Tip - Save time by disabling the "Confirm File Delete" message box

This tip is a potentially very useful time-saving tip for people who find they need to delete lots of files when re-arranging or tidying-up their folders/directories on disk. It could save you many hours over a year of computer use.
In Microsoft Windows Vista and XP, every time you press the delete button for a file in Windows Explorer, the "Confirm File Delete" message box pops up asking:

“Are you sure you want to send 'Filename' to the Recycle Bin?”

If you delete more than one file - say 3 files - then the message reads:

“Are you sure you want to send these 3 items to the Recycle Bin?”

Tip - writing for maximum reader comprehension

Today I read a post entitled "Serif vs. sans-serif legibility" on a blog which claims to be a "Blog about web design & development". (I have removed the link to the blog as a favour to the blog author after his comment below, since this post is critical of the material posted).

The post had been referred to in Hacker News - one of the feed combinators that I subscribe to in my Google Reader.
The post caught my eye because it was on a topic that interested me and on which there is quite a large and solid body of scientific research and knowledge, and I wondered if the post added anything to that body of knowledge. Disappointingly, it did not, because it was a superficial, elementary and unscientific look at the subject by someone who clearly seemed to be ignorant of that body of knowledge and of either human psychology or especially of human visual perception - the latter two factors being what I would have hoped might have been burned-in to the skull of anyone involved in "web design & development". Maybe modern educational standards just don't cut the mustard.

Tip - the paperless office: take a rational pilot approach to workgroup systems

"Ignorance is bliss"
- as the saying goes, and it can be expensive when you are talking to snake-oil salesmen of computer systems. The rule is, caveat emptor ("let the buyer beware").

Whenever you plug your laptop or thumb drive into a client's knowledge systems, you may need to be able to share knowledge, which is often in the form of documentation. You need to have common, up-to-date and preferably "open" standards for this. Some organisations have really good knowledge-sharing or workgroup systems. Others do not and just use email to spray copies of documents around. This is a small case-study of one of the latter.
Last year I was working on an assignment for a client whose IT operation was running a moribund, unsupported version of Novell GroupWise (v6.5.6, from 2006), on an IT infrastructure that was based on an archaic operating system (Windows 2000). I was pretty surprised by this as, though the business processes in the organisation were pretty high up the CMM (Capability Maturity Model) - being at Level 3 or higher in some cases - they were using archaic systems to support these processes that I had thought no-one used any more.
I was further surprised when I subsequently learned that there were some areas of the organisation that were running a trial/POC (Proof-of-concept) of a couple of different modern-day workgroup systems that were unrelated to Novell's GroupWise.

Tip - use Gmail and other Google services to avoid "lock-in"

The post [G] Welcome to the Data Liberation Front discusses Google's approach to Gmail data portability and zero "lock-in". Brilliant. This is one of the main reasons I like using Gmail and Google's other free services. They don't try to lock you in. It's YOUR data - e.g., they even make it easy for you to pack up and migrate your Google blogs to some other system.
It reminded me of my recent experience with migrating my NZ mobile phone number from Vodafone to the much cheaper - by up to 50% - 2degrees mobile network service.

Tip - start using OpenDNS

OpenDNS stands for "Open Domain Name Server".
An ordinary DNS server is used by your web browser and other internet applications, and is usually provided by your ISP (Internet Service Provider). If you start using OpenDNS, then you will start to realise what it does, and will be unlikely to stop using it - thus it will become your "preferred" DNS.

A DNS server looks up the numerical IP (Internet Protocol) address of any domain to which you are effectively requesting access when you enter a domain link into the address bar (e.g., gmail.com) or when you click on a link on a web page.

The DNS server settings are TCP/IP addresses that are usually automatically created when you install your modem and subsequently boot it up, whether that is an ADSL or a cable modem (ignoring dial-up modems). However, these addresses can sometimes only be set by opening your computer's TCP/IP properties and manually adding the DNS server IP addresses provided by your ISP.

Tip - TidyRead will save you time and cut the noise

I just started using TidyRead. A real time-saver and an aid to reading enjoyment and comprehension. I found out about it at MakeUseOf.com - here.
I use Google Reader to filter all the blogs and news sites that I like to keep in touch with, scanning the headers for items that look like they will interest me. This has automated things to the extent that it saves me considerable time/effort in visiting these sites individually from RSS feeds/bookmarks - I now have it all “delivered” via Google Reader - which presents me with a neat and uncluttered list of the feed items, with headers.

However, when I go to read the items presented in Google Reader that interest me, I am faced with something I detest: all the distracting colour splashes, logos, and general advertising noise/garbage and bad ergonomics in web design that the authors/promoters of the destination sites have decided they will force-feed to me as part of my “user experience” (a euphemism for “you will see what I dictate” used by editorial/media fascists). It’s got as bad as - if not worse than - commercial TV advertising, which is something else I detest. The media are in control of the viewer.

Tip - Getting more out of tables (Word 2007)

(This is borrowed with thanks thanks from 2 separate articles in Worldstart newsletters.) 
The features of MS Word 2007 make for easy creation of nice-looking tables from scratch. To do this, you have to insert a table of appropriate dimensions, format any coloring, header rows, row height, and so forth. This can become tedious, especially if you need to do it repeatedly. An alternative would be to insert one of the standard formatted tables already provided in the Quick Tables, and either use that as is, or develop it into the table you want. If you take the latter path, and if you are likely to use that final table frequently in other documents, then you could also save it as a Quick Table item. This could be very handy.

Using Quick Tables to insert a ready-made, pre-formatted table:

Place the cursor at the location where you want to insert a table, and go to the Insert tab of the Ribbon. On the Insert tab, select the Table button:

Tip - email etiquette/netiquette, and using computer resources wisely

This material has been consolidated from sound policy advice provided by major computer companies.

A general rule of life is that, if left undisturbed, people will tend to follow the path of least resistance and fall into bad habits.

This rule can also be applied to the way people use email. In the early days of email, in the late 1970s or early 1980s when companies first installed email systems, email was mainly for the use of company employees and relatively few people received mailboxes - it was almost a mark of respect to have an email address. Email was rather in the private domain. Few companies supported external access to mailboxes, and fewer still allowed employees to connect from home. Today, email is in the public domain, is ubiquitous, and each of us is able to access free email on many different systems and can connect to email using a variety of devices and different network links, ranging from notebook PCs across VPNs to RIM Blackberries across public wireless networks.

Tip - dispatching the CapsLock gremlin with Microsoft's remapkey.exe

This single tip has probably saved me from hundreds of hours of recovery work and annoyance, over the years - avoidable work and annoyance that I still see a lot of people labouring under today. The tip is about changing the function of the CapsLock key. I used to do that with a Zif-Davis program called KEYMAP ZD v1.0 (which worked in Windows 98 but not in Windows post that). For Windows XP I use Microsoft remapkey.exe.
I mention it now because, today, I was perusing one of my favourite sites - Donation Coder.com - and reviewing the subsite:
1-hour software by Skrommel - (IMHO well worth a read).
Of the mountain of free and useful software there, there were these two:

• CAPshift v1.7 - "Ever hit caps lock by accident and not found out until half a page later? CAPshift extends the Caps Lock key by slowing it down, and shows a menu to change the selected text to lowercase, UPPERCASE, TitleCase, iNVERTEDcASE, RaNDoMCaSE or to Replace user defined characters." 
• ShiftOff v1.2 - "Turns off CapsLock when Shift is pressed together with A-Z or other user defined keys."

Whilst these could both be really useful software, they (and lots of other ways of remapping keys) are made largely redundant, because of remapkey.exe - arguably the best and simplest way to remap the CapsLock key (or almost any other key). It is a free utility from Microsoft, available as a tool within the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools. That is a file of dozens of useful uber-geek tools, and they work with Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Vista.
If you are not a geek, and/or just want the remapping tool rather than the whole toolset, then you can get it here: remapkey.exe (click on link to download). When you have downloaded this file, double click it, and you will be presented with two keyboard maps (see image of my keyboard map below) of the  101-key keyboard.

Use these to change CapsLock to Shift. Drag and drop the Shift key from the upper keyboard, onto the CapsLock key on the lower keyboard - notice that it now shows as a red Shift key. You can can remap other keys too, if they are configured on the 101-key keyboard. Once you have remapped the keys, save it and forget it - it makes a registry fix. There is no need to run remapkey.exe again, unless you want to remap some other keys.
If you need a more detailed step-by-step guide for using this utility, then you can find a good one at TechRepublic, here.

Tip - use a decent web browser - Firefox

Firefox 3 has landed. On its release date of June 18, 2008, 8,002,530 happy surfers downloaded this latest version of Firefox. These folk are now able to enjoy an even safer, smarter and better Web. This download statistic set a new Guinness World Record for the highest recorded number of software downloads in 24 hours.
If your web browser is not Firefox, then you will be using a proprietary browser which will be relatively limited, by comparison.
The more you surf the Web, the more you need a browser that makes your surfing as secure, efficient and effective as possible. Experience indicates that the public domain browser Firefox, and the add-ons that you can install to it, already made it arguably the best browser on the planet (for "best", read "secure, non-proprietary, highly functional and customisable, and not fat, bloated software"), and it just got even better. However, don't take my word for it - install it yourself and try it out today. To find out more, or to try it out now, press this button:

Tip - "Social networking" sites and online chat media

I had been trying to track down one of my best friends from grammar school in Llanrwst, North Wales, and had made contact in Facebook with a school alumnus who recalled him. This alumnus asked me if I had tried FriendsReunited.
This was my reply (I thought it could be generally useful):

No, I have not joined FriendReunited - and I shall try to avoid doing so. Being relatively computer-literate (I have depended on and developed my IT skills and knowledge to make a living for years), I am acutely conscious of the risks of so-called "social networking" sites. The risks include:

• Risk of loss of ID (from "identity theft") - so I am thus wary of most of the these sites.
• Risk of unwittingly contributing to spamming sites, or sites that sell your email address to spammers.
• Risk of invasion of privacy.
• Risk of the sites starting to make one feel compelled to provide increasinly large slices of one's cognitive surplus and time.
• Risk of being bombarded with unsolicited advertising.

Notwithstanding, I have for several years been a member of RealContacts and later LinkedIn, for professional association. Against my better judgement - after avoiding them like the plague - more recently I joined the social networking site Facebook and very recently Plaxo- because several of my friends encouraged me to join.

There have since been some gaffs, issues and concerns relating to the potential for loss of ID/privacy on Facebook - these seem to have been mostly addressed for the moment - but I feel that Plaxo is still pretty dubious (based on the dodgy-looking manner in which it was originally started up), so I have put very few details into my profile on that. I am becoming somewhat desensitised to these social networking sites clamouring for my profile details. Why do they want those details so badly? It's all about advertising revenue, and there is often no clear benefit to me as a user.

It is similar to the evolution of "chat" media - e.g., ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, irc, etc. Initially, users were obliged to have a separate proprietary application running for each chat medium being used. I was an early (about 1997) adopter of ICQ, and started to use the other media because my friends used them. However, I then started to use Trillian instead, which caters for all five media, and I was thus not able to be held captive by the chat media providers and thus could not be subjected to their otherwise compulsory manipulation and advertising.

When Trillian was establishing itself, it was a case study in the exercise of corporate control and fascism - amazing to see how the big four of these media providers (ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!) kept changing their proprietary program code or data formats on an almost daily basis to frustrate Trillian from interoperating with them. This, of course, seriously pissed off the Trillian users who (like me) wanted to use Trillian instead of the separate proprietary chat media applications. The Trillian user forum made interesting reading on these points, at the time. Eventually, perhaps after seeing how pissed off their users were getting and what asses they must have been making of themselves by trying to overtly manipulate and control their users, the big four seemed to get a grip on themselves and arrive at some form of agreement whereby Trillian has now become an accepted (or at least tolerated) fact of life.

Tip - test the recoverability of your backup media/data

This may be another one of the most important and valuable tips that you ever read.
An old friend who was one of my teachers in high school had seemed to go quiet in our email exchanges recently, until I received an email from him indicating that:
(a) he had had a hard disk crash, and was currently unable to recover data from the damaged disk;
(b) his backup software had not been "properly programmed" and had not necessarily backed up (onto his external backup drive) what he thought it was backing up.

The 2nd post I had made on this blog was: Tip - backup your work data

I made the post because backing up your digital life:

• could be very important in the event of a data loss/corruption;
• could be very important if your living might in some way be dependent on your having access to that data;
• could make something which might be regarded as an extreme inconvenience/disaster (loss of data) just a minor inconvenience.

However, what I did not stress in the post was that testing the recovery of the backup media/data is also important, because, after all - and, for example, as my friend seems to have discovered - backup is not of much use if you cannot actually recover it.

So, how do you ensure that you can test it, and how do you test it?
Well, ideally:

• You should have read Tip - backup your work data., and be using a portable or semi-portable external hard drive (or two if you are paranoid - the more the merrier) for backup.
  
• You should not have to be dependent on the software that performed the backup to make the recovery.
• The backup should be in a non-proprietary, uncoded, uncompressed format - so that you can look at the backup media and recover the backed up data, using normal file management tools from any computer, just as if it was any old hard drive with your data on.
• You should then be able to use standard/conventional file management tools (e.g., Windows Explorer, or - my favourite - xplorer²) to copy the data and test it for relevance and usability with the appropriate applications that used/created the data. By "relevance", I mean, it is a copy of vital work data, as opposed to some obscure system files (e.g., desktop.ini) which would not usually be essential to be able to continue working.
  

Tip - Use Adblock Plus, and save your time and traffic

The words quoted below are taken from the site for AdBlock Plus. I have used this add-on in Firefox for some time now, and it is brilliant. It blocks adverts in websites - e.g., Facebook - and saves your bandwidth from being gobbled up by the nowadays all-too-prevalent, annoying advertising junk. If this sounds appealing to you, then check it out.

Ever been annoyed by all those ads and banners on the internet that often take longer to download than everything else on the page? Install Adblock Plus now and get rid of them. Right-click on a banner and choose “Adblock” from the context menu — the banner won’t be downloaded again. Maybe even replace parts of the banner address with star symbols to block similar banners as well. Or choose a filter subscription, then even this simple task will usually be unnecessary: the filter subscription will block most advertisements fully automatically.

Tip - Use free Google Mail and other free Google services

I used a free Google product called Picasa as an entry to the free Google blogging system that hosts this blog. Picasa really seems to be a remarkably good piece of free software from Google, and it integrates really well with blogger.com and the blog site blogspot.com.

How did I get started on this? It all started in 2005 when I was invited by my son to open a Gmail account. I held the view that Google was becoming far too ubiquitous on the Net, and perhaps even predatory in the way it inveigled itself into search bars in browsers - especially in my favourite browser, Firefox. I don't like the way large companies start to become ubiquitous and predatory in the IT world - for example, that well-known company Microsoft. Why? Because it potentially limits the freedom of choice that we consumers have, and I have long disliked the way large corporations try to dictate to the market exactly what they will consume. That's why I am a strong supporter of consumer rights, consumer protection laws, consumer associations, and things like privacy - for example, I used to use JunkBuster (and later it's sister product Guidescope) to help to keep the ad-men and their annoying noise from my Net experience. On Guidescope's recommendation, I have dropped Junkbuster and Guidescope in favour of a plugin to my Firefox browser - the plugin is called Adblock Plus.

Anyway, I opened up a Gmail account, and was grudgingly impressed. Having initially been suspicious, I became assured that:

(a) my much-valued privacy was not going to be lost or exposed to the advertising spammer world, and

(b) I was not going to be inundated with advertising junk, either on screen or in my mailbox.

Then I started to check out the increasing number of utilities that Google offer, and I installed the Google desktop utility, and then Picasa2 onto my laptop. I recommend readers of this blog try out these and other free Google products. You might be as amazed as I was at how brilliantly these products work, what timesavers they can be, and how they open your world up to doing things in new ways and possibly changing your paradigms.

Tip - backup your work data

This may be one of the most important and valuable tips that you ever read.

If you had ever worked in IT on mainframe computer systems, then you would have had several professional best practice rules and lessons drummed into your head, often based on the hard-won lessons of other peoples' experiences. One of them was sure to have been: carry out data backups of your work data on a regular basis. The only time that you will realise exactly how valuable and important this rule is will be when you have a disk crash or similar, by which time it will be too late to help yourself if you have not carried out any backups.

Because the majority of laptop/PC users are not professional IT workers, they may not know any better. Those that are professional IT workers often:

• have not been trained as professionals
• may be rather slack in their work practices in any event
• may have been meaning to get a round tuit
  

- so, this rule is often forgotten nowadays and regular data backups may have been ignored/omitted.

Data backup is actually quite a simple process, though rigorous double-checking and spring-cleaning the work data and its backups can be tedious and could consume quite a bit of time. Fortunately, such spring-cleaning, though useful in conserving storage space, is not mandatory. You need 2 things to make backups possible:

1. A portable backup device.
2. A system (software) to carry out the backups in an automated manner.

Backup device:

• Forget tapes of any sort - not only are they expensive and not portable, but they are also unreliable in the recovery.
• Avoid using CD-ROMs, unless your backup data really is minimal - they are too slow and not easily/safely portable.
• Insist on using USB or Firewire (for faster data transfer) plug'n play portable or semi-portable hard drives. From experience - having tried CD-ROMS, ZIP drives, etc. - I recommend the use of 2.5 inch profile laptop drives in a pocket-sized (i.e., portable) metal case. These devices are robust, cheap, reliable and fast, and can hold large volumes of data - e.g., typically 120+GB, which are likely to serve most users' needs.

Backup system/software:

• Go for something that is flexible and that enables you to automate and schedule backups on a regular basis. I would recommend that you try one of the many freeware and shareware products in the market. I personally have used Handy Backup since 1999, since reading reviews of it in computer magazines and on web sites. It is a brilliant and relatively inexpensive product.
• Is it worth it? For cost-justification, the expense of doing backups needs to be compared to the expense, inconvenience, and loss of business/time in attempting to recover from a data loss if you have not done backups.

Tip - selecting a laptop

If you have already bought a laptop, then you are likely to be committed to making the most of it. If you have not yet bought it and are wondering what to buy, then take this tip born of 30 years' experience of working in IT and 17 years' experience of using laptops as my main/only productivity tool:

• Insist on a Toshiba laptop.
  

Now I know that people could object to such a bald statement - so, why Toshiba? Well, it is because, after trying out or using Toshiba, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, NEC, ASUS, IBM, etc., I have been forced to acknowledge that Toshiba corporation are consistent. Their three most important consistencies are:

• They consistently conform to relatively high production quality standards.
  
• They have consistently been shown to be leaders in laptop technology (along with NEC) - i.e., always being farsighted in implementing features that other manufacturers only belatedly follow.
• They have consistently implemented good ergonomics in their laptop design - including especially: large/full-size keys designed to assist touch-typing; keyboards with good feel and bio-feedback; good and consistent keyboard layout (the Del, Alt and pagination keys are usually in the same/similar locations on all models); good ergonomics in the screen design; solid construction (so they can put up with everyday knocks).
  

These are the most important simply because, if:
(a) you are likely to be spending a lot of time with your laptop and
(b) if it does not enable you to achieve optimal efficiency, effectiveness and productivity when it is being used as a working tool,
- then you will probably inevitably find that it is forcing you to waste time.