How to pause animation in PowerPoint

If you have a long animation looping animation that you want to be able to pause and then resume, there's an easy way to do so with the keyboard. Press the 1 key, which puts you in the mode where you can type in a slide number to jump to. In this mode, all animation is paused. To get out of this mode without jumping to another slide press the ~ key.

There are lots of keyboard shortcuts in Powerpoint; press F1 to get a list. Note that one of them is listed as "pause" (S key or + key) but this doesn't actually seem to work in all the situations that the trick described above does.

Tested an known to work in PPT 2003.

Add 960x600 resolution (16x10 aspect ratio) to ATI Radeon display drivers

ATI doesn't offer a lot of different resolutions built into their drivers. If you have a wide aspect monitor (16x10, for instance) and you want to run at a lower resolution that preserves the aspect ratio, you'll need this hack (I do it to make full-screen flash videos play smoothly 0n my 1920x1200 LCD). All it takes is regedit and a bit of attention to detail.

First, you need to determine the registry key you need to edit. This will vary by computer, but can be looked up in the catalyst control panel (see first pic). Note the "2D driver file path". Now open regedit (start>run>regedit), and navigate to that key, which will be something like HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Video\{random numbers here which you just looked up}\0000]

Next you want to edit DALNonStandardModesBCD1; just follow the format of the binary data, and add the resolution (+ refresh rate) to the end of the key.



See second pic for example that adds 960x600 at 60hz. Note the leading zeros, required if the resolution is less than 1000. The order of the lines does not matter, but those leading zeros (and the zeros between the resolution and the refresh rate) must be preserved.

Finally, reboot. Tested and known to work with the 6.9 drivers. Thanks where it's due: I first figured this out from this forum post.

Convert PDF to PNGs for free using ghostscript

Ghostscript is PDF and PS rendering program for Unix ported to pretty much all OSes, modern ones included (AKA Windows). With this free, GNU program, you can make high resolution PNG files from PDFs, which you can then edit with any regular drawing program, such as PhotoShop or the Gimp.

Just open the PDF in GSview, and select convert from the file menu. The dialog box will let you select the output file type (I suggest PNG16m if you want color, otherwise PNG256 is fine if you just plan to print the file). Use 600DPI (aka resolution) if you plan to print the files and want sharp text (lower DPI is fine for screen use). After you hit OK ghostscript will ask you for the output filename. The non-obvious but important trick is that the file name should include the following text: %03d this will cause ghost script to output a separate PNG file for each page in the PDF. For instance, you can use the output filename output%03d.png. Otherwise you just get the first page.

Google Chrome now supports spell-check in blogger posts

I've been using Google Chrome for a while, and on the whole it's a nice web browser. Given that the main job of a web browser is just to render webpages, how much value added can there really be? In truth, not that much, but Chrome does a very nice job of handling tabs, wastes less screen space than any other browser, and is quite fast. It also uses less RAM than IE and Firefox, if you run it in single process mode, though that does eliminate one of its nicest features: if the browser crashes, it only kills the current tab, and all others remain running.

There was just one nagging little problem, up to version 2.0.172.28. Though chrome has a built-in spell checker (not the very best, but it does a good enough job at making suggestions for most people), it only works on a subset of web forms. Most notably, it never worked properly in Blogger. Now, however, it does. Just right click in the form, and select Spellchecker options to enable it.

If you do come across a misspelling that Chrome cannot correct, you might try FreeSpell, which adds a very high quality spelling suggestions to all windows programs.

Remap keys under windows without TSR!

SharpKey is a simple, free program that uses the built-in keyboard map (via the windows registry) to change the meaning of keys on your keyboard. The classic use for this is to remap the left caps lock key to be a control key. On older Thinkpads it can also be used to give yourself a Windows key (I like to remap the useless browser keys for this purpose). Since it just changes the underlying keyboard map there is no possibility of macros, or fancy things like that. But that also means that you don't have to have the program resident in memory in order for the remapping to work (hence the old DOS joke in the title of this post). Highly recommended.

Free or low cost tax 2008 prep online - 2009 pricelist

The IRS has a website listing the free online tax preparation websites for your 2008 taxes for the 2009 April 15th deadline.  All the sites offer free Federal filing, but most charge you for state filing. Turbo tax does both for free if you make less than $30K and live a select set of states. I live in California, so that doesn't help me. Tax slayer has free prep for both fed and state if you are below 25, or make less than $10 k.

California also has a website that lists free state tax prep. I've never heard of most of those companies, so I'm a little hesitant to use them. The also have a state-developed "calfile" site that is free to most all Californians (here's a less then ecstatic review from 2005). The ultimate cheap option is to use one free site for your fed taxes and one for your state taxes, but as you will see below that only saves you $10, vs. the cheapest reputable pay sites.  Doing both taxes on one site is nice because you don't have to double-enter anything. 

If you can't do it for free, how much does it cost from the major providers to do both if you make less than $55k (unless otherwise noted)? (prices as of 2-5-09)

Tax$imple $10

H & R block: $30

TaxAct $14

Turbo Tax Freedom Edition (if you make less than $30k) $10

Tax slayer $10

Complete Tax: $15 (if you make less than $31k).

(note to get these prices you may have to follow the link from the IRS website).

I've used all of these, over the years, and they are all OK. I've been most please with Turbo Tax and H&R block over the years, interface wise. But none of them stand out as being all that different, really. 

Some somewhat out of date reviews

Netbooks compared on price and features

I made a matrix of Netbooks, split by OS (Linux or Windows) and Hard disk (SSD or HHD):

OS / HD	Linux OS	Windows OS
SSD	Asus Eee PC4g 512MB/4GB/4cell $250 Acer Aspire One 1GM/8GB/3cell $280 Acer Aspire One 512MB/8GB/3cell $329 Acer Aspire One 512MB/16GB/3cell $350
mechanical		ASUS EeePC 900HA1GB/160/4cell $329 ASUS EeePC 904HA 1GB/160/4cell $340 Acer Aspire One 1GB/160GB/6cell $380 MSI Wind U100 1GB/120GB/3cell $350 Lenovo IdeaPad S10 512MB/80GB/3cell $350

Notice anything interesting? Netbooks only appear along the diagonal of the matrix. It seems you can't get a Windows netbook with a solid state disk, or a Linux netbook with a mechanical hard drive. A strange set of optimizations, if you ask me. Given how much excitement there is about this category, you'd think that there would be at least some examples in the other two cells of the matrix. True, not every netbook is listed here, but this is a representative sample of what I could find on Amazon and Newegg. I'd welcome reader comments on netbooks I missed.