Tech facts that are probably true. Just a few trivial tech facts (or factoids, maybe) According to PureStorage there are about 6.5 billion (6,500,000,000) cat pictures on the internet (Aug 2023) Robert Cornelius (definitely not him on the right) created the first selfie (in 1839) – or did he? Marina Amaral disagrees There are some …
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Category:Technical
Posts concerned with the technical side of computers and their products. This mainly means the nitty gritty of actually using the products.
Close a frozen program from the taskbar in Windows 11
What do you do when a program stops working in Windows? It happens to everyone from time to time: a program just stops responding. It doesn’t necessarily mean there’s any great problem, but you can’t do any more with it until you dismiss it and start again. If you don’t know a better way, you …
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Autocorrect – more tricks
You can do more with autocorrect than just correct spelling and type fancy characters In my blog post of 17/11/2023, I covered “re-setting Word options”. This included setting up your own autocorrect options so that, for instance, “thier” would automatically be changed to “their” every time you mis-type it. Let’s be clear that this is …
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Re-setting Word Options
A few weeks ago I started writing about re-setting Word options if an update from Microsoft has set them back to defaults Then I allowed my attention to be hijacked away from Word options when Bard (Google’s AI) admitted lying to me. Let’s try again By default, Word automatically capitalises the first letter of every …
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A Conversation with Bard (aka Gemini)
One of Microsoft’s least endearing habits is re-setting “options” after installing updates Every now and again I get a phone call or email from a particular client telling me that Microsoft has done it again. It has installed an update and now Word has gone back to automatically starting sentences with a capital letter, and …
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Windows 11 Taskbar
There are some things you can change about the Windows 11 taskbar – and some things you can’t The first thing that my computer support clients usually notice about the Windows 11 taskbar is that its contents are centred – not left-aligned as in previous versions of Windows. I can’t help thinking that this is …
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Predictive typing in Word and Windows (10 & 11)
The spirit of Clippy is back Do you remember the good old days of the Microsoft “Clippy” character in Microsoft Word? If you started to create a document that looked anything like a letter then it popped up a totally useless box with a totally fatuous and infantile piece of clipart, and a caption saying …
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Copy a web page address (URL) with a QR code
It’s easy to open the same web page on a mobile device that is open in Chrome on a computer. Just copy the URL with a QR code Suppose you have Chrome open on a computer and the web page address (also known as its URL – Uniform Resource Locator) is long, complicated, and quite …
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Drawing a range circle on a Google map
You can’t do this directly in Google Maps You might think that drawing a range circle (a radius around a point) on a Google map would be easy. It isn’t. Every now and then, you might want to draw a circle of a specific radius from a given point. You can mark the distance between …
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Use “Quick Parts” in Word to re-use pieces of text
You can save pre-defined pieces of text for re-use in different Word documents I have described in other blog posts how you can use “autocorrect” in Word to correct your oft-repeated spelling mistakes automatically, and also to replace several words with just a few keystrokes. You can find these posts here: Re-setting Word Options Autocorrect …
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