This tutorial may be particularly interesting to anyone who plots a series of data points over time with Excel. Using these instructions, one can mark “points of interest” along the X axis of an Excel chart in order to give context to the data. The author illustrates this by plotting his RSS subscribers over time, and the inserting a vertical line that shows the point at which is site was featured on a popular blog. The line can help to explain fluctuations in your data, and can be especially helpful when you are putting together a report that will be read by other people.

Have you been meaning to learn how to type, but never seem to get around actually starting the lessons? Wish you could bang out dozens of words per minute, but don’t want to shell out for typing software? Well for those of you who were not lucky enough to spend a few hours per week under the expert guidance of Mavis Beacon during your high school years, TypingWeb is here to fill the gab.

TypingWeb is a web application that offers a wide variety of typing exercises from beginner to advanced, right inside of your browser window. You can register with the site in order to keep track of your progress, or go through the lessons without registering.

Tips for Learning to Type

Here are a few tips for mastering the skill of typing:

• Don’t look! If you catch yourself cheating, tape a sheet of paper to the top of your keyboard and let it rest on top of your hands as you do the exercises.
• Concentrate on accuracy first, then work on speed.
• Read fast to boost your typing speed. While doing the speed drills I read ahead and try to type fast enough to catch up to my train of thought.

Advanced Typing Exercises

TypingWeb isn’t just for beginners — the site also offers advanced exercises for veteran typists to stretch their fingers. I did some of their accuracy and speed drills, and topped out at 101 WPM with 98% accuracy. I will admit that my performance dropped to around 50-75 WPM with 98% accuracy for exercises with complex usage of numbers and special characters… I have never been very good at no-look typing on the number row.

Twitter users: how fast do you type?

So Of Zen and Computing is wondering — how fast do our readers type? Give some of the TypingWeb speed drills a try (located under “Intermediate Course”) and tell us how you did via Twitter (@ozac). We’ll publish some of the responses right here.

Link via “Computer Keyboard Typing Course” by gHacks.net.

Forgotten Attachment Detector by Bhavesh Chauhan of Microsoft Office Labs is an add-on for the Outlook 2007 e-mail client that is meant to avoid this potentially embarrassing situation. Forgotten Attachment Detector, or FAD for short, will scan your messages for keywords that indicate your intention to include an attachment. If FAD think you planned to attach a file to an e-mail and you attempt to send the message without doing so, FAD will notify you of the potential omission and give you a chance to correct the mistake before the e-mail gets on its way.

Forgotten Attachment Detector is compatible with Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Outlook 2007.

Link via “Never Forget an Email Attachment in Outlook Again” by Digital Inspiration.

The complete function for adding a custom block of Lorem Ipsum filler text to your Word document is as follows:

=lorem(Number of paragraphs, Number of lines)

Just enter this function (starting with the equals sign) and hit Enter to generate your filler text. The parameters are optional, but allow you to specify how many paragraphs and lines of text should be generated. If this function does not work, click the Office Button, click “Word Options”, click “Proofing”, click “AutoCorrect Options”, and make sure “Replace text as you type” is checked off.

For more information about generating random text in your office documents, see the Microsoft Office KnowledgeBase article “How to insert sample text in Microsoft Office Word 2007”. It contains more information about the =lorem() function as well as instructions for inserting random text in older versions of Microsoft Word.

You can also generate Lorem Ipsum text using one of many online generators such as the Lipsum generator.

Tip via “Use Microsoft Word to Generate Lorem Ipsum Text”.

YourFonts.com is an online service that will make a high-quality custom font from your own handwriting. The service starts at $14.95 and is very simple to use.

Your personalized font is created by filling out a template worksheet. The YourFonts.com print template can be downloaded as a PDF file or printed directly from your web browser. You write a character in each cell on the template, scan it and send it back to YourFonts.com. It takes about 15 minutes to get your font - it is available via download and e-mail.

YourFonts.com also provides a space to include your signature, which you can add to e-mail messages and documents. Visit the YourFonts.com site to get started building your personalized font.

Link via “How to Create a Custom Font from Your Own Handwriting” by Simple Help.

“The Ultimate Mac Setup for Web Designers (60 Apps)” by David Appleyard of AppStorm is a robust list of Mac applications useful to Web Designers for working on design projects and managing their business. The list includes project management software, design software, text editors, applications for editing and encoding audio & video, file transfer software, databases, analytics software and backup solutions.

There’s little doubt that OS X is a popular platform for web designers - it offers an enormous range of software for designing, managing, developing and publishing websites. Whether you prefer to use an all-in-one environment for designing websites or a range of different applications, there’s a tool to suit you perfectly.

You do not have to be a web designer to find this list of applications useful. We here at Of Zen and Computing do more web development than design, but still use many of the entries in this list to get the job done. Some of our favorites are iCal (plus Google Calendar and Spanning Sync) for scheduling and organization, SubEthaEdit for writing code, CyberDuck and rsync for file transfer, Subversion for source control, Google Analytics for stats analysis and SuperDuper for backups.

“One way to move iPhoto ratings into Adobe Bridge” by ben42 of Mac OS X Hints describes a process for moving your iPhoto ratings over to Adobe’s file organization & management software Bridge.

I wanted to move my (thousands of) images from iPhoto 6 albums into Adobe Bridge folders, but I didn’t want to lose my ratings. I never found a way to make the ratings readable in Bridge, but this method turns them into keywords that can be seen in Bridge.

This solution is a workaround for the lack of a direct way to transfer ratings from iPhoto to Adobe Bridge. The process is to create keywords for each iPhoto rating, convert them to IPTC keywords, and then export your images from iPhoto. A few different applications are required, but this definitely sounds better than doing the conversion manually.

“How to Move Mails from one E-mail Account to another for Free” by Amit Agarwal of Digital Inspiration describes how to transfer messages from one e-mail account to another with a free service called TrueSwitch.

TrueSwitch is a set of services that simplifies the process of getting a new Internet Service Provider by making it easy to move over your data. Here is a description of TrueSwitch from their About page:

Many ISPs use proprietary software for email and on-line only storage of address book and calender information etc., and make cancellation difficult thus, until now, users faced a considerable effort in switching ISPs. TrueSwitch, removes these barriers providing users with the freedom to choose the best ISP for their needs.

Agarwal’s article on TrueSwitch focuses on e-mail, illustrating how e-mail can be migrated between various providers such as Windows Live Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, as well as Microsoft Exchange mail accounts which are commonly found in the business world. In order to use TrueSwitch you must give the service your e-mail username and password. It will then use those credentials to transfer your e-mail messages online from the old service to your new account.

TwitterBerry is an application that lets you use Twitter from your BlackBerry. “How to Use Twitter from Your BlackBerry” by Simple Help is a step-by-step tutorial on installing TwitterBerry on your BlackBerry. Each instruction is accompanied with a screenshot of the step.

If you are looking for a few good people to follow once TwitterBerry is up and running, here are a few suggestions: our pal @rossm wrote this tutorial, the official Of Zen and Computing account is @ozac and you can find me at @tomharrison.

Photo by edans used under a Creative Commons License.

SpeedFan works with Windows 9x, ME, NT, 2000, 2003, XP, Vista and Vista 64 bit. You can download it directly from the SpeedFan download page. Once you have the application up and running, there are a number of different tabs that give various readings regarding your system’s internal temperature and fan speed.

Main Readings

The main readings tab gives you a high level overview of your system status. You can see CPU usage, fan speed, the temperature of both your system and any hard drives that were found by SpeedFan. You also have the option to change the speed of your system’s fans from this tab.

S.M.A.R.T. Tab

The S.M.A.R.T. tab gives you insight into the health and performance of your hard drives. S.M.A.R.T. is a monitoring system for hard disks that aims to help predict and/or prevent failures. For more information on S.M.A.R.T. you can take a look at the Wikipedia page for Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology.

Charts

The last tab you will find in the SpeedFan interface is called “Charts”. Here you can get a visual look at everything that SpeedFan is monitoring. In this screenshot, you can see a graph of my HTPC’s system and hard drive temperatures.

Be careful when changing fan speeds

If you plan on using SpeedFan to change fan speeds, be sure to know exactly what you are doing. A system that is not properly cooled can overheat, possibly resulting in hardware damage and/or data loss.

Link via “4 Applications That You Do Not Know (But Should)” by gHacks.net.