Paint.NET

People often ask me how I created or maniuplated a particular image. I say I did it in Photoshop. They then ask, "where do I get it?" I tell them that you have to buy it for $700. They then say "oh, nevermind."

Fortunately there are alternatives. Photoshop is great for professional graphic design, but if you don't need all the bells and whistles, there is a great free product available called Paint.NET. It has a lot of the same tools as Photoshop and even some of the same way of doing things.

You can download it here: http://www.getpaint.net/.

I ♥ Special Characters ☺

I started to write a similar post to this a while back and just never finished it. After Katdish's last comment, I decided to write this post instead.

So how do you include special characters like a heart or smiley face in a post or comment? Well, there are 3 ways that I can think of.

1. Copy and paste. It's that simple. See something you like? Copy it and paste it to your own blog. But of course it's not that simple if you can't remember where you saw it or how to get to it.

2. If you have Microsoft Word, then go to Insert → Symbol on the toolbar. From there, you can find just about any symbol you need. Speaking of Word, I just remembered something. There is a plug-in for Word that you can download and install that will let you type your blog posts from Microsoft Word and then press a button and publish it from Word. Why is that so great?
a. Spell check
b. If you wanted to save copies of your posts to your personal computer
c. If you have Internet issues, then you don't have to worry about losing your post

3. The last is fairly easy especially if you are good at memorization. First a little computer talk. For every character or symbol on a computer, there is a number associated with it. (They are called ASCII codes if you're interested.) To type a special character (in Windows), press and hold down the Alt key, then type the number associated with the character on the Num Pad and then release the Alt key. (Be sure your Num Lock is on).

Here is a nice chart of codes.

For example, if you needed to ask someone "where are the pinatas?"
¿Donde estan las piñatas?
¿ = Alt 168
ñ = Alt 164

Or "where is that boy?"
Où est ce garçon
ù = Alt 151
ç = Alt 135

Keep in mind that codes and keyboards are different across the globe, so what might look like a heart to you might end up looking like garbage to someone else. For further reading, check out this exciting article on character encoding on Wikipedia.

Google Is Your Friend

I have said it a million times: I don't know how I would do my job without Google. It's simply amazing. But are you harnessing its full power? Here are a couple of tricks that I often use.

Say you want to search Stuff Christians Like for the phrase worship eagle. If you type site:stufffchristianslike.blogspot.com followed by "worship eagle" into the search box, it will then only search the Stuff Christians Like Web site. By putting the words worship eagle in quotes, it will also only search for the words as a phrase. Now to make things even easier, if you click the Cached link underneath the search result, it will show you a stored copy of the page, with your search term(s) highlighted. If you have multiple search terms, it will highlight each one a different color. Very useful for skimming through a long page to find exactly what you need.

What about you? Any other Google tricks that you use?

Use the Clipboard

Have you ever spent hours pouring over the perfect blog comment, hit "Publish", waited for the page to load...and then got an error message? So you hit the "back" button on your browser only to find that your magnum opus has disappeared into a cyber black hole? That will make you lose your religion in a hurry!

Here's a little tip. If you've typed something rather lengthy and/or important, make a quick copy before you submit it. On a Windows computer, you can press ctrl+a inside of a text box, then ctrl+c. This will put your entire comment into a magical place called the clipboard. Then, if for some reason the comment doesn't go through and you have to retype it, you can simply press ctrl+v to paste the comment back into the box. This works for blogs, Facebook, email, whatever. If it's something really important, you may even want to paste it into Notepad or Microsoft Word and save a copy to your computer just in case.

Firefox

I love Firefox. One of the reasons I love it so much is because it is designed so that other software developers can create their own "add-ons" to it. Here are some of my favorite add-ons:

Adblock Plus
This add-on blocks most advertisements on the Web. While I disagree with this from a capitalist point of view, it really removes the clutter from your screen.

GBookmarks
Say you use one computer at work, another at home, and a laptop when you travel. You end up with bookmarks on 3 different computers and can never find the ones you need. GBookmarks solves that by allowing you to use Google Bookmarks just like you use your regular bookmarks. Then, no matter what computer you use, you can just sign-in to your Google account and retrieve the same set of bookmarks.

Undo Closed Tabs
Ever spend a lot of time searching for something only to accidentally close your tab and lose your place? With this add-on, if you accidentally close your tab, you just right-click and click "Undo close tab".

There are also some great add-ons for Web developers such a Firebug. There are many other various add-ons from weather reports to e-mail notifications.

Another other feature I love about Firefox is how it keeps track of where you are. For example, in Firefox 3 if you have several tabs open and close the browser, it will ask you if you want to save your place. And if Firefox accidentally crashes (which will happen no matter what browser you are using), when you open it back up it will ask if you want to restore your session and you're back where you left off.

Adding Life to Your Blog Comments

Whenever you post a comment to a blog on blogspot.com, you may have noticed that it says "You can use some HTML tags, such as <b>, <i>, <a>." So what does this mean? It's geek for "bold", "italics", and "link". They are actually called "tags" and you need a beginning tag and an ending tag.

For example, if you wanted to say: "Hey Hucklebuck, that was a great post!". You would type:

Hey Hucklebuck, that was a <b>great</b> post!

Or if you wanted to italicize something, you might type:

Hey Hucklebuck, you are <i>so</i> cool!

The last one is a little different, but still very simple. Say you wanted to post a link to Google with the text "Click here to go to my favorite site". You would do it like this:

<a href="http://www.google.com">Click here to go to my favorite site</a>

That's it for this post. I've got several more ideas, but if you have any computer topics you'd like me to blog about, please send me an e-mail at [email protected].

Intro

I have been a professional software developer for the past 10 years. Because I work in the information technology field, I get asked lots of computer-related questions from friends and family. So I've decided to pass along a few tips and tricks that I have learned along the way that I hope will be helpful to you too. I'm working on my first post now. Stay tuned...