Category: tech

Here’s a little quick-fix that all technical writers will appreciate. As you have probably noticed, if you make a screen capture of a Windows screen, then print it, the scrollbars appear to have an ugly moiré pattern. This is caused when the dots that make the scrollbar colour (called dithering) are matched to the printer’s dot screen.

How do you avoid it? A quick change to your registry will make your scrollbars a solid colour instead of a dithered colour.

1. Select Start » Run, type regedit, and press Enter. The Registry Editor appears.
2. Browse to HKEY_CURRENT_USER » Control Panel » Colors.
3. Change both “ButtonHilight” and “Scrollbar” to 230 230 230.
4. Close the Registry Editor.
5. Logout and log in again to make the registry changes take effect.

The scrollbars should now be a solid colour. You can check this by making a screenshot and magnifying it. The scrollbars will remain solid until you next choose a Scheme in the Display Properties dialog box. If you like, you can save the current appearance (including the scrollbars) for later:

1. Right-click the desktop and select Properties.
2. In the Appearance tab, click Save As and enter a descriptive name, like “Solid-colour scrollbars”.

Now you can choose your solid-scrollbar scheme any time you want to make screenshots.

To the people with a novelty “musical” ring tone on their cell phone: Do you know how bloody irritating that is??

At least with a normal ring, people can speak (and think) between rings. But your continuous electronic crap drowns out everything around you.

What made you think that anyone wants to hear a mechanized bastardization of Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven? What made you think that the “funky” ring was even remotely entertaining (or funky for that matter)? And what makes you think that it’s in any way “cute” or “sophisticated”, when it blasts out in a quiet coffee shop, causing everything to come to a halt until you decide to fumble through your belongings to answer it?

And finally, to the person on the sixth floor with a novelty ring tone who won’t answer the phone when it rings: if you let it run through twenty repetitions of “William Tell” again, don’t be surprised if a certain blogger demonstrates how you can make a cell phone more operate more quietly with the correct application of a ball-pein hammer.

If you haven’t noticed yet, you should probably know that yesterday we set our clocks forward by an hour. I would have missed it completely, if I hadn’t sat down at the computer Sunday morning. And so, I dutifully went from room to room to room (I have three rooms) setting each of my clocks. Why do so many things come with clocks in them?

It’s a sign of the times, I think, when I actually have so many personal e-mail addresses that I forget which ones actually work. Most, like the e-mail address for this site, go directly to my inbox (one of my inboxes, anyway). Others enter a convoluted maze of auto-forwards and usually end up wasting away in one of two junk mail collection inboxes. Over the years, I’ve left this trail of abandoned addresses that still bloat up with spam for herbal medicine and “barely legal” porn sites.

Why so many addressess? I’ve registered four domain names. Each comes with either pop mail or e-mail forwarding, which means at least four addresses for each domain. I have two hotmail accounts — one is current, one is now a spam recepticle. I have a few addresses with my ISP, but I don’t use any of them. I think I must have at least twenty in all.

So now I’ll get to the point of today’s blog entry: if you’ve e-mailed me and I didn’t respond, then your message is probably lost in the netherworld of misplaced e-mail accounts. Try snail mail instead.

Have you ever looked at the inside of a Dell? I added a new 60 GB drive to mine this morning. No screwdrivers are necessary to do this — all you have to do is slip a couple of rails on the drive and slide it into the bay until it clicks.

At least, that’s what happens if you have drive rails. Without the right rails, you can’t mount a hard drive because there are no screw holes anywhere inside the case. They did, however, generously include two spare rails for a 3.5″ floppy drive.

Thanks Dell. Naturally, if someone upgrades their computer, they’ll add a second floppy drive. Good thinking.

In half an hour, with the aid of pliers, a pen knife, and twist ties, I adapted (read: brutally mangled) the floppy drive rails so that they’d hold the hard drive. Mission accomplished.