There’s nothing like the front seat view from a Cessna to really help you gain some perspective on life! Particularly when the flight takes you over Federation Peak and the Western Arthurs in Tassie’s southwest wilderness.
Last week, a pilot friend took a mate and I for a morning’s flight over our rugged and spectacular wilderness before landing on the gravel strip at Melaleuca where I breathed that pristine air loaded with bushwalking memories.
This was my first visit down that way - in this way - with me at the controls of the plane! The digital camera got a real workout, with nearly two hundred photos and movies to show the family.
Of course photos don’t come close to the full experience. The colour is never as vivid as you remember and those aerial shots are full of window reflections, but hey, what were YOU doing last Tuesday morning!
This month’s tips start off a little photo-centric, as we take a look at Adobe’s new online photo storage facility and find some easy ways to shrink those photos for easy emailing, as well as look at some simple steps to data recovery, stripping unwanted formatting from text and visit a useful site offering free online user guides.
Enjoy!
More and more software companies are providing their applications online, often for free. This is the case for Adobe who recently launched Photoshop Express, a new online photo storage facility, photo organiser and editor.
Offering 2GB of storage and interoperable with other photo-sharing websites like Facebook, Picasa and Flickr, Photoshop Express offers basic editing and cataloguing of photos. It has the basic functions that enable you to crop, rotate, fix red-eye and touch up, as well as offering more sophisticated tools for tuning your image, such as white balance, fill light, sharpen and soft focus.
You want to email those photos to friends but the image files are too large. A freebie called Photo Gadget Resize integrates with Windows Explorer and allows you to resize a photo by right clicking on the photo and simply selecting the size/quality you want.
Alternatively, Shrink Pic runs in the background and when it detects that you’re sending a large photo it creates a temporary copy, automatically resizes based on your pre-selected settings and sends. Great for sending photos in email or as attachments, uploading to blogs and web galleries and sharing with Skype and MSN Messenger, Shrink Pic works with regular email, like Outlook, as well as webmail, such as Gmail, Hotmail and others.
Recuva free data recovery software is a Windows utility that enables you to restore and recover deleted files and data from your hard disk or removable drive.
With Recuva’s simple interface, there are only a few easy steps to recover files that have been emptied from from the recycle bin, deleted from your hard drive, digital camera memory or mp3 player. It’s even possible to restore files deleted by bugs, viruses and crashes. Ideally, install Recuva before you need it, as just browsing the internet and downloading the installer can possibly overwrite the file you are trying to recover. When needed, run the software, choose the type of file for recovery. Recuva will assist you to identify the file by name, size, path or last modification and advise as to recoverability. Then it’s just a matter of selecting the file to recover.
If you’ve copied text from a webpage or a PDF file to an email, you’ve encountered the problem associated with formatting being copied along with the text. The result can look very strange indeed, with broken lines and odd fonts. Email replies are even worse, with all those problems, and the crazy >>> characters to boot.
The good news is that there are several free programs available that allow you to copy the text you want without the unwanted formatting.
One of my favorites is StripMail. It’s a stand-alone program that takes the clipboard contents and converts it into plain text without formatting.
It removes HTML and Word formatting, removes email reply “>” and “|” characters and will optionally remove line feeds so that broken lines are restored into proper paragraphs. At the touch of a button the stripped text is restored to the clipboard, ready for pasting into your document.
It works like a charm. I use it daily and it’s one of the most useful utilities on my PC.
The only downside of StripMail is that you have to run the program each time you want to clean some text. I overcome this by assigning a hotkey to run StripMail to automatically strip the clipboard contents ready for pasting. Removing formatting is then as simple as copying the text, hitting the hotkey and pasting.
You can create the hotkey by using the freeware program AutoHotkey.
The magic line you need for your AutoHotkey script is
#v::Run %A_ProgramFiles%Stripmailstripmail.exe -d -x
(assuming that you put StripMail in C:Program FilesStripmail or similar) which assigns the WindowsKey-V hotkey combination.
Now the next time you want to copy text from an email or website, just copy the text as normal, hit WindowsKey-V, and paste. Voila, the unwanted formatting has been removed.
Source : techsupportalert
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