Make any window stay on top

Some applications have an option to make their windows stay visible even when you select another application. While using my webcam on Skype the other day I went searching for the option to make the webcam window stay on top but I could not find it anywhere. There are a number of free tools available to apply this feature to all windows, but I settled on Tummy's Power Menu 1.5.1.

Not only does Power Menu add the 'stay on top' option to all windows, but also it allows you to set the transparency of the window to make it see-through. This software also enables you to minimise an application to the Systray (the collection of icons near the clock on the Taskbar). Power Menu even lets you adjust an application's priority within windows, although I do not recommend setting this unless you are confident that you know what you are doing.

Power Menu works on all modern versions of Windows including XP and Vista. Once you have installed the software you can access the new features by pulling down the control menu of a window by clicking on its icon at the right hand of the title bar. The following images demonstrate Power Menu's excellent features:-

The extra features on the control menu.

A semi-transparent Notepad.

Firefox minimised to the Tray. Click on the icon to restore it.

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The 13th Carnival of Computer Help and Advice

Welcome to the thirteenth monthly Carnival of Computer Help and Advice - a digest of recent blog articles about making interaction with computers safer and easier.

We start this month with a free e-book at BookFundas.com entitled Microsoft Windows XP Registry Guide: "This title for power users and IT professionals is the authoritative source for information on the Windows XP registry and how to modify it to suit your administrative and personal needs. The Windows registry contains profiles for each user of a computer plus information about system hardware, installed programs, property settings, and more."

With Windows XP approaching the end of its production life, Pass The Boll presents a review of Windows 7 - A Promising OS From Microsoft. While we are on the subject of operating systems, The Software Junkie has written a blog post for those of you who have tried the Ubunti 8.10 Intrepid Live CD only to find that OSX will not boot correctly: Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Live CD - Mac Boot Error Fix.

"My blog covers computer-related repetitive stress injuries, ergonomics, software, and peripherals. I put this list together for folks who might be thinking of buying voice recognition software." So writes Lindsay B about the 7 Signs It's Time to Try Voice Recognition Software post at Ergoblog.

Malicious attempts to capture our secured information on the web are on the increase. To help us protect ourselves Richard of Geek-News.Net offers his Tips To Avoid Twitter Phishing.

While Twitter's popularity is increasing as a means to communicate with each other, Jam Ward looks at a swiss army penknife of an application that enables us to communicate via a plethora of systems in The Best Pidgin Hacks & Mods at Jam's Ubuntu Linux Blog.

Finally this month, a welcome return of Andrew Edgington with A Preview of Photoshop Elements 7 Part 1 posted at Learn Adobe Elements.

If you would like to host the next carnival then please leave a comment on this post or use the contact form over at our Blog Carnival page where you can also submit your blog posts for inclusion. Don't worry, if you don't want to write the Carnival post I can do it for you.

More next month.

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Faster word processing revisited

Do you wish to be able to use your word processor more efficiently? Would you like to be able to edit a piece of text without having to reach for the mouse every few seconds? If your answer is 'yes' then this selection of time-saving keyboard shortcuts are for you. They should work in any text editor on Windows (and possibly on other operating systems too), whether you are using a word processor or a comments box on a web page.

I have included a text box as part of this article so you can play around with the various key combinations. For those interested, the text in the box is the opening paragraph of Candide by Voltaire.

We will start with quick navigation links.

• The Home key will move the cursor to the beginning of the line (on most keyboards this key is in a collection of 6 keys located above the cursor keys).
• The End key will, unsurprisingly, move the cursor to the end of the line.
• If you hold down Ctrl and press Home, the cursor will move to the beginning of the document. Ctrl and End will take the cursor to the end of the document.
• The Page Up and Page Down keys do 'exactly what it says on the tin'; they move the cursor one page up or one page down.
  

You probably already use the cursor keys (the ones with arrows on) to navigate around your compositions, moving one character at a time. If you hold Ctrl and press the left or right cursor keys you can jump one word at a time, left or right.

You should now be able to whiz around your documents; but what about keyboard shortcuts for selecting bits of the text? To select, simply hold down the Shift key as well as the key combinations I have already mentioned.

• Holding down Shift and pressing a cursor key will select one character to the left or right, dependent on which cursor key you press.
• Hold Shift and press Home to select the text from the cursor position to the beginning of a line. Shift and End selects the text from cursor to end of line. Thus, a quick way to select a line of text is to press Home, hold down Shift and press End.
• Holding down Shift and Ctrl together and pressing Home will select all the text between the cursor position and the start of the document. Holding down Shift and Ctrl while pressing End selects all the text between cursor and end of document.
  
• To select the whole document you could hold down Ctrl and press Home to take you to the top; then Shift, Ctrl and End to select to end; however, it is much easier to use the keyboard combination for selecting the whole of a text: Ctrl and A.
• Holding down Shift and Ctrl and pressing a cursor key will select one word left or right, dependent on which cursor key you press.
  

So, you can whiz through your document selecting chunks of text as you go. The last selection of key combinations in this article enable you to do stuff to the text.

• Hold down Ctrl and press C to copy the selected text.
• Hold down Ctrl and press X to cut the selected text - that is to copy it and delete it.
• Hold down Ctrl and press V to paste the copied text where the cursor is located.

Whereas, it is easy to remember the key combination for copy (Ctrl+C) the combinations for cut and paste are not so intuitive. When I first started using these particular keyboard shortcuts I remembered the cut combination because the X looks like a pair of scissors, and the V looks a little like an upturned glue pot (a little imagination is required I know).

Play around with all these key combinations in this text box.

In the country of Westphalia, in the castle of the most noble Baron of Thunder-ten->tronckh, lived a youth whom Nature had endowed with a most sweet disposition. His face was the true index of his mind. He had a solid judgement joined to the most unaffected simplicity; and hence, I presume, he had his name of Candide. The old servants of the house suspected him to have been the son of the Baron's sister, by a very good sort of a gentleman of the neighborhood, whom that young lady refused to marry, because he could produce no more than threescore and eleven quarterings in his arms; the rest of the genealogical tree belonging to the family having been lost through the injuries of time.

Some text boxes allow you to use 'rich text'; that is, text that has extra formatting options such as bold, italic or underline.

• Hold down Ctrl and press B to make the selected text bold.
• Hold down Ctrl and press I to make the selected text italic.
• Ctrl and U will underline the selected text.
  

Thankfully all three of these are intuitive, so no need for imaginative mnemonics to remember them.

To further increase your productivity while using a word processor you can use your keyboard to access the application's menus too as detailed in this tutorial.

This is an edited version of a post that I originally posted on September 5, 2007.

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Jargon Busting: Networking - Part 1

Computer networking is a jungle of acronyms. In this article, which will be the first in an occasional series, I will briefly explain some of the most common of these so that you will be able to impress friends, families and colleagues with your knowledge of the dark art which is networking.

TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol): This refers to a set of rules and standards by which computers can communicate with each other over the Internet and in Local Area Networks (LANs).

IP Address: Every device using TCP/IP has a unique number within its network, not unlike a telephone number. This takes the form of four numbers, each of which has a value between 0 and 255, for example 72.14.221.104, which is the IP address of the google.co.uk web server. Because there are more networked devices with access to the Internet than there are available addresses, there are a various ranges of addresses to be used on private networks. Of these the most commonly used are 172.16.x.x thru 172.31.x.x and 192.168.x.x. Each PC with a private IP address will then access the Internet through a device which will have a public address just as a company may have a private telephone network and a receptionist who redirects calls from outside to the appropriate telephone extension.

DHCP: This is a system that gives a networked device an IP address when it accesses the network, rather than setting the address on each device indivually. This helps prevent two different PCs having the same address on the network and, by extension, it saves the network administrators from having to keep records of what device has been allocated each address. Quite often DHCP systems are set up to give the same address to the same machine for an extended period of time.

URL (Uniform Resource Locator): This is the technical name for a web address or any other address where you tell an application the location of what you want to see and the manner in which it should access it.

HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol): You have probably typed this many times at the beginning of URLs. It tells the browser to display whatever it finds at the address as a web page.

Domain name: Consider the follwing URL - http://bloodycomputer.blogspot.com/2009/01/two-applications-for-safer-computing.html. The domain name for my blog is bloodycomputer.blogspot.com. This is part of the larger blogger domain: blogspot.com, which is in turn part of the top-level domain .com used for commercial sites. Thus bloodycomputer.blogspot.com is known as a subdomain of blogspot.com. So basically the domain name is everything that appears after "http://" or "http://www." and before the third "/" in a URL.

DNS (Domain Name Server): This is a computer that translates a URL into an IP Address, so it is something like an automated telephone directory enquiries.

I think that is more than enough for now. Check back for more arcane networking terminology over the coming weeks.

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Two applications for safer computing

I recently suffered from the DNSChanger trojan. This particularly nasty piece of malware changes the DNS settings on the infected PC to a server which then redirects the web browser either to advertising or more maliciously to phishing sites. Unfortunately the virus checking software that I was using at the time - AVG Free - failed to pick up the trojan.

This failure along with a number of other gripes that I had with AVG resulted in me looking for a new free anti-virus package. In the end I decided on Avira AntiVir Personal, after having read good things about it on a number of forums. The only issue that I have with this software is that it pops-up an advertisement every time that it updates, but this is a small price to pay. Avira has something of a reputation for finding a lot of false positive, which is when a safe file is mistakenly identified as a virus; however, this is preferable to the opposite problem, when the software fails to identify an infected file.

I finally managed to remove the trojan from my PC using the excellent Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware. A version of this software is available for free that allows you to scan your drives for any infections. You can pay for another version that offers real-time protection from malware.

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The 12th Carnival of Computer Help and Advice

Seasonal greetings and welcome to the twelfth monthly Carnival of Computer Help and Advice. Another digest of blog articles that help you to avoid problems with and to get the most out of your PCs.

Dan Coveney of Print n Post offers advice to anyone thinking of Buying a laptop in the January sales. On the subject of mobile computing Nim at dixlinx reviews Logmein - “the best free remote access available" - in the article, Logmein - excellent web-based remote access to your computer.

If you want to see those Xmas TV shows that you missed streamed over the Internet on your television then fear not, ramaraobobby has written a tutorial explaining How-To Connect your Computer to your TV over at Wonderful tech. stuff.

For converts to Firefox, carol smith present a post explaining how to configure Firefox opening screen at Friendly Computer Training.

Last but not least we have two posts from regular carnival contributor, Andrew Edgington, from his Learn Photoshop Now blog: Steps In Restoring and Repairing Your Photos and Turning Your Photographs into a Work of Art. Ideal for getting the most out of those holiday snaps.

If you have a blog with posts about computer issues and would like to host the next carnival then please leave a comment on this post or use the contact form over at our Blog Carnival page, where you can also submit your blog posts for inclusion in a future carnival.

If you would like to host a future carnival but don't wish to have the responsibility for selecting articles or writing the carnival post, don't worry I can do that for you.

See you all for the next carnival in the new year...

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Windows Hopping reprise

Hopping Between Windows
Have you ever needed to swap windows while you are using the keyboard? Have you needed to jump quickly from that email you are composing to the report you are supposed to be writing? Then try holding down Alt key and pressing the Tab key. Select the window you want and release the Alt key to bring that one to the front. A little dialog box will open that looks like this in Windows XP or 2000:


And looks like this in Windows Vista:


There is also an alternate way of hopping between windows that does not show this box. Simply hold down the Alt key and press the Escape key (marked Esc) to hop between windows in the order that you opened them. If you hop using this method Windows will leave any minimised windows in that state, it will not restore them like the Alt+Tab method does.

Hopping Within Windows
While we are on the subject of the Tab key, whenever you are filling in a form in a Windows program, the Tab key will generally move the cursor to the next field or button.

To move the cursor back to the previous field hold down the Shift key and press the Tab key.

Filling in a whole form from the keyboard means you get the job done more quickly and more easily, leaving more time available to 'Alt-Tab' back to that blog you were reading.

Try these shortcuts out on the following form. Click on the first field to select it, then tab between fields to your heart's content.

Field1:
Field2:
Field3:
To change the value of this press the space-bar when selected:
To change the value here use the up and down cursor keys: MondayTuesdayWednesdayYou get the idea...

[This post is an edited version of two that I originally posted on 22 August 2007 & 24 September 2008... I have been very busy writing up an assignment lately, but rest assured there will be more original material here soon]

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