just to listen to an article while you’re getting dressed in the morning. In the Speech pane of System Preferences, turn on “Speak selected text.” Click Set Key to choose a key combination. Pressing it makes the Mac read anything on the screen, at the rate, and in the character voice, that you’ve specified.

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Change, Add and Remove Values for File Properties – Windows 7 | Digital Life – http://www.cubesquare.co.cc

When you select a file in Windows 7, properties (or details) about the selected file, such as the author of the file, the size of the file, any tags associated with the file, and the date of the file are displayed. The properties available for a file differ depending on the type of file. For example, the Rating property is available for image files and music files, but not for text files. File properties are displayed in a Details pane at the bottom of the Windows Explorer window.

File properties make it easier to find and organize files. You can search for a file by one of its properties. For example, you can find all image files from a specific author. Libraries allow you to arrange files by properties. If you are browsing the Documents library, you may want to see which files you have most recently changed. To do this, sort the files by the Date modified property by selecting Date modified from the Arrange by drop-down list.

The files are then grouped according to the date they were last modified.

If you don’t see the Details pane at the bottom of the Explorer window, click the Organize button and select Layout | Details pane from the drop-down menu.

NOTE: Any pane on that menu that has an icon to the left of the option name is not displayed on the Explorer window. A pane is visible when there is a check mark to the left of the option name instead of an icon.

The size of the window determines how many of a file’s properties are displayed. You will notice that when you make the Explorer window smaller, less properties are visible in the Details pane. You can adjust the size of the Details pane by moving your mouse over the top border of the pane until you see a double-sided arrow. Click and drag the border of the Details pane to make it bigger or smaller.

More properties display as you enlarge the Details pane.

You can also change the size of the Details pane using a popup menu. Right-click in any empty space on the Details pane (not on the image thumbnail) and select Size from the popup menu. The options Small, Medium, and Large are available on a submenu. The Small option resizes the Details pane to the default size.

NOTE: Selecting Remove properties displays the Remove Properties dialog box, which we discuss later in this post. This dialog box allows you to easily remove values for selected or all properties.

To change the values of a property, move your mouse over the values for the property and click in the edit box that displays. To add a value for the property, simply type the value. To remove a value, click on the value to select it. Press the Backspace key or the Delete key to remove the value. To remove all values for a property, select each value and delete it. To change a value, remove the value you want to change first, then add the new value to replace it.

Once you have changed, added, or removed all the desired values for the properties you want to modify, click Save to save your changes.

You can also change, add, and remove values for properties by right-clicking on the file for which you want to modify properties and selecting Properties from the popup menu.

The Properties dialog box displays. Click the Details tab. To change, add, or remove values for a property, move the cursor over the Value column for the Property you want to modify and click in the edit box.

NOTE: Some properties don’t have an edit box in which you can enter your changes. For example, to change the Rating property, simply click a star to indicate the rating level you want.

Change, add, and remove values for properties as desired and click OK when you have finished making changes.

The Details pane reflects the changes you made to properties on the Properties dialog box for the selected file.

You can also remove values from properties by clicking the Remove Properties and Personal Information link on the Properties dialog box (open the Properties dialog box as mentioned earlier in this post).

The Remove Properties dialog box displays. You can choose to remove all properties from a file or just selected properties. To create a copy of the selected file with all of the properties removed, select the Create a copy with all possible properties removed radio button. This is a safe way to remove all the values from all the properties for a file. The original file is preserved with the values of the properties intact.

To remove only selected properties, select the Remove the following properties from this file radio button. Select the check boxes next to the properties for which you want to clear the values.

Click OK once you have made your choices.

NOTE: The properties themselves are not actually removed. When you remove a property, the values for that property are cleared. The property is still available for the file, in case you want to add any values to it again in the future.

The values for the properties you chose to remove are cleared on the Properties dialog box. Click OK to close the dialog box.

There are some types of files for which you cannot change the file properties. For example, you cannot change the properties of .txt or .rtf files. Some file properties cannot be modified, such as the length of a music file, as is also the case for Windows 7 system files or program files. You must be the owner of a file to be able to modify the file properties of that file. See our post, Easily Take Ownership of Files and Folders in Windows 7, for an easy way to take ownership of files and folders.

by NYK

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