Solving technology problems, one at a time
If the background-image property you have set in a stylesheet displays on PC, but not on Mac, make sure you haven’t accidentally specified the height or width of the div without a unit designation (i.e.
Continue readingFor about 4 months, I fought a war against greenwater algae in our big aquarium, home of our pet oscars. If you don’t know what an oscar is, they are the most cantankerous, petulant, opinionated tropical fish ever created and they make great pets. They are members of the cichlid family, and are extremely smart, even trainable.
My oscar, Galadrial, showing her friendlier side
But this article is not about oscars. It’s about their unwanted tankmate: greenwater algae. This algae was so thick I couldn’t even see the fish! They would swim in and out of the green gloom. There are those who will tell you that greenwater algae is good for your fish, and indeed, it may be. But it doesn’t look very good in your living room, and I wanted to be able to see the oscars! So I determined to rid my tank of the ugly, smelly stuff.
This looks a lot like my tank did. Try to imagine 120 gallons of this algae soup in your living room!
photo © Charles Yu, from an FAQ article on algae by George Booth
A client gave me a powerpoint presentation recently that contained a lot of symbols: arrows, greater-than-or-equal-to signs, and the like. They showed up fine in the powerpoint, but once incorporated into an MS Producer presentation, and published, they disappeared, or changed into letters.
It turns out the reason for this is that fonts are embedded into powerpoint presentations, but Producer is creating HTML pages, which of course are dependent on the end viewer’s computer for fonts, and on browser options for default font preferences.
When inserting symbols in powerpoint, (on a PC) it is not immediately obvious that you are switching fonts. By default, when you select “Insert Symbol” the font that comes up highlighted in the dialog is “Symbol” which does not always show up in a finished Producer presentation. Select another font, like Arial or Times New Roman and choose one of their symbols – they have almost as many.
The alternative would be to position graphics of the symbols in place of temperamental text characters. However, this isn’t such a great solution, since you can’t place inline graphics inside text boxes, so the symbols won’t stay in postion, especially if the font size varies a bit depending on the user’s computer.
Continue readingI had occasion to reinstall Windows2000 the other day and got a chance to see what the rest of the world endures when using anything but the most basic standard peripheral devices.
I have a two monitor setup, one a Dell 17″ flat screen, nothing special. The other is a 19″ Dell UltraSharp.
My reinstall was done from a ghost image, made from the install disk that came with the machine. A stripped, basic reinstall, which only had my network settings and network software added on, so at least I didn’t have to do that again.
So, the reinstall went quickly, but then came the endless trips to Windows update, restarts, and back to Windows update for more. Quite a few of the updates have to be installed separately, then the machine restarted.
Oh, did I forget to mention, after the reinstall, the left monitor, the digital Dell Ultrasharp, was black. I figured it would be OK, once I got around to opening the display control panel and setting it to use both monitors.
Continue readingYesterday I found that all the entries had disappeared off my main moveable type index page. I had recently posted an entry about popup windows, and another about Photoshop brushes, so I knew there should
Continue readingDreamweaver sometimes has trouble assigning styles consistently. When you select some text in Design View, and apply a CSS style, Dreamweaver seems to make a guess as to which element the style should be applied to, and doesn’t always guess right.
For example – try this:
Paste this into the BODY area of a new Dreamweaver HTML document.
It should look like this:
After a recent OSX update, I noticed that there are times the CD drives decide to stop functioning. The keyboard “eject” button no longer works, discs that are in them at the time disappear from
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