Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
There are a number of programs and apps available for creating paintings from digital photos,and one of my favorites just happens to be completely free. It also runs entirely within your web browser so there is nothing to download or install.
It’s called Psykopaint, and here’s how to use it: [Read more…]
Most of us English speakers rarely need to type accented characters, but if you have family or friends in Europe or Latin America and you wish to converse with them in their native language, you’re going to need a simple way to type accented characters on your English language keyboard.
And if you’re taking a foreign language class, being able to type accented characters is essential for completing assignments, typing essays, etc.
Typing an accented character typically involves looking up the ALT code for the character in question, then holding down the ALT key while typing the appropriate code on the numeric keypad. But a great free utility called Holdkey eliminates the need to perform either of these steps.
Using Holdkey couldn’t be simpler: [Read more…]
If you’ve been using Microsoft Windows for a while you have surely seen the “USB Device Not Recognized” error balloon pop up after plugging in a USB device.
This happens fairly often, and most of the time unplugging the device and plugging it back in will fix the problem. But what if you start getting this error every time you plug in a USB device?
If all of your USB devices start generating this error when you plug them in, there is an easy fix: [Read more…]
Do you open the “Computer” utility and navigate to the same folder on a regular basis? If so, why not create a shortcut to that folder and place it on the Desktop?
One the shortcut to your favorite folder is on your desktop, you can double-click on it Windows will open that folder immediately instead of you having to navigate to it every time.
This might seem like a trivial matter, but if you open the same folder several times a day, having a shortcut to it can be a real time saver.
Here’s how to create a Desktop shortcut to a specific folder: [Read more…]
It happens to all of us on occasion: the dreaded hung program. After spending the better part of an hour typing in a long text document or editing an important photo, the program window freezes and we get the infuriating “Not Responding” error message.
All of that hard work has been for naught, right? Well, maybe not… A nifty little Windows utility called Resource Monitor just might save the day.
But before I explain how to try freeing up your stuck programs, let me explain a little bit about why programs stop responding in the first place. Programs running under Microsoft Windows do not run in a vacuum. They typically interact with a number of Windows processes, and even other software programs.
If one of the processes or programs that the program you’re working with encounters a problem, it will often cause the program you’re working with to just sit and wait while it tries to finish the task at hand. The problem is the task at hand will sometimes never be completed, hence the stuck program.
The next time a program stops responding before you’ve had a chance to save your work, try this: [Read more…]