Computer mice are pretty versatile these days but here’s a very neat little freeware program that adds even more functionality to your favourite rodent. It’s called AltMove and once it’s running you can quickly move, resize and hide windows with a simple keyboard and mousse key combination, and it even works on windows that do not normally support move and resize. If you have a centre mouse button, or clickwheel, pressing it opens a magnifier screen, and there are three simple ‘gestures’ with the right mouse button. Click and hold the right button and move the mouse down and the open window minimises, click right, hold and drag upward to maximise and click right, hold and drag right lets you change the windows transparency. Read the rest of this entry »
As you may know you can make icons manually out of ordinary JPEG and bitmap images, by fiddling around with the size and format. It’s easy enough, just a bit time-consuming but why bother? Here’s a simple one-click solution, called Easy PictureIcon. Just select your image and it is automatically converted to the three commonest sizes (16 x 16, 32 x 32 and 48 x 48 pixels). All you have to do is decide if you want to compress trim or fit, select background transparency, and where to save it. Go on, give your desktop a makeover, and don’t forget, you can change the icons in most applications simply by replacing them with one of your choosing, providing it’s the same size and has the same filename.
A one-way mirror is basically just like any other mirror, just that it has the ability of reflecting light on one side while on the other, it is transparent. Typical mirrors achieve a high degree of reflectiveness on one side, leaving the reverse opaque to optical light. This is done by covering the glass layer with a silvered coating. One-way mirrors, however, use half silvered surfaces in order to achieve a balance between reflectiveness and transparency, in combination with carefully adjusted amounts of light.
Practically, the silvered coating is only half of that of a typical mirror, meaning that it reflects half of the incoming light, leaving the other half pass right through. The concept is relatively similar to that used in lasers. Inside a laser, photons of light are being bounced between two mirrors, one with 100 percent reflectiveness and the other with 99 percent. Read the rest of this entry »
Computer mice are pretty versatile these days but here’s a very neat little freeware program that adds even more functionality to your favourite rodent. It’s called AltMove and once it’s running you can quickly move, resize and hide windows with a simple keyboard and mousse key combination, and it even works on windows that do not normally support move and resize. If you have a centre mouse button, or clickwheel, pressing it opens a magnifier screen, and there are three simple ‘gestures’ with the right mouse button. Click and hold the right button and move the mouse down and the open window minimises, click right, hold and drag upward to maximise and click right, hold and drag right lets you change the windows transparency. Read the rest of this entry »
