CyberNet » Helpful Tips

Helpful Tip: Use a Remote External Drive for Time Machine Backups

Ryan — Sun, 11 May 2008 21:23:28 +0000

Mac only
Ashley and I have been getting acquainted with our new MacBook Pro’s over the last few weeks, and things are going pretty well. I really wanted to get an external hard drive so that I could do Time Machine backups, but I didn’t want to fork out an arm and a leg for one. A few days ago I managed to “come across” a clearanced 300GB external drive at a local store for $27, and I just couldn’t pass up the deal.

Unfortunately they didn’t have another one so that both Ashley and myself could utilize the Time Machine backups, and from what I had heard previously the only way to to wirelessly do backups was with (of course) an Apple Time Capsule. As it turns out you can do backups wirelessly as long as the target hard drive is hooked up to another Mac computer.

The first thing I had to do was pull up Finder and navigate to the external Time Machine hard drive on the remote computer:

I knew that the Time Machine hard drive was mounted and ready once it showed the little “eject” symbol next to its name. Then I jumped over to the Time Machine preferences where I could select the drive I wanted to use to perform the backups. Since the remote drive was mounted I was able to see it in the list, and it had the remote computer’s name in parenthesis after it:

I selected that drive and the backup was off and running. What I ended up doing, however, was connecting the external drive directly to both computers for the initial backup because it can take awhile the first time through. After that, however, the backups are performed hourly and only the changes are synchronized which is much more suitable for a wireless connection. So this actually works out pretty well.

And no, you don’t have to go manually mount the Time Machine drive in order for your backups to run. I thought that you might have to do that, but once you’ve established the remote drive you want to use it will automatically make the connection whenever necessary. Neat, huh?

I’m still not a huge fan of the whole “spacey” interface for browsing your Time Machine backups, but that’s okay because they can still be browsed through Finder.

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Helpful Tip: Automatically Delete or Mark Spam as Read in Gmail

Ryan — Wed, 07 May 2008 19:27:07 +0000

I’ve slowly made the move back to using an email client full-time ever since Gmail started offering IMAP support. By using IMAP both my online Gmail account and all of my email client are kept in sync with each other, which is nice since I read my mail on multiple devices throughout the day. The only problem is that some of my email clients automatically download messages that Google has already flagged as spam, and it’s frustrating thinking that I have received a new email just to find out that it was a spam message.

DaComboMan pointed out in the forum a nice little tip that can get around that for me. Basically all you have to do is create a filter that either marks spam as read or actually deletes it as it comes in. Here’s what you have to do:

Create a new filter (instructions here)
In the Has the words field enter in:spam
Check either the Mark as read or Delete it box depending on what you would like to do with the spam

I didn’t go as far as to delete the spam because having it automatically marked as read will solve the headaches that I was getting. If you have found yourself in the same boat where you get notifications when new spam arrives then hopefully this will keep what sanity you have left. Doing either of those things will also eliminate the “new spam counter” that you see when visiting the Gmail website.

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Helpful Tip: How to get Free Shipping at Amazon.com

Ashley — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 17:54:34 +0000

If you’ve bought anything from Amazon before, you know that many of the products they sell are eligible for “Free Super Saver Shipping.” With the offer, if you spend at least $25 dollars on eligible products, you’ll get free shipping. It’s as simple as that. I’ve never come across anything on their site that didn’t qualify for the free shipping which is nice, but the only problem is when I’m purchasing something that is slightly under $25, Amazon tacks on shipping charges. The additional expense can make the item I’m purchasing (which may have been a good deal to start with) more expensive than purchasing it in a brick and mortar store and I’m usually purchasing at Amazon because of the price. Luckily there’s an easy way to spend $25 and get free shipping every time you make a purchase at Amazon for eligible products.

There are at least two sites that we know of that list out the cheap fillers you can buy so that your order will qualify for free shipping. The first is Amazon Filler Item Finder (which seems to be the nicer site) and the second is found at Freebieville.

It was just a couple of weeks ago that there was a pair of New Balance shoes on clearance at Amazon that I wanted for around $21.50. Of course Amazon tacked on shipping because the order wasn’t over $25. If I found an item for $3.50 that I could purchase, my order would still be cheaper than paying shipping charges, so I headed over to both Amazon Filler Item Finder and Freebieville to see if there was something I could find for around $3.50.

First I went to Amazon Filler Item Finder. They allow you to simply enter the amount you need to spend to get free shipping, and then you can search particular categories. I entered in $3.50 as the amount I needed to spend and they returned a whole list of items in the categories that I chose. With this service, you can enter in an amount that ranges from a few pennies up to $14.99.

To compare results, I headed over to Freebieville to see what they had. They only list fillers that are up to $5, and you can’t enter in a certain price, they just list out specific items. In that respect it’s not as nice as the previously mentioned service, but it still does the trick.

The next time you place an order at Amazon that’s slightly under $25, try to find a filler item to see if spending the $25 and getting free shipping is still cheaper than just paying the shipping charges. Chances are, it will be and you can save yourself some money.

Source: Lifehacker

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Helpful Tip: How to Quickly Save an Image

Ryan — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 22:07:13 +0000

So you’re browsing the web and come across an image that you want to save to your computer. There are various ways that you can go about doing this. For example, in Opera you can hold down the Control key and click on the image. You’ll then be prompted with the Save-As dialog just as you would have if you right-clicked on the image to save it.

As you may recall we had just written an article about dragging and dropping text/URL’s in Firefox. Well, a commenter who goes by the name “i2008″ pointed out that you can also drag images to your desktop to save them immediately. It works like a champ in both Firefox and Internet Explorer, and completely bypasses the Save-As dialog making it a quick way to save images.

Similarly you can also drag and drop hyperlinks to your desktop to create a bookmark/shortcut to that page. I did, however, find out that if an image is hyperlinked it will create a shortcut rather than saving the actual image.

If you’re using Firefox you could also look into installing the Image Toolbar extension (review) which provides buttons to save, print, and more when you hover over an image.

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Helpful Tip: Drag & Drop Text/URL’s in Firefox

Ryan — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 19:16:32 +0000

One thing that you may not realize is how many different actions can be performed simply by dragging and dropping text or URL’s in Firefox. Most browsers actually support similar actions, but we thought it would be useful to provide an overview of the different ways you can put it to work.

You can drag and drop…

a URL (hyperlinked or not) onto the address bar to immediately be taken to that site in the current tab.
a URL (hyperlinked or not) onto an existing tab or blank tab to immediately replace it with the new URL.
a URL (hyperlinked or not) onto an empty area on the tab bar to immediately have that URL opened in a new background tab.
highlighted text onto the address bar to replace the URL with the text, but it will not be executed immediately.
a single highlighted word (cannot contain spaces) onto an existing tab or blank tab to replace it with www.[highlighted word].com immediately. Where [highlighted word] is the single word you were dragging and dropping.
a single highlighted word (cannot contain spaces) onto an empty area on the tab bar to immediately have www.[highlighted word].com opened in a background tab. Where [highlighted word] is the single word you were dragging and dropping.
an image onto the address bar to immediately have that image open in the current tab.
an image onto an existing tab or blank tab to immediately replace it with the image.
an image onto an empty area on the tab bar to immediately have the image opened in a new background tab.

Tip: When dragging and dropping the text, images, and URL’s you can also hold down the Control key to force them to open in a new tab.

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Helpful Tip: Retrieve Original Images from Windows Photo Gallery

Ashley — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 22:12:33 +0000

One of the nice features built-in to the Windows Photo Gallery in Vista is a “fix” option where you can edit your photos. Among the editing features are options to auto adjust, adjust exposure, adjust color, crop the picture, or fix red eyes in an image. Once you make a change and close the “fix” window, the changes have been saved. When you go to open up the image, you no longer see the original image, you see the newly “fixed” image.

So what if you wanted to view the original image again because you don’t like the changes that you made? Luckily there’s a “Revert” button that will appear if you were to open the edited image. Keep in mind that if you decide to revert to the original, you will lose all changes that you made.

So what if you wanted to view the original image, but you still wanted to keep the edited image in tact? Here’s what you do.

Open up the Windows Explorer
Click on the User
Click AppData (this is a hidden folder)
Click Local
Click Microsoft
Click Windows Photo Gallery
Click Original Images

There you’ll find the original images for any photos that you have edited.

Another reason you’ll want access to the original images is if you’ve edited a bunch of them and you’re limited on hard drive space. Some photos can be pretty big and take up a lot of space, so you can go there and delete any of the original photos you know you won’t want.

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Helpful Tip: Use the Internet to Save $$$ Eating Out

Ashley — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 21:02:33 +0000

If you’re one of those people who like to save a buck here or there, here’s a helpful tip that will save you some money when you’re eating out at a restaurant. Most restaurants these days have websites that you can visit to check business hours, or view the menu. Additionally, many of those restaurant sites have an email list or newsletter that you can sign up for. I know, I know, no one likes getting more junk in their inbox, but this “junk” just might be worth it. When you sign up for an email list or newsletter, most restaurants will send you a thank-you “gift.”

From our experiences, the thank-you gift can be anything from a coupon for a free appetizer to a coupon for a few dollars off your purchase. And if you set-up an email account just for newsletters like this, you won’t have to worry about your regular account getting cluttered up with junk. Some of them will even send you an additional free gift once your birthday rolls around. Anything helps, right? With as expensive as eating out can get, signing up for an email newsletter from some of your favorite places can be worth it.

Here are a few examples of offers you’ll receive when signing up for an E-Club or newsletter:

Lone Star Steakhouse - Free appetizer after signing up for their E-Club
Maggiano’s Little Italy - Free appetizer after signing up for their E-Club
Cold Stone Creamery - Free ice cream on your birthday after joining their birthday club
TGI Friday’s - Free appetizer after joining Friday’s E-Club
Texas Roadhouse - Get a free appetizer and a dessert on your birthday after joining the Texas Roadie VIP Club
Red Lobster - Purchase 2 entrees and get a free appetizer or dessert after joining “The Club”
On the Border - Get a free appetizer after joining Club Cantina

After signing up, it usually takes a couple of days to get your coupon so if you can plan ahead, you’ll be better off. Have a tip on how to save money eating out? Let us know!

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Helpful Tip: How to Stop Receiving Credit Card Offers

Ashley — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 20:18:06 +0000

Every day when I go out to get the mail, there’s one thing I know for sure will be there… credit card offers. Often times the envelopes read “Pre-approved” or “0% APR” or “Get Cash Back with This Offer.” Whoopty Do. Another credit card offer that I have to shred. It gets old after a while, and I’m sure most of you can relate. To my surprise, I recently learned that there’s an opt-out program which will significantly reduce the number of unsolicited credit and insurance offers that you receive, assuming that you live in the United States.

Much like the “Do Not Call” list found at http://donotcall.gov, a website found at http://OptOutPrescreen.com has been put in place solely for the purpose of helping consumers stop the offers that are sent to them. A quick visit to the website for the Federal Trade Commission (http://www.ftc.gov) confirmed (more info here) that this was the site to go to to opt out. The process of only takes a few minutes, and the only downside is that they say it could take up to 60 days before you stop receiving offers.

When you go to www.optoutprescreen.com, you’ll want to click the button that says “Click Here to Opt-In or Opt-Out.” From there you’ll select that you want to either Opt-out for five years (the most that you can do electronically) or Opt-out permanently in which case you’ll need to print a form and mail it in. The form consists of typical information like your name and address, but you’ll also be asked for your social security number. They say that this is not required, but it will “help ensure that we can process your request.” Once you’ve entered in all of your information, click confirm and within 60 days, your name should be excluded from lists that credit card and insurance companies receive. Hallelujah!

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Helpful Tip: Quickly Switch Between Search Engines in Your Browser

Ryan — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 19:21:04 +0000

I’ve never been a big fan of the search box located in almost all of the browsers these days, and I’m not quite sure why. Maybe it is because I can setup keyword searches that turn the address bar into its own search box? Personally I always remove the search box when possible just to regain some more space.

If you’re not like me then you’ll likely enjoy this tip. Normally to switch between the different search engines you’ll have to hit the drop down arrow with your mouse and select the one you want from the list. Many browsers actually have keyboard shortcuts that make changing search engines a little faster, and in the end it can save you oodles of time. Here are the shortcuts for Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Opera:

Firefox

Control+Up/Down Arrows: The icon for the search engine will change according to which one you currently have selected, but you won’t see a list of search engines.
Alt+Up/Down Arrows: A drop down list of the different search engines is displayed.

Internet Explorer

Control+Up/Down Arrows: A drop down list of the different search engines is displayed.

Opera

Up/Down Arrows: A drop down list of the different search engines is displayed.

Now you can shuffle through the different search engines like there is no tomorrow!

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Helpful Tip: Gmail RSS Feeds for Labels

Ryan — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 20:54:02 +0000

Gmail has offered an extremely handy feature for quite awhile that lets you subscribe to an RSS feed for your Inbox. The feed URL that you would need to use is http://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom, but your feed reader will need to support authentication for it to work. For example, Google Reader will not work when subscribing to that feed because it doesn’t let you input your username and password. I believe most desktop clients support this (I know FeedDemon does), and some online ones do as well (Netvibes does).

One thing that I didn’t know, and I have Google OS to thank, was that you can also subscribe to a feed for any Gmail label that you’ve created. All you have to do is throw the label name onto the end of the feed URL like this:

http://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom/LABELNAME/

Tip: I’ve noticed that you should replace spaces with hypens in label names. Or you can just leave the space in the URL, but don’t try to delete the space because it won’t work.

All you have to do is replace LABELNAME with the name of the label you want to subscribe to. This is useful for me because I have one particular label that reports on the status of my backups that are performed every night. I have these skip the Inbox by default because I don’t want to wake up to fifteen different notifications sitting in my Inbox every morning, but now I can subscribe to a feed so that I don’t forget to check whether everything went through okay.

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Helpful Tip: Use Google to Search Within Websites

Ashley — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 20:13:58 +0000

There may be times when you’re trying to find a page on a specific website but can’t find it for one reason or another. Thankfully there’s Google to help you search within a website so that you can easily find the page you’re looking for. Google has three different options available and each one is very simple to use but will help you find exactly what you’re looking for.

Look for the Search Box
This is the newest method available when you perform a search at Google.com. Google found that for certain websites, there are many visitors who usually end up wanting a refined search. One example is Microsoft. People may search Google for Microsoft and then once they click through to Microsoft’s site, they perform another search for what they’re looking for within the site. Now when you do a search for Microsoft at Google, you’ll see a search box right after the result where you can enter a term and search within Microsoft.com. A screenshot of this can be seen below:

When the result appears with a search box (remember, not all results will show the search box), you can enter in another search term (like Windows Vista) and Google will search only Microsoft for Windows Vista related pages.
Source: Thanks for the tip Yansky!
site:example.com
Another simple way to search within a specific site is done right in the Google search box. If there’s a specific page you’re looking for on a site, all you have to do is go to www.google.com and in the search bar enter the topic you’re looking for followed by “site:” and then the site you’re wanting to search. If you were looking for an iPhone related article at CyberNet, it would look like this:
iPhone site:cybernetnews.com
All of the results will then be related iPhone articles from CyberNet. Be sure that you do not put a space after the colon, otherwise it will not work.
Advanced Search
Any time you go to Google.com, you’ll see an “advanced search” link next to the search box. By clicking the link, you’ll be given a variety of more advanced search options. One of them includes to search within a specific site or domain.

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Helpful Tip: Advanced Addressing in Gmail

Ashley — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 23:14:44 +0000

A couple of weeks ago, one of our CyerNotes articles discussed how to use the filters in Gmail. One of the tips we gave talked about using “plus addressing” in which sending an email to username+blah@gmail.com is the same as sending an email to username@gmail.com. The benefit to this is that when you’re signing up for different services, you can use a + address (a combo of words or numbers after your email address) and easily filter those emails. The example Ryan gave was this:

You could use an address username+amazon@gmail.com for all of your Amazon purchases. Then in the “To” field use the username+amazon@gmail.com to filter the emails sent from them

The only problem with this method is that some sites do not support using a plus sign in an email field (Facebook is one example). Luckily, there’s yet another way that you can filter email addresses and that’s by using one or several dots. These dots can appear anywhere in the email address so for example, you could do the following and it would still work:

user.name@gmail.com
usernam.e@gmail.com
u.sername@gmail.com

You get the idea, don’t you? Once you apply filters to any of these variations, you can have them automatically be labeled, starred, and/or archived which can make your life that much simpler. The Gmail Blog wrote about this earlier today, so we know for sure that these are confirmed methods for addressing in Gmail.

Note: If you need a refresher on how to set-up filters in Gmail, we recommend reading this article.

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Helpful Tip: How to Dry a Wet Phone

Ashley — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 20:03:29 +0000

It may not have happened to you yet, but chances are that sometime in your life, you may end up dropping your cell phone in water whether it be the kitchen sink, a puddle, or maybe even… the toilet! So what are you supposed to do when something happens to your precious phone? Today’s helpful tip explains two things that you can do should your phone get wet. Our source of information was wikiHow, so checkout their site for additional tips.

Get a bowl of rice…

That’s right, get yourself a big bowl of uncooked white rice, take your battery out (and SIM card if you have one), and then bury your phone in the bowl. The rice will soak up the water from your phone and there’s a good chance your phone will work once all of the water is removed.

Use a Hair Dryer on low…

Once again, be sure to remove the battery and your SIM card and don’t turn it on to see if it works! The key here is not to use high heat, but to use the lowest possible setting on the hair dryer. The heat can actually damage the phone even more, so keep that in mind before you go putting it under a heat lamp, in the microwave (this will destroy the phone and possibly the microwave), or blast it with hot air from a dryer.

Additional Tips

Most phones have an indicator (many times there are multiple indicators, some which you wouldn’t be able to see, and one is usually under the battery) which changes color if the phone has been exposed to water. If you were to take your phone back to the place you got it from, they’ll likely check this indicator first. Many insurance plans on phones will not cover damage from water, and this is the way that they’ll check.

Image Source
Be sure your phone is completely dry before you try turning it on for the first time. This means the non-visible inside parts need to be dry too. Give the phone plenty of time to dry both on the outside and the inside.

Drop your phone in water? Tell us what you did, and if it worked!

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Helpful Tip: Disable Firefox Prefetching

Ryan — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 20:43:54 +0000

Something you may not realize is that Firefox has a setting that will prefetch websites and images to improve the user’s browsing experience, and it’s actually enabled by default. It will utilize your browser’s idle time to prefetch images and websites as determined by the webmasters.

Mozilla has an entire page setup to describe how the link prefetching mechanism works, and here is the summary that they provide:

Link prefetching is a browser mechanism, which utilizes browser idle time to download or prefetch documents that the user might visit in the near future. A web page provides a set of prefetching hints to the browser, and after the browser is finished loading the page, it begins silently prefetching specified documents and stores them in its cache. When the user visits one of the prefetched documents, it can be served up quickly out of the browser’s cache.

Webmasters can enable the prefetching by placing code like this in their website:

The HREF is what points to the website or image that needs to be prefetched, and in this example a fullsize version of a thumbnail is cached so that it loads faster. This can obviously be a useful feature, but it can also result in unwanted cookies and cached items showing up on your computer. Even Google uses this to cache the first result that is displayed.

If you don’t want Firefox to do this then you’ll have to manually go and disable it:

In the Firefox Address Bar type about:config and press Enter.
Find the option that is named network.prefetch-next and double-click on it.
Change the value to false.

I’m not quite sure how I feel about Mozilla prefetching content without the users ever knowing. To me that is something they should ask users whether they want to enabled it when initially setting up the browser, especially since it can store cookies for websites that you yourself never actually visit.

What do you think about the prefetching?

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Helpful Tip: Firefox Profile in Use

Ryan — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 23:52:46 +0000

From time to time I receive an error message stating that Firefox is having issues starting up after I close it or after it crashes. There are two different error messages that I receive the most, and today we’re going to cover a few different ways that will hopefully bring your Firefox back to life.

Here are the two errors that you might see:

“Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Firefox process, or restart your system.“
“Firefox cannot use the profile because it is in use. To continue, close the running instance of Firefox or choose a different profile.“

The first error message you’ll likely see only after closing and then trying to reopen Firefox. It will appear as though Firefox was shutdown, but the computer was not actually able to close it. The easiest way to solve this issue is to open up the list of running processes (on Windows that is Ctrl+Alt+Del), and find firefox.exe in the list. Then end the process to forcefully close Firefox. Or you can just restart your computer.

The “profile in use” error message is a little bit trickier to solve. The first thing that you’ll need to do is locate the Firefox profile on your computer:

Operating System	Profile folder location(s)
Windows 95/98/Me	`C:\Windows\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\` `C:\Windows\Profiles\\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\`
Windows NT 4.x	`C:\Winnt\Profiles\\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\`
Windows 2000 and XP	`C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\`
Windows Vista	`C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\`
Unix	`~/.mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/`
Mac OS X	`~/Library/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/` `~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/`

Once you find your profile’s folder there will be a file in it that you need to delete. The file is a “lock” that the browser creates to ensure that no other applications are able to modify the files while Firefox is using them. Here’s the name of the file you’ll be looking for:

On Windows the file is named parent.lock
On Linux there are two files: lock and .parentlock
On Mac OS X the file is named .parentlock

Once the file is deleted you should be able to open up Firefox without any issues.

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Helpful Tip: One-Click "Ignore All" Solution for Facebook Apps

Ashley — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 23:04:06 +0000

Ever since Facebook apps launched, one of my biggest pet-peeves has been all of the darn app requests I receive. It’s annoying to say the least, and the worst part about it all is that there is no easy way to ignore them all with one click. For each individual request, I must click “ignore” over and over again. The number of requests usually builds up to about 30 before I get sick of having a big list of them, and then I take the time to go through and click ignore for each one. I figured if I was frustrated with this issue, certainly many of you are as well which is why you’re going to love a new “one-click” solution to ignore them all!

All you have to do is go to www.ignoreall.com and follow the instructions. You’ll end up bookmarking a bookmarklet and then once you go back to the page with all of your pending application requests over at Facebook, you’ll click the bookmark and the JavaScript program will go to work and all of the ignore buttons will be automatically clicked. You don’t have to worry about friend and group requests getting ignored because this solution is only for the application requests. This is the perfect one-click solution I have been looking for. Hallelujah! Now why couldn’t Facebook have thought of incorporating an “ignore all” feature?

Click here to see a video of this bookmarklet in action.

Note: Currently works in IE and Firefox

Source: Digital Inspiration [via DailyApps]

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Helpful Tip: “Open in New Tab” Keyboard Shortcuts

Ryan — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 21:39:43 +0000

When using your web browser there are a lot of things that you can do to speed up your efficiency and productivity, particularly when it comes to keyboard shortcuts. Thanks to a comment by Inferno_str1ke it struck me that some people may not realize the different ways you can make their browser open websites in a new tab. His comment sparked some “thank you’s” from other readers, and here’s what he had to say:

For about four months I was using the Google Toolbar search box exclusively, but now I’ve even dropped that in favour of keyword searches. I just hit Alt+D to jump to the URL box, type g,w,v,i,f for Google, Wikipedia, Google Video, Google Images and Facebook respectively, type a query and hit Enter or Alt+Enter if I want it in a new tab.

Did you know that in Firefox from the Address Bar or Search Box you can hit Alt+Enter to pull up the site in a new tab? We thought that this would be a good thing to share with all of our readers, and here’s a quick rundown of the various ways you can have sites open in a new tab for each of the different browsers:

–Firefox & Internet Explorer–

Ctrl+T - Open a new tab with a blank page loaded.
Alt+Enter - While in the Address Bar or Search Box this will open the requested site in a new tab.
Ctrl+Shift+Enter - When you’ve selected a link using the keyboard this shortcut will open the hyperlinked site in a new tab.
Ctrl+Enter - When you’ve selected a link using the keyboard this shortcut will open the hyperlinked site in a new tab in the background.
Ctrl+Shift+Click - When left-clicking on a link with the mouse hold down the Shift key to have the hyperlinked site open in a new tab.
Ctrl+Click - When left-clicking on a link with the mouse hold down the Ctrl+Shift keys to have the hyperlinked site open in a new tab in the background.

–Opera–

Ctrl+T - Open a new tab with Speed Dial loaded.
Shift+Enter - While in the Address Bar or Search Box this will open the requested site in a new tab.
Ctrl+Shift+Enter - While in the Address Bar or Search Box this will open the requested site in a new tab in the background.
Shift+Enter - When you’ve selected a link using the keyboard this shortcut will open the hyperlinked site in a new tab.
Ctrl+Shift+Enter - When you’ve selected a link using the keyboard this shortcut will open the hyperlinked site in a new tab in the background.
Shift+Click - When left-clicking on a link with the mouse hold down the Shift key to have the hyperlinked site open in a new tab.
Ctrl+Shift+Click - When left-clicking on a link with the mouse hold down the Ctrl+Shift keys to have the hyperlinked site open in a new tab in the background.

Hopefully we’ve saved you some time!

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Helpful Tip: How to Select Text Vertically in MS Word

Ashley — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 20:10:08 +0000

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been writing something or working on a project in Microsoft Word and it would have been helpful to be able to select text vertically. It never occurred to me that it was even possible to do such a thing! To my surprise, I learned that in fact you can select text vertically in Microsoft Word, thanks to an article over at the How-To Geek site.

All you have to do to select text vertically is hold down the Alt key and then you’ll be able to make your selection. Not only is this great for deleting, copying, or cutting words, but it’ll also be helpful for formatting changes like making the first word of each sentence bold, increasing the size of the text, or whatever the case may be. Below you can see how I held down the Alt key and then highlighted the first word in each line:

All it took was one click, and I was able to make the first word of each line bold as shown below:

Of course this isn’t something that you’re going to use everyday, but when the occasion arises where it would be time-saving to highlight text-vertically, you’ll appreciate this helpful tip.

Source:

How-to Geek

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Helpful Tip: Disable UAC Prompt for an Application

Ryan — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 19:28:21 +0000

Microsoft has obviously observed the request from users to bypass the User Account Control (UAC) prompts for specific applications. Just a few days ago they posted instructions on how to get around UAC prompts and a per application basis.

I decided to give this a whirl, and I can say first hand that it does work. There’s just one thing…it’s not quite as simple as a few clicks. The first time you go through the instructions it will probably take 3 or 4 minutes, but each program you setup after that will probably take just a minute since you’ll understand what needs to be done.

I’ve taken the liberty of modifying their directions ever so slightly to make them a bit easier, and I’ve also thrown in a few screenshots to guide you along the way:

(more…)

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Helpful Tip: Wikipedia RSS Feeds

Ryan — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 21:44:21 +0000

I’m sure many of you use Wikipedia on a regular basis for information, but did you know that Wikipedia also has RSS feeds available for keeping up with changes to your favorite articles? To get an RSS feed for a particular article just go to the Wikipedia page for it, and click on the History tab located along the top. Now in the far left column you should see a section toward the bottom called Toolbox. In there are two links for RSS and Atom syndication formats, which you can use in your feed reader.

You might be wondering why anyone would want to subscribe to feeds for a particular article. Wikipedia is a very well updated source when it comes to recent events. It’s also a great way to find out what’s happened in previous episodes of television shows (example), and by subscribing to RSS feeds you’re able to read what’s happened as soon as the article gets updated.

If you decide that you can never get enough of Wikipedia there is also this main RSS feed which lists out recent changes to every single article on the site. Just remember, there are a lot of changes being made to Wikipedia every second, so that feed is sure to keep you busy for awhile.

Don’t forget to checkout the other useful ways that you can use RSS feeds.

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