Posts filed under ‘Computers and Internet’
Arial is Not a Font
Arial is a typeface (aka “font family”). In fact, what many people refer to as “fonts” are actually “typefaces.”
The meaning of the word “font” has been butchered since the introduction of desktop publishing in the mid 1980s.
What is the true meaning? Directly from Wikipedia, “… a complete character set of a single size and style of a particular typeface.”
In other words, a font is a specific version of a typeface. Arial is a typeface, and 12-point Arial Italic is a font. 14-point Arial Italic is a different font in the Arial font family.
Changing the size of text on a computer is not a significant amount of work, so it might seem silly to think that you’re actually changing the font when you do this. Especially since we think of the font as just the typeface and not its size or style. But, this terminology made a lot of sense before desktop publishing.
The first printing presses used characters that were carved from wood and arranged in order to form a complete sentence, although they were glyphs rather than Latin characters.
This evolved into more modern systems that used metal characters that were more durable. At that time, changing the size of a typeface was a lot of work — it meant you had to pull all of the letters out and reassemble the words with a different set of metal pieces. (more…)
iPhone and iPod Tricks
Apple has sold 50 million iPhones and 35 million iPod touch devices, so there are a lot of people who can benefit from these secrets.
This is by no means a complete list, but I wanted to provide some of the most useful and least well known iPhone tricks. Most of this list also applies to the iPod touch; if you know someone with one of these, be sure to send them a link to this article.
Double Click the Home Button
The button on the front of the phone is called the “home” button. You can choose what happens when you double click it. Mine is set to go to my phone favorites, making it quicker to dial my people. You can get to this screen by going to Settings > General > Home.
As you can see on the option screen above, there is an option for “iPod Controls.” When those are on and the phone is in standby mode (blank screen), you can double click the home button to see the current song/artist/album cover and show audio controls (volume/forward/back/play/pause) — see below for example. If you want to fast forward or rewind, hold the forward/back buttons respectively.
Remove Farmville Updates from Your Facebook Feed
Many of my friends play Facebook games like FarmVille and Mafia Wars. Although my Facebook news feed is littered with requests, I don’t have any interest in watering their crops or feeding their puppies. All that noise makes it difficult to get to the heart of Facebook productivity, making jokes and sending pokes.
Don’t get me wrong, Facebook is a lot of fun and a great way to stay in the loop, but I wish there were fewer FarmVille updates.
Thankfully, Facebook has made it very easy to hide these updates. If you put your mouse over an update, a “hide” button will appear in the top right corner (figure 1).
Figure 1
Click the hide button and you’ll have the option to hide all updates from that person or hide the updates from that application (figure 2).
Figure 2
Click “Hide FarmVille” and you’ll never see another FarmVille update. The same technique works for other applications (“apps”) such as Mafia Wars, Cafe World and others. On that note, if you’re not already a fan, join Broken Secrets on Facebook — I won’t spam your feed, I promise.
Broken Secrets | Written By: Chad Upton
Stop Cords from Falling Behind Your Desk
At some point, everyone with a rechargeable gadget will curse gravity as the cord falls behind their desk. This is extremely annoying, mostly because you never want to go under your desk if you don’t have to; although, you’ll probably find some other lost treasures when you do.
A friend shared this secret with me recently and it blew my mind: use binder clips to catch the cables.
I bought a pack of Medium Binder Clips at Staples (24 @ $2.79) and I weaved my cables through — they work perfectly. If your cable slides through easily, you may need to tie a very loose knot in the cable or even better, put a couple zip-ties around the cable to stop it from falling through.
Broken Secrets | Written By: Chad Upton
Extend the Life of Printer Ink Cartridges
If you’ve got an ink jet printer then you’re likely spending a lot of money on ink. Most of these printers use expensive and sophisticated ink cartridges. These cartridges monitor usage and estimate the amount of ink remaining. The estimate is usually conservative, meaning it indicates you are out of ink before you’re really out of ink.
If you reset this memory then you can keep printing until the cartridge is actually empty. Depending on the brand and model of cartridge, this reset is actually really easy. If you look above the small circuit board on the cartridge, there is sometimes a pinhole reset button, kind of like the paperclip eject hole on most cd rom drives.
Check out the following video to see a demonstration.
I should also note that not all cartridges can be reset in this way. Here are a couple of sites that show other methods of resetting some cartridges.
Doing a cartridge reset is also useful if you refill your own cartridges, since the cartridge may report that it’s empty even after you refill it.
I should also mention that laser printers have become extremely cheap. I rarely print in color, so a black and white laser printer is very cost effective for me. When I need to print photos, there are lots of drug stores or department stores that do a great job for a low price. If I need to print color documents, there are many great places to get that done at a reasonable price too. With a $100 laser printer, you’re often able to print thousands of pages of text on the toner cartridge that is included.
Big thanks to Derek Santos for sending the video and inspiring this post.
Broken Secrets | Written By: Chad Upton
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The Space Bar Scrolls Down in Your Browser
This is an awesome week and I mean that figuratively. The Book of Awesome arrives in stores this Wednesday and I wanted to celebrate by sharing some broken secrets from the website 1000AwesomeThings.com.
One of my favorite “Awesome Things” is “Learning a new keyboard shortcut.” Since I’m talking favorites, I want to share one of my favorite keyboard shortcuts: the space bar.
If you’re reading this in a web browser or you do a lot of reading on the web, this is one shortcut you should learn before all others. To scroll your browser down exactly one page, press the space bar. To scroll up one page, hold shift while you press the space bar.
It’s that simple, happy reading.
Broken Secrets
Written By: Chad Upton
Photo: jakebouma (creative commons)
Keeping Headphones Untangled
Walking, flying, train and bus riding — these are some of the most inane, meaningless and repetitive activities that you may do. Many people do them everyday, even twice or more. Headphones, and the devices they’re connected to, make these activities more enjoyable, memorable and sometimes even meaningful.
I’ve spent my fair share of time commuting in planes, trains and automobiles, but few of these experiences were memorable. Even fewer were memorable in a good way. But, I’ll never forget the bus ride when I first listened to the song, “I Will Follow You Into The Dark” by Death Cab for Cutie. I had played the song dozens of times before, but this was the first time I really listened to it. (more…)
Improve Monitor Picture Quality in 15 Seconds
In a previous post, I wrote about properly cleaning LCD screens on televisions and monitors. That article will help you keep the screen clean, but what about the electronics inside?
You may already defragment your hard drive to keep it tidy and reduce its workload, but there is a secret the LCD manufacturers don’t want you to know about — your monitor needs similar treatment to perform its best.
There are a few websites that can run scan patterns across your screen to achieve 100% pixel defragmentation. It takes about 15 seconds to complete and you’ll have a noticeably better picture on your screen.
Bookmark the following site because you should do this about once a month: click here to use it.
[THIS POST WAS THE 2010 APRIL FOOLS' POST]
Broken Secrets
Written By: Chad Upton
Follow BrokenSecrets on Twitter
Save Your Wet Electronics by Sticking Them in Rice
Simply put, when you make rice, you take 1 cup of rice and pour at least a cup and a half of water into it. Then you put it on the stove for a while and when you’re done, there’s no more water — it’s in the rice!
The point is, rice is really good at absorbing water.
So if you drop your cell phone in a bucket of water, toilet or swimming pool: get it quickly; turn it off; dry it and immediately put it into a bag of uncooked rice.
If you can access the battery, you should take it out too since some devices, especially cell phones, are still consuming power on standby, even when they appear to be off.
If you’ve got a wet vacuum, like a shop-vac, you should use it to suck some of the water out. A friend of mine (you know who you are) spilled water on my laptop keyboard once. I flipped the laptop upside down immediately, turned it off and pulled out the battery. It set it down and ran to get the shop-vac. While keeping it upside-down, I sucked all the water out of the keyboard. (more…)
