Computer and Web Articles

All you need to know is in the site’s tagline: One killer gear deal, one item at a time until it’s gone.

Outdoor gear, one deal at a time, is offered on the SteepAndCheap website; you never know what you’ll find when you log on. There might be a deal on anything from a pair of tele boots to some nice hiking shorts, a pair of twin-tip skis to a pair of last year’s snowboard bindings. As you never know what great deal is being offered, it’s easy to get sucked into returning many times throughout the day. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

A few days ago my friend bought a pair of Electric sunglasses for $17 (normally retail around $90). As I write this article, the current deal is a Dragon DXS Goggle Ionized Lens. It normally retails around $79.95, but it’s being sold for $25 on the SteepandCheap website right now.

SteepAndCheap.com also gives you the option to subscribe to “the Daily Dose,” which is an e-mail that comes out every midnight and fills you in on the coming day’s deals.

Question: You had a column item some time ago where you talked about dragging the desktop icons to the recycle bin, and you talked about the icons having the small, black arrow. But some have an arrow and some don’t. What’s the difference?

Answer: Icons without arrows are usually not shortcuts. Instead, they actually represent the program or file itself - if you delete these icons, you delete the programs or files.

For example, let’s say you save a Word document to your desktop. The icon representing your document won’t have an arrow on it, and if you delete it, you delete the Word doc itself.

Only when you see the little black arrows on the bottom left of an icon can you be sure that it represents a shortcut to (an alternative way to jump to) a file or program. These are always safe to delete so feel free to go right ahead and do so if you’re not clicking on them regularly.

A few weeks ago a dear friend of mine emailed me with his unique dilemma: the emails he was sending out via Outlook Express had recently stopped being saved in his “Sent” folder. What was he to do?

I was stumped. After asking him various follow up questions and racking my brain, I could think of no reason his email program would suddenly begin acting so oddly.

More follow up questions and fifteen minutes of online searching later, I found the answer. If you’re experiencing the same problem as my friend, a very likely solution can be found right here: http://tinyurl.com/kyd23.

Attention all PowerPoint users: the Ctrl key is your friend! Make quick copies of objects in your presentations by holding down the CTRL key while dragging the items elsewhere on your screen. Holding the CTRL key actually “drags off” a new copy of any item you wish to copy. Give it a try and you’ll see how easily and quickly you can duplicate various components within your presentations.

Another great tip: hold down the CTRL key when you click the the slide show “View” button. This will open a mini preview window for you that shows the current slide in Slide Show mode. Neat!

Zillow.com is a fun site that’s not just for real estate agents. Type in an address-any address. Zillow will search its database and show you the estimated value of that specific home or building! I looked up the California house my parents purchased in 1980; it was fun to compare the original purchase cost with the current cost that Zillow estimated.

Other information on my parents’ house was also available: square footage, lot size, number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms, the cost of other homes in the neighborhood, etc. And yes, the information was all correct.

The big bummer here, though, is that Zillow is still in Beta and doesn’t have information on real estate for the entire U.S.; Summit County is one of the areas where information isn’t available, so you can tune into www.summitdaily.com and find your local real estate information.

If you, at any point during the next couple of weeks, wonder what time it is for me down here in New Zealand, I recommend visiting the World Time Server website.

I began using this site after unintentionally waking up a dear friend in Switzerland one too many times with my awkwardly-timed phone calls.

Remarkably easy to use, the WTS website (www.worldtimeserver.com) is always ready to tell you what time it is anywhere in the world. Choose the country/area you’re interested in from the alphabetical list and you’re immediately shown the exact time. WTS is a definite “must-bookmark” site if you have friends and contacts around the world.

The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) put together a tremendously fun conglomeration of entertaining web pages for kids who enjoy puzzles, games, riddles, brain teasers, illusions, magic tricks and quizzes.

Kids can explore the NIEHS pages and play a Mind-Reader game, browse through amazing optical illusions, test their knowledge with a fun storybook quiz, or exercise their brains with tricky riddles.

For brainteasers, riddles and illusions, have your kids visit: http://niehs.nih.gov/kids/braint.htm. For a fantastic list of fun games (think Connect 4, Science Challenge, Spelling games and Matching games), have them try http://niehs.nih.gov/kids/games.htm instead. Both sites are also offered in Spanish-text versions.

Find what you’re looking for more quickly by becoming a smarter searcher. Yahoo! users should bookmark http://tools.search.yahoo.com/shortcuts and visit the page regularly to access the best Yahoo! search shortcuts available.

Looking for the cheapest gas price in town? Search Yahoo! by typing the word “gas” followed by your zip code. Did you miss the big game? Type your favorite sports team, then the word “score” into the Yahoo! search box. My favorite is the conversion tip: Type in “convert” followed by the amount of money you’d like to convert, then the word “to,” then the type of money you’d like to convert the money to. (Example: convert 300 yen to U.S. dollars).

You’re browsing the web with Firefox. You’ve got more than 20 tabs open, and the tabs are so small and squished together you can’t read the text on them anymore. Now … if only you could remember which tab showed your Google results without having to click on each individual tab.

Tab Preview to the rescue! This Firefox extension allows you to hover over each of your tabs and quickly preview each tab’s contents. If you understand what I’m writing about here, chances are it’ll be useful to you - especially you power-browsers out there who love having a ton of tabs open at once.

The Tab Preview Extension requires Firefox 1.5 or higher and can be downloaded here: http://tinyurl.com/7lzpe.