Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Date and Time
We all know the time appears in the lower right of our Desktop; right side of the Taskbar. To view the current date, mouse over the time and a screentip will appear. With XP, if you make the Taskbar double size, the date and time appear all the time. Neat, but it takes up screen real estate. When I wanted to see a calendar, I used to double-click the time to pop-up the Date and Time properties dialog box. This is a little dangerous; change the date and hit OK instead of Cancel and you have changed the system date!

I found a better way with a freeware program by Dale Nurdeen called TClockEx. You may download it from http://www.rcis.co.za/dale/tclockex/. It allows you to display the date and time in place of the current time. You pick the format and color scheme. Click once and a calendar pops up -- one which will not change your system date.

Monday, October 03, 2005

The Address Bar
When we view a web site (like this one) the address bar contains the URL to the web site. If we want to travel to another site, we can type the desired address in the Address Bar text box. Getting there is as simple as a mouse move and a click, but there is a shortcut. Hold the Window key down and tap F4 -- Win+F4. When you arrive at the Address Bar, the current address is filled with blue indicating it is selected and the list of previously entered addresses drops down. Choose from the list or enter a new one. Because it is selected, as soon as you begin to type or Copy another address, the highlighted address is replaced. You do NOT have to erase the old address to enter a new one. When using Internet Explorer, typing a new address ending in .com, just type the name (ie: blogger) , hold the Control key down and tap Enter -- Ctrl+Enter. The http://www and the .com are added for you! Press Enter or click Go to find the site.