Wishing all my readers and visitors to my site/blog a very Happy Holiday, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Merry Yule, and the very best for everyone to have a safe holiday season.
Listen to some Christmas music via YouTube:
Some fun links:
Enjoy Christmas Color Pages for Adults.
Christmas recipes from Allrecipes.com
Enjoy a Virtual Snow globe. Click and shake.
One of the best entertainment you can get with your tablet or smart phone is the wonder that is augmented reality. This provides fun, education, and wonder to our otherwise boring reality life.
What is augmented reality? Augmented reality is supplemental reality, or things added to reality via smart phone or computer, to add enhance perception. Unlike virtual reality, which changes the entire perception, augmented adds to the reality to that we already perceive. Things are added, not replaced.
Technology needed: You will need technology to ‘see’ the augmented reality, and this includes Virtual Reality headsets, or smart phones, or tablets. You will also need the apps/programs.
iPhone/iPad
Android
Programs/apps
You may have heard the hype with Pokémon Go! which lets you physically go into the real world and hunt Pokémon via a smart phone. At Tom’s Guide, you can see 17 of the best augmented reality apps.
What you’ll find is not only games, but helpful information in the real world, similar to Google Glasses. The apps imposes a HUD (Heads-up Display) via your camera, adding information, links, and interactivity to the world. You can read/view/interact with your environment from ads in magazines to park monuments, to reading in foreign languages.
I’ve used SkyView app (IOS) before, which is a virtual sky you can explore day or night. This explores the night sky even if its not night, and shows you in real time where the sun, moon, satellites, planets, and stars are located using the phone’s GPS. It’s great for stargazing, and I remember once being able to watch a solar eclipse that happened on the other side of the world via this app.
Try them out and add in comments your thoughts and experiences. Ask questions if you like, and let me know if you liked this post.
While editing a manuscript, I found a need to make the process faster with the use of hotkey (keyboard shortcuts), wildcards, and some keyboard tricks to get things done.
These work only in MS Word.
|
Doing this |
Does this |
|
— |
Pressing the dash key 3x will create a horizontal line in your document |
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== = |
Pressing the equal key 3x creates a double line in your document |
|
Ctrl H |
Opens the Find/Replace feature. |
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Ctrl E |
Aligns text and graphics to center |
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=rand(08,10) |
Type this in your document creates random text if you ever need to add random text. |
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^p^p ^p |
Using Find/Replace, put ^p^p in Find and ^p and this removes manual spaces between paragraphs |
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Ctrl SHIFT m |
Inserts a comment where you put your cursor in the document. |
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SHIFT F7 |
Pressing these two keys open the built in Thesaurus. You can often find synonyms by RIGHT-CLICKING over a word. You will choices of words to use. |
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LEFT CLICK The mouse |
Clicking a word twice will highlight the word. Click three times, and you select the entire paragraph. |
Find these useful? Share with your friends, subscribe, or leave a comment to let me know. If you have any questions or ideas you’d like me to post a blog about, leave me a note.
Portable apps are application that are small enough to work off a flash drive, which enables users a means to work off an external drive.
Why use a portable drive? I own a Windows Pro tablet, which doesn’t have a very large hard drive. Portable apps allow me to use programs without having to install them because I’m working off the flash drive.
I can also share programs with multiple systems. I can switch between the tablet and my desktop PC.
Since the programs are smaller, you can also use these versions if you don’t like the software taking up lots of space on your hard drive.
Some suggested apps:
Portable browsers. You can use Chrome or Firefox easily off a drive, so you can store your book marks and settings.
Chrome by Google
Firefox by Mozilla
Office Suites. Similar to MS Office, LibreOffice and OpenOffice offer word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation within the software suite. All fits on a flash drive too.
Messaging. Need to chat online? Use the following program to chat and manage your network of online social messaging service.
Pidgin– Chat with AOL Yahoo, MSN, and ICQ users in a single app.
Security. Use this to scan computers with a flash drive.
ClamWin On the go anti-virus software.
KeePass securely stores passwords.
Graphic Image Editing or Viewing. On the go editing of photos and images.
FotoGrafix is lightweight editor. Easy to learn too.
Infranview works with lots of formats, so you can view the graphic. This includes a few editing features as well.
Sound, music, and video. Here are some apps to create and edit sound as well as video.
Audacity is an easy to use sound recorder and editor.
VLC video player. This doesn’t edit or create, but allows you to view many different format of videos. If you have problems opening a video file, this can help.
There are so many more portable apps you can use, there are only ones I’ve used and can verify are useful, but if you visit PortableApps.com, you can find many more programs to select.
Posted in Internet, learning, MS Office, programs, web
Tagged apps, computer, flash drive, lightweight, pc, portable, programs, thumb drive, usb
You may find that when clicking links in web sites to send email, you get Outlook email popping up. If you use primarily Gmail, this can be frustrating.
Want Gmail to be the default email handler? Here’s a quick tutorial:
1. Open your Gmail in the Chrome Browser and sign into your account.
2. Take note at the upper right-hand corner of the browser, there is an icon
called the Protocol Handler icon.
3. Click on that; this switches your default email handler to Gmail.
If you cannot see the icon, there is another way;
located at the upper right hand corner of the Chrome browser.
If you found this helpful, please comment, subscribe, or visit again for more tips and tutorials.
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