Archive for category Tips

Bookmarks Bar Space Saver

The bookmarks bar is a useful browser feature to have quick access to website favorites. Fortunately or unfortunately most browsers use the website title as the title for the favorite link, and this tends to take up a lot of space. Your bookmarks bar probably looks something like this.

Chances are that you have more favorites that you want quick access to, but they get pushed off the bookmarks bar because the titles are too long.

Good news everyone! There is a way to shorten the titles, or in some cases even remove the titles altogether to compact the favorite link, and thus making more room for favorites on the bookmarks bar.

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Clean Your Mouse

In our last post we covered how to clean your keyboard. The same steps pretty much apply to an optical mouse. But what if you use a ball mouse? Often a ball mouse never gets cleaned especially where it counts, which is inside where the rollers are. The rollers are where the movement of the ball translates to X and Y coordinates to move your cursor around. When these rollers get dirty, it results in an inaccurate read of how the ball is moving. Thus resulting in laggy or skipping cursor behavior. Read the rest of this entry »

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Clean Your Keyboard

Keyboards are gross. Period. Think about it, you are constantly touching it, many people eat over it, and I am willing to bet that you have never cleaned it since unpacking it from its box. In fact, if you have a white or light colored keyboard, I would like for you to stop reading right now, and look down at your keyboard. Don’t worry, I’ll wait. Chances are you are grossed out right now, and would like to boil/scrub/powerwash/or otherwise sanitize your keyboard. Here’s a quick run through on a mild keyboard cleaning. Read the rest of this entry »

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Don’t Buy a File Compression Program

For years people have been using WinZip, not purchasing it, and using the “trial” version which made you wait while prompting you to purchase a license before actually opening. Which for the most part is ridiculous, especially considering that Windows has built in zip capability.

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Shortcut to Quit/Close a Program

More keyboard jockey shortcuts, or maybe they are just lazy shortcuts… Either way, here is a quick way to close a program. Hit (press, hold then release together) Alt and F4 on your keyboard (in Windows XP/Vista/7), which will close/quit the program that you are currently in.

As screens get larger and have higher resolutions, we need to move our cursor farther to move from one side of the screen to the other. While I don’t always use this key sequence, I do find it useful from time to time.  Read the rest of this entry »

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