Information Megahighway

iGoogle

2007-12-12T07:09:00.000-08:00

iGoogle is a fantastic tool that allows you to customize your homepage by adding information about your latest Gmail messages, headlines from Google News and other top news sources, weather forecasts, stock quotes, and movie times, bookmarks for quick access to your favorite sites from any computer and any of an enormous range of gadgets you can use for communication, education, fun, information, etc.

To make your iGoogle page, just:

1. Visit the Google homepage and click the iGoogle link in the top-right corner of the page.

2. Begin personalizing by selecting some of our most popular content from the blue "Welcome to iGoogle" box to appear on your iGoogle page.

3. Open the iGoogle directory by clicking "Add Stuff" in the top-right corner. This will let you add additional gadgets from the directory to your iGoogle page.

4. Once a gadget appears on your iGoogle page, click its downward-facing arrow and select "Edit Settings" to adjust the gadget's settings.

5. To move a gadget on your iGoogle page, just click the gadget's blue bar and drag it to your preferred location.

Profile:
Name: iGoogle
Website: http://www.google.com
Use: Easy
Cost: Free
Advertising: None

Games in Excel

2007-12-10T12:29:00.000-08:00

Car Game:

This is a neat racing game you can find in MS Excel, but only in the 2000 version. It won't end, so don't keep on playing just to finish it. Great fun, and something you'd never expect to find in Excel:

1: In a blank worksheet, select "Save as" and choose "Save as web page".

2: Click on Publish and Add interactivity.

3: Save as any name you like, then load in the page with MS Internet Explorer, Excel will appear in the web page.

4: Go to row 2000 Column WC

5: Highlight all of row 2000 and press Tab to make columnWC the active column.

6: Hold the keys Ctrl, Alt, Shift and click on the Office Icon.

Have fun!!

Flight Simulator:

If you still have a copy of MS Excel '07 lying around (or on your PC), this could be a fun thing to try. By following these instructions you can start up your own little flight simulator! NOTE: This probably won't work in later versions of Excel (though some say it does, I haven't managed to get it to work):

1. Open Excel, and then click F5. In the dialog box enter: X97:L97

2. Then click OK and then tab.

3. You should now be in cell 97. Finally, hold down Ctrl, and Shift and click on the chart wizard button on the toolbar.

4. The controls are right mouse click to accelerate and left mouse click to slow down.

BitfontMaker

2007-12-09T03:11:00.001-08:00

Making your own font is something much easier than most people would expect. BitfontMaker is a great little tool for creating your own font in twenty minutes. The downside is that you're making a bitfont, which is basically just a font made up of a few pixels. The other (more common) kind of font, the kind that you'll use in a word processing document, is a truetype font. These are made of lines, so they look better and can easily be inflated and deflated to lots of different sizes, something which bitfonts do a little shakily.

To use the BitfontMaker, just go to the site. You will not need to download anything, oddly enough. Now you need to think of what kind of font you want to make. If it's fairly similar to your average set of letters, click on "sample". This could take thirty seconds on IE (by the why, you'll need IE 6.0 or later, or any Netscape or Mozilla version). If it's completely different to normal letters, then you won't need to do this. Now just select the character pressed on the keyboard, then click on the squares to create your letter.

When you're finished, give your font a name (letters and digits only) then click on "create font". Now move the file into; C Drive>>WINDOWS>>Fonts. Now you'll be able to select it in your word processor as a font, but it won't work properly as it's a bitfont. You'll only be able to use the font in Notepad and maybe Notebook, as well as some minor, primitive word processors. If you don't use Windows, then I'm not sure what will work.

Profile:
Name: BitfontMaker
Website: http://www.pentacom.jp/soft/ex/font/edit_canvas.html
Use: Easy
Cost: Free
Advertising: None

Wallpaper Rotater

2007-12-08T03:25:00.001-08:00

Everybody gets sick of looking at the same wallpaper all the time, so that's why this clever little tool exists - to rotate your desktop background at chosen intervals. Wallpaper Rotator is a simple but very handy program available from Digital Wonders.

After you've downloaded and installed the program, open it and drag all the pictures you want to use into the white box. Next, set the time interval you want to use between backgrounds; 1440 minutes is the default setting (that's 24 hours). It'll work on pretty much any version of Windows.

Profile:
Name: Wallpaper Rotator
Website: http://www.digitalwonders.net/wallpaperRotator.aspx
Use: Very Easy
Cost: Free
Required: Microsoft's .NET framework, and Windows 98/ME/NT/2000/XP/2003

GuerillaMail

2007-12-07T08:07:00.000-08:00

Everyone has come across the problem of signing up to a site you know you'll regret giving your e-mail address to. That's the inspiration behind GuerillaMail.

GuerillaMail gives you a working e-mail address that expires after 15 minutes (however you can, if you need more time, lengthen it's short, sad life by 15 minutes more). The primary use of this service is so you can give a website a valid e-mail but not have to deal with their spam. If required, you can use it to verify an account (or whatever) by reading the emails sent to the address, and reply to them too.

The service is available in English, Polish, German and Spanish, but if you know what the site's for there's not really any reason for using it in your native language anyway.

Profile:
Name: GuerillaMail
Website: http://www.guerrillamail.com/
Use: Very Easy
Cost: Free
Advertising: Little

Introduction

2007-12-07T07:59:00.000-08:00

I intend this blog to basically be a guide to list great websites and programs I've found on the internet, and how to use them if it's not immediately obvious.

I'll try to write at least once a week, with the details of a website or program with it's description. This kind of thing could be handy, amusing, entertaining, interesting, life-saving etc.

I'll try and make this blog easy to use and applicable for more or less everybody. I'll add instructions if you aren't as computer knowledgeable as you could be, but nevertheless I'll be writing about things it's likely you haven't heard of before, so even experienced computer users can learn stuff.