Category Archives: Computing
Backup Drobo NAS Content to CrashPlan on Windows
Windows 8.1 Tiled “Metro” Apps Stopped Working! Here’s a Fix
Bring the Quick Launch Back (no need for “pinned” TaskBar Items)
TV Addicts database: TV.com
Tips for TripIt to Manage Your Travel Details with No-effort!
Be a Little More Dashing in Your Text Communiqués
Again, I am off on a tangent. This is actually a tangent of a tangent (so I am way off course!). If you care about typefaces and the look of your text communications on your computers and smart-phones, as I do, then you probably feel constrained by the limited typewriter character set in your electronic communication. Finding the exact character to look and act like you want can distinguish and beautify your communiqués. It turns out that things have evolved a bit since the typewriter days and, though keyboards doesn’t show this, there are a bunch of other standard characters that are available; double-quotes (“ and ” vs. "
), single-quotes (‘ and ’ vs. '
), ellipsis (… vs. ...
—which saves also save you two characters in limited-length messages such as tweets and text-messages), and the topic of today’s post, dashes: hyphens (-), en-dashes (–), and em-dashes (—). I simply want to be able to enter these characters to make my messages look better, without a lot of tedium.
As tangents go, this led to more tangents; but here, I will try to distill these meanderings to something digestible and useful. So, first, a little about dashes then some howtos to enter the one you want on computers, tablets, and smart-phones you’re using
Dash, Dashes, and More Dashes
It turns out that dash/hyphen, en-, and em-dashes not only look different, they have different meanings. Reading through the Wikipedia’s “Dashes” entry reminds me of one of my peeves: when composing a document’s formatting, apply semantic formatting independent of how you want it to look (and address the look of the elements separately)—do not format content based on how you want it to look. (But I digress again…). Continue reading Be a Little More Dashing in Your Text Communiqués
Where to Blog? Consolidate!
“Unhack” Your Facebook Account
If you are lounging around at a café, Facebooking using their public wifi, note that a hacker with the right software can grab your login information and do you the favor of Facebooking for you, without your help. Realistically, his kind of hack is not very prolific, but it is easy to block, so it’s better to be safe than sorry. Since Facebook makes this simple setting unduly difficult, the following is a quick step-by-step (as of July 4, 2011).
- Go to the “Account” drop-down menu in the upper right of your Facebook page.
Continue reading “Unhack” Your Facebook Account
Gmail “Anonymizer”: Using Gmail without others knowing about it
Free email is always popular. With Gmail having been out for a while and all those nifty Google services which require a Gmail ID as a prerequisite, Gmail is more popular than ever. إلعب واربح Couple with that its great Spam filtering and it’s no wonder why so many people use it. العاب ربح Even if you have your own domain or other email mailbox, the Spam protection, alone, might be a reason to switch to Gmail. Other reasons: almost unlimited mailbox size, fast searching of all your email, a single place to organize all your email, a single view to your mail organization from any email client (via IMAP), and versatile mail management via labels.
So, if you are going to use Gmail, here’s some advice on how to use it right. Continue reading Gmail “Anonymizer”: Using Gmail without others knowing about it