Happy New Year! I hope everyone’s head is nice and clear after New Year last night!
I’m down at Mum and Dad’s for New Year, so this’ll be a fairly short issue. Just because I’ll need to go and rescue save the kitchen from the boys, rather than any overindulgence last night, honest… (The fact that Edward has a new cardboard box with “Glenmorangie” written on it as a garage for his toy cars is totally coincidental. I promise.)
How I found out that new Year’s resolutions are much older than I thought
Do you make New Year’s resolutions? I don’t tend to, but I was a bit curious about how they resolutions started. To be honest, I thought it might be something from Victorian times… or maybe even older, maybe from the Puritans in the 1600s vowing to be better every year.
But I had a look on Wikipedia and it turns out it’s much older still – the ancient Babylonians used to make promises to their gods at the start of the year.
It’s probably one of the websites I use most of all, www.wikipedia.org. You can look up all sorts of things.
It’s written by thousands of volunteers, rather than them paying experts, but they’re very good at only giving information if they can give a reference to a believable source, so it’s generally pretty reliable – certainly reliable enough for when you’re curious about something like resolutions!
If you’ve made a resolution to be more organised…
I’ve mentioned different programs you can use to help stay organised before. But if you use gmail for your emails, Google Docs or any other Google service that you have to log in to, you may have another option ready waiting for you.
If you log into your google account, using the details you use for gmail or whatever you use Google for, you can see a button near the top right that has a square of nine little squares in it – a bit like a touchtone phone keypad.
If you click on that it gives you several different online services from Google that you can use (free). One is the calendar – if you click on that one you can set it up with any appointments you have, dates you don’t want to forget and even set up a reminder, for example where it emails you half an hour before (or a few days if you need to buy a birthday card).
It’s similar to lots of organiser programs but because it’s online it has the advantage you can access it for different computers.
I’m not saying it’s for everyone, but if you already use one of Google’s other services and you want a program to help you stay organised, it just might be ideal.
(By the way, if you don’t already have a Google account, you can go to http://docs.google.com and set one up – it doesn’t cost anything. Then you can do everything in the same way I’ve just described it.)
Another meaning of resolution
With computers, resolution has another meaning. It’s basically how sharp the display you’re using is. So for example, on this computer, it’s set to (pauses while I check what Mum and Dad have it set to) 1280 by 768 – that means the picture is divided into 1280 dots across and 768 up and down.
So the higher the two numbers, the smaller the dots and the sharper the picture.
On most PCs, the easiest way to check what you setting is (and if you like, change it), is to right click on the desktop and look for “resolution” or “personalise”, then display settings.
If everything on your screen looks a bit blocky, it might need increasing.
And if you’re ever looking for a new PC or laptop and are considering several options, it can be worth checking what resolution they can manage to make sure one isn’t much worse than the others.
Well, I’d best finish there as I think Edward has discovered where the Ribena is kept and if Alastair helps they’ll be able to get the lid off, which could be a messy start to the year…
I hope you have a great 2014!