Quick! Calculator at your fingertips

Quick Tips No Responses »
Jan 192010

Quick tip –

I often find myself needing to make a quick calculation, but not wanting to whip out a calculator, or dig through menus or folders until I find my built-in calculator (in /Applications on a Mac, in Start->Programs->Accessories on a PC).

Since I almost always have a web page open, I’ve resorted to just using Google.

In the Google search field, or the Google search bar if you have one, or even just in the address bar if you’re using Google’s Chrome browser, type in the math problem. The first item on the list that comes back is your answer:

Google calculator in action

It does conversions too. Here’s one for temperature:

Google does conversions too

Google does conversions too

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Posted by scott at 4:34 pm

Reverse text (Why Cats Should Not Compute)

Quick Tips No Responses »
Dec 092009

It seems I’ve found myself writing an unintended series of accessibility articles. ( See Your Computer Can Read to You and Make Text Larger)

For this article, I have to thank Cathy’s cat and my optometrist.

Yesterday, I had my eyes checked. As is usual for such occasions, I had my eyes dilated, and thus had trouble afterward seeing much of anything, let alone a computer screen. After an hour or so, the blurriness and light-sensitivity had diminished, but not quite enough.

I was able, though, to make a quick temporary change to my computer to make things a) darker and b) still high-contrast so I could read the screen, though still with a bit of a squint.

On the Mac, you can get a photo-negative effect by invoking “white-on-black”. Either open System Preferences ->Universal Access -> Seeing and turn on white-on-black , or use the keyboard shortcut control+option+command+8 to toggle back and forth. It doesn’t just make text come up as white-on-black – it reverses the whole color-scheme, so everything looks exactly like a photographic negative.

On Windows XP, you can get a similar effect by using the Accessibility Options control panel, then selecting the Display Tab, then the High Contrast settings.
Here, you can choose a white-on-black or a black-on-shite high-contrast scheme.
Once you turn on the keyboard shortcut here, you can toggle high-contrast by pressing left-alt + left-shift + prtscrn.

If you’re wondering where the cat comes in, read on.

I received an email from Cathy, one of my clients. It said something along the lines of “when I picked up my cat (off the keyboard), the screen was weird…” I’ve had this call enough times that I was able to guess the symptom, and provide a quick cure, right off the bat.

The moral of the story? Don’t let cats compute.

For further (rather dry) reading, Microsoft has a tutorial that has step-by-step instructions. Apple has a page detailing the accessibility tools available on OS X , and some help pages listing available accessibility keyboard shortcuts and preferences.

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Posted by scott at 12:44 pm Tagged with: , , , , ,

Post-it Notes without glue

Quick Tips, howto No Responses »
Dec 052009

Do you have a small forest of sticky notes stuck to your screen or keyboard? Are they overflowing onto the desk, the computer, and the cat who is really just trying to nap on your keyboard?

You can use your computer to save your sticky notes for you.

On the Mac, look for Stickies in the Applications Folder, or type Stickies into the Spotlight search bar (the magnifying glass on the upper right corner of the menu bar at the top of the screen). On Windows 7, look for Sticky Notes in the Start menu (pinned to the left column), or type Sticky into the search box in the Start menu.

On the Mac, you can adjust fonts, colors, text-size and so forth via the menubar at the top of the screen. On Windows, Sticky Notes has no menus, so you’ll need to use keyboard shortcuts to adjust these. Select or highlight text in a sticky note, and use one of the following keyboard shortcuts:
Note: You will need to first Select the Text in your sticky note to use the Hotkeys Listed below:
Ctrl + b Makes text bold
Ctrl + i Makes text italic
Ctrl + u Makes text underlined
Ctrl + t Make strikethrough text
Ctrl + shift + > Makes text larger
Ctrl + shift + < Makes text smaller
Ctrl + shift + L To create lists or bullets, hit this key combination repeatedly to change between list types.

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Posted by scott at 12:19 pm

QuickTip: Make text larger on your screen

Quick Tips, Uncategorized No Responses »
Nov 272009

As time goes on, I’ve found that I have a harder time reading small type on screen. Fortunatey, it only takes a couple of steps to make the screen easier to read. This is possible on both Windows and Macintosh systems.

There are two things you can do. Each has its pros and cons.

You can either increase the size of text on a single web page, or increase the size of text (and everything else) on the entire screen – text, icons, the menubars, the task bar or dock at the bottom, desktop icons – really, everything.

To increase the size of text when you’re on the web, you can simply select the larger text option. For Windows,From the menu, choose view, then look for Text Size, then click Increase Font or Decrease Font. For Mac, look for the View Menu, and Zoom In or Zoom Out. If you are using FireFox, look for View -> Zoom -> Zoom In or Zoom Out.

This method requires repetition each time you visit a new web site or open a new browser window. It does, however, offer the most flexibility, as you can fine tune it fairly easily on a page-per-page basis.

If you don’t want to adjust text size in individual windows, you can change the size of everything on the screen.

On the Mac, click on the Apple Menu in the upper left corner, click on System Preferences, then on Display. Here you’ll find a list of sizes. Those with small numbers at the top of the list fit less stuff on screen, making everything appear larger. Those with larger numbers fit more on screen, making everything smaller. The highest setting has the smallest text, but it is usually the clearest and sharpest. Lower numbers make things larger, but sometimes more fuzzy.

On a Windows PC, you can get there through Control Panels from the Start Menu at the bottom left corner of the screen, and look for Personalize Settings or Display, then for Screen Resolution. Alternatively, you can right-click on an empty portion of the desktop, then choose Properties-> Settings (XP), Personalize -> Display Settings-> Screen Resolution(Vista), or Screen Resolution (Windows 7). Either way, move the slider towards the smaller numbers to make things larger,or vice versa.

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Posted by scott at 10:37 am
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