Some bits and pieces this time, including something I’ve never thought to mention before.
Moving tabs about when you’re on the web
I’ve never thought to mention this for some reason, even though it’s something I use myself from time to time, and you might find it useful as well.
When you’re using Internet Explorer, Chrome, or any other web browser to look at web pages, you can use tabs. You can open new tabs to have several different webpages open at once – I use it a lot if I’m looking something up on www.wikipedia.org
I’ve written about tabs several times in the newsletter (and it’s in the book The Internet One Step at a Time if you want to look it up)
But something I’ve never mentioned is that you can change what order the tabs are in. You just click on one tab, hold down the mouse button and drag it to one side or the other to move it.
I’ll be honest, it’s not something I use a lot. But now and again it’s helpful to be able to group tabs together. Say if you’re researching whether to go to Cornwall or the Lake District on holiday, you can have all the Cornwall tabs on the left, the Lake District ones on the right.
One of those little tips that’s worth knowing!
Turning off caps lock…
I had a question a while back from someone asking if you could “deactivate” the caps lock key – because he kept knocking it by accident and then typing half an email in capitals by mistake.
Frustratingly, the answer is that there isn’t an option to do it in control panel.
But it is possible – albeit it’s slightly tricky.
You’ll need this file – download it and save it to your computer before you start (right click on the link and choose save target as). www.helpfulbooks.co.uk/disablecapslock.reg
Then find wherever you’ve downloaded it to – possibly the downloads folder or the documents folder.
Right click on it and you should have an option to “Merge”. Click on that, then restart your PC and it should be done.
If you want get the caps lock key working again in the future, that’s slightly more fiddly!
Go to the start menu and type “regedit” into the search box and press enter.
You need to find what’s labelled “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout”
You click on the little triangle arrows next to HKEY_LOCALMACHINE to get SYSTEM, click on the one next to CurrentControlSet to get Control and so on.
Once you’ve got to the last one, you right-click on “Scancode Map” over on the right hand side and choose delete.
As I say, it’s not the simplest thing to do, but if the caps lock key really annoys you, at least it’s possible!
As an alternative, you can make it beep every time you press caps lock, which might at least warn you that you’ve pressed it!
An article by Microsoft shows how: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2655348/en-US
What’s been keeping me busy…
Well, several things, of course. Looking after Alastair and Edward keeps me fairly busy, as you can imagine, even with my wife doing the lion’s share of the work. But there’s something else I’ve been working on. I don’t want to say too much until I’ve got it all finished (there’s many a slip twixt cup and lip, as I’ve learnt far too often when announcing something that’s not finished yet…). But I see it as something quite different from the books and videos I’ve published so far – sort of like the flip side.
Anyway, as I say, I don’t want to say too much until it’s ready, so I’d best stop there.