I have a little obsession with finding new information.  I love learning, and finding new articles, resources, and knowledge.

But there’s a problem with the internet: it sucks to read for long period of time online.  When I am learning something new, it helps to have a hard copy to read, highlight and make notes. I can’t help it, I’m just a nerd that way.

Print Friendly makes it easy to print any website simply.

This great site gives you three options:

• Add a print friendly button to your bookmark tool bar (which I use the most)
• Add a print friendly button to your website
• Enter any URL directly on their site to convert into a print friendly version

For example, when I entered my latest post at Dreamin’ the Life, it converts the page into a simplified version that looks like this:

You can hover over the pop up of your web page, and delete whatever areas that you don’t want printed (pictures, certain paragraphs, comments of a blog post). It simplifies the page, makes it easily edited so that you can print only what you want and save time, ink and paper.

Check out Print Friendly here.

I’m an obsessive list maker. And note taker. Things to buy. Things to do. Chores that I am procrastinating. Blog ideas. Business ideas. People to reconnect with. Toy wish list.

So, I’m trying out a new geeky toy: virtual post-its.

I love post-its. And now I’ve taken my love to another level.

They are cute little yellow stickies, that exist on the desktop of your computer. I can make as many lists as I want now, and easily update and change them.

There are a few different virtual post-it programs available. Right now I’m trying out the 3-M, name brand Post-It software. The downside is that the program isn’t free. But, there is a 30 day trial which I am using now. If I decide to go with this software, it’s only $19.99 when the trial period ends…. which isn’t too bad if it helps me organize my life on my desktop.

The cute little post-its look like this:

And have a little holder that when you click on, produces a new post it on your desktop:

Every time you click on it, it makes a little cartoonish sound that is either adorable, or highly annoying… I can’t decide.

The post-its have a few fun features:

• different color choices
• font selections
• alarms you can set to attach to certain post its
• easy right click options such as: trash note, insert time and date stamp, paste, etc.
• minimize capabilities that reduce the post it to a half inch size
• preview of the title of the post it that is minimized when you hover over it

This is what the cute little minimized post-it looks like:

Now, you’ll have to excuse me.  I have lots of lists to go make.

You can get the software and trial version here.

photo credit

So, I taught my brother this trick last night. I thought it was so beginner, that I would feel silly posting it here. And then I remembered that there is nothing too beginner here! He proved me wrong, and made me feel super-techy for a slight moment. He has had a laptop with Vista for a year, and had no idea that it existed, so I thought I’d share.

One of the few awesome things about Windows Vista (and now Windows 7, I think) is the Snipping Tool.

It lets you grab screen shots easily, and crop them instantly. It makes me stupidly happy, such as when I discovered that I could hit Ctrl U to view page source. Little things make me happy.

To use the Snipping Tool to grab a screen shot in Vista:

1. Go to the Search box in the Start Menu and type Snipping Tool, or just snip, and it will pop up.

2. Click on it, then click New.

3. Drag the cursor around the area that you want a screen shot. Then rename and save to your desktop.

I tried to take a screen shot of the Snipping Tool in the Start Menu, but the redundancy of the idea was just too much for Vista to handle. It wouldn’t let me. So we’ll have to settle on the Options box within the Snipping Tool. It’s such a handy little feature, and I use it for every post on here.

Favicon:(n.) Short for favorites icon. The little square icon/ picture that appears to the left of the URL in an address bar in a browser. Also, the icon to the left of a website name when you bookmark the page.

As in right here…

To create a favicon:
1. Go to a favicon generator site such as favicon.cc or browse for a free, already created  one at Free Favicon. The image must be very small, and perfectly square (16×16 pixels), so think simple. Complex pictures don’t work.

2. Download the favicon to your desktop.  Right click on the file, and if it isn’t already an .ico file change the name to read favicon.ico

3. Next, past this code in between your <head> <head/> tags or on Thesis, go to Thesis Options in the very bottom left hand corner and then go here, to header scripts:

Copy this code into the box, and change the url to your website name.

4. Next, go to your FTP software, and drag and drop the favicon.ico that you just created on your desktop into your root directory. Your root directory is the most basic folder where all the other files to your website live. In my Filezilla FTP it looks like this:

5. Refresh your web page, and voila! Your favicon appears. This techy stuff is like magic sometimes.
**Note: there are multiple ways to upload a favicon, but this is the one that seems to be easiest for me.

Another great tutorial about inserting an favicon is here.

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This is a neat, easy trick to organize my bookmark toolbar. I used to have a big, unorganized list in the bookmark drop down menu, that was so deep in bookmarks, that I couldn’t find anything recently saved.

1. When viewing different pages in tabbed browsing, simply click on the tab of your desired web page, and drag it and drop it into your toolbar above, right under the url.

2. Now you have the favicons, and the description of the page that is about an inch and a half long.
It looks like this:

3. Then right click on the new bookmark, and go to the bottom of the menu and pick Properties. Then you get a window that looks like this:

4. Go to the first line Name, and simply delete the all of the text.  Hit Save.

5. Now you have neat bookmarks of your favorite pages, identified simply by their favicons that looks like this:

6. These are pages I frequent usually every time I am on my computer, and now the bookmarks are filed neatly without the text.  You can fit 10x more icons without text in the bookmark toolbar, and it looks better too.  As a bonus, right click on the new icon and go down to New Separator for the clean little line to divide the icons. (I’ve done them half way through in the picture above).

Yesterday I was trying to confirm that my Feedburner code was correctly placed in my footer on a new website.  But I forgot how to view source.  Seems simple enough.  People that are techy take this kind of thing for granted.  I couldn’t remember how I did it 9 months ago when I first set up my blog.

1. Open the webpage that you want to view source.
2. Hit  CTRL U
3. Bam
4. It opens the source in a new window, and looks something like this…..

I don’t know how to read the programming language that it shows. Yet. But now, at least I can find it.