Maybe more than you want to know about batteries. This blog entry about batteries showed up as a link on one of the other blogs I visit regularly— http://tinyurl.com/3bys9r . It seems well-written and has links to other sites.
I was introduced to the Tiny URL concept a while ago when I received one in an email from a former co-worker, and have been using them, gratefully, ever since. Go to TinyURL.com for more info. One nice feature is that you can add a TinyURL button to your browser’s toolbar, so you can easily generate them as needed.
I switched from IE6 to Firefox some years ago, but Firefox stopped copying items I wanted to my hard drive, probably due to memory problems. Rather than solve the problem, I tried the Operabrowser–and, boy do I like it! It does what I want, it’s nicely customizable, and I don’t have the feeling I have to keep looking for new things to add to it.
Three tools I’ve incorporated in my Opera browser’s main bar, in addition to the TinyURL button, are the text size selector, the “Fit to Width” button, and the “Author Mode/User Mode” button, which make it easy to improve the readability of a page. The text size selector also works to resize many items on a page, including graphics.
ecleaner, a small program I told SPAUG about some years ago, has become useful again for a slightly different reason. I originally touted it for getting rid of those darned “>“ symbols in email. Now, I’ve found it’s a handy way to deal with situations where every line in what should be a single paragraph ends in a paragraph mark, such as occurs when copying material from a pdf file.
There are several programs named “ecleaner”. The one I’m writing about is available here—http://ecleaner.tripod.com/ .. Note that it hasn’t been supported since 2003, but it still works. Other programs for the same purpose are available from other sources.
The printed versions of this newsletter, and the newsletter I edit for my church— available on the church’s website at www.stthomas-svale.org are created using MS Publisher and then printed as pdf files that are sent out for proofing and printing. My preferred pdf file generator is CutePDF Writer. Another similar program is BullZip PDF Printer. When I want to annotate a pdf file, I use PDF-XChange Viewer . You can learn more about these, and many other useful freeware and shareware programs at my favorite program source, Snapfiles.com .
Another program I found via Snapfiles is Calendar Magic, which is really sort of a Swiss Army Knife of a program, because in addition to basic calendar information, it provides several different calculators (including a scientific calculator and an expression calculator), sun and moon information, a units converter, and more.
I get to use a greater variety of fonts in my church’s newsletter than I do here. My favorite sources for fonts are —
· http://www.abstractfonts.com/
· http://www.dafont.com/
· http://www.urbanfonts.com/
· http://www.1001fonts.com/
· http://www.fonts500.com/
· http://www.fontstock.net