by David Hakala
It’s all too easy to get lost in your computer and the Web, totally ignoring the real world. Writers and programmers do it all the time; so do gamers. But sooner or later you have to get up and go outside. It would be nice to know what’s going on out there. A number of online weather services can put the current weather report for your area right on your desktop so you don’t even have to look out the window.
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by David Hakala
You go to a Web site and start reading it. But immediately, another browser window opens and displays something you probably didn’t want to see, hiding what you came to see. That second window is a pop up window, also called a popup or pop-up.
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by David Hakala
I bought a Thinkpad T61 notebook recently, retiring a vintage 2001Toshiba Tecra 8100 laptop. (Go ahead and snigger, but we made lots of money together.) The new machine, like most others made in recent years, has a small touch-sensitive cursor-moving pad in the center of its front edge – right where I like to rest the balls of my thumbs when I am typing. As a result, the cursor sometimes jumped around unexpectedly and the characters I was typing ended up in the middle of previously written words.
I learned this nuisance is called a touchpad. It is useless, too small to give me good control of the cursor. I use a USB mouse with a self-retracting cord. The touchpad had to go.
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by David Hakala
When you install Windows or format a disk, you are asked to select a “file system.” The options are FAT16, FAT32, or NTFS. Which file system you choose depends on the size of the disk and what you intend to do with it.
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