MS Word: How to Make All Caps?

I was asked yesterday how to turn a whole paragraph of text in Microsoft Word to all caps. Here’s how you do it.

Let’s say you have a paragraph of text like so:

Sample “Lorem ipsum” text written in Word.

1. Select all the text you want to change.
2. Right-click the text and select “Font” from the pop-up menu.

Pop-up menu when text is highlighted. “Font” is selected from the menu.

The Font formatting menu screen displays.

3. Select the “All caps” check box in the “Effects” grouping.
Notice that in the Preview window, our text is now in all upper case or capital letters.

MS Word Font formatting window with “All caps” selected.

4. Click the “OK” button.
Your original text displays in all uppercase or capital letters.

Sample “Lorem ipsum” text written in Word, now in all capital letters.

Other common uses of this: strikethrough all text; set superscript like with 1^st, 2^nd, or 3^rd; set subscript to create molecular formulas like H₂O.

harassment takes a back burner

So it seems that the whole Winnie Pooh stuff has gone away. We can only hope.

The Taquito is on the way soon. We've been thinking a lot about home movies recently. While we don't have a fancy shmancy movie camera, we do have a small camera that will take clips, and we can take still pictures like a muthatrucker. So what we need is editing. We have been really interested in Jahshaka, the open source movie editing software. But then recently, we've been seeing some free online tools. Eyespot is one such online editor. Jumpcut is another. We haven't tested any of these, but we are willing to check them out.

Another big thing we have been seeing a lot of online talk about it Firefox extensions. Now, we love ourselves some Firefox extensions. And we are aghast to find that SessionSaver is a veritable memory sieve. We've been wondering where our memory has been going (and no, this has nothing to do with the parking lot at the slam). TabMixPlus is supposed to be an excellent replacement for SessionSaver, with a whole bunch of tabbing and memory saving built in. W00t! Plus, our good buddies at lifehacker have been putting together some interesting Firefox extension packages. We're excited about those, too. And lastly, this might be our favorite extension since "Open all linked pictures in new window": DownThemAll! This little bugger downloads everything off a site. It's like pictures and sitesucker all in one. Neat!

Now here are some things we might classify under web design and general design. Firstly is an AJAX-enabled color themer: Color Tool 2.0.1. We've used lots of themers before and this one is nice, too. Next is an awesome gallery of classic arcade artwork. One of our earliest calls to the world of design was the come-on in the darkness of the Bunny Hutch and Corbin Bowl arcades. Wait, rephrase. Oh, nevermind. Behold: The Arcade Art Library! Now granted, we've never Varkon in our lives, but damn, that's some great sideart. And lastly, there is EveryStockPhoto.com. This site collects Creative Commons licensed pictures and allows you to use them at your whims. Nice.

If you've been following our trevails in this blog, you'll know that we have some serious-ass networking issues. We've tried a lot, but we're always willing to try more. We're hoping Network Magic won't bite up in the ass. Yet another software package that promises to make networking easier, file and printer sharing a snap, and etc., etc., etc. And then there's Vyew, which promises easy web conferencing. Though when they require Flash updates and recommend IE and Java, we wonder at how much we would really use the damn thing to begin with.

2 more that we can't leave without telling you about. First is a nifty Ray Carver site we found, and it includes a few (3) audio snippets of Ray laughing. Joy. Pure joy. PinkDome is a local lefty news & politics site our friend Gen tipped us to. So far, we haven't been greatly offended.

AJAX: ajaxwrite on the web

AjaxWrite promises MS Word-like functionality in a web app. Very neat.

software: background switcher, project alternative

Our friend Big Poppa E has a Mac notebook computer. And mostly, we do not covet it. Except one night, we spied that it changes the background on his desktop every once in a while. We tend to think that things like that are distracting, but still, it would be nice to do.

Enter John’s Background Switcher, which does it for you, for free, on your Windows box. And it can poll from flickr, the web, or elsewhere on your computer. Neat!

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We cannot load up MS Project on our computer. We don’t know why, but we can’t. We have been using an open source project manager for a while, but it leaves much to be desired. But we found a nice free alternative, Open Workbench, that gives a lot of power and flexibility. Very nice.

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Bonus link: We work in a slightly-noise-but-not-so-horribly-noisy office. There is a dull background noise that varies just enough as to be noticeable. What’s a taco to do?

Pink Noise. Honestly, we thought pink noise was a joke we heard once on a Kleptone’s album. But it’s not. It’s not quite white noise. There is variance to it. And here comes the pink noise generator. These handly apps create a small section of pink noise that is easily looped. We prefer pink noise #1, which is 2 minutes long. The #3 loop is too long for us at 6 minutes.

how to bury your dead

This news piece was so incredibly sad, we waited 9 days to post it. From Reuters, the government is preparing for the upcoming pandemic of avian flu. Are they stockpiling anti-flu vaccines? Are they making the world country cleaner, safer? Well, that’s one way of looking at it. Presenting: How to bury your dead. In your backyard.

“We talk about how people should bury their dead in their backyards, how far from the septic systems,” said Dorothy Teeter, director of the King County public health department in Seattle. “In case you’re wondering, it’s $20 apiece for high-quality body bags.”

But while you are still alive, you might enjoy your music online. Here’s something we’ve been meaning to try out: Picard from MusicBrainz. It promises to help you organize and tag your mp3s. Okay.

Also, while you are still above ground, you might check out MIT’s free open courses. You think “burying your dead 101” is a course? Don’t bet on it.

Roll your own Windows

No, it’s probably not what you are thinking. We love WindowBlinds for a lot of things. Chief amongst them is that you can change around the metaphor (slightly) of your desktop. But second to the ability to roll up your windows.

Behold, where there’s a will, there is a freeware. WinRoll does an awesome job of rolling up your windows so that you just have the title bar floating in space. This is way better than minimizing them all the time. And you get the added bonus of people coming over and saying “How did you do that?” Just right-click on a title bar and voila! Smack your mama and call her Sally! Cuz that’s just how we roll.
Oh yes. One of the features we always liked in the otherwise destable Nortan SystemWorks is the ability to recall stuff that you might have accidentally lost or thrown out or otherwise cleared out of your recycle bin.

Behold (again): Restoration will scan your files and then make sure you don’t lose them. Plus, it won’t tell you have 250 errors on your machine when in fact your compy is just fine. W00t!

making it work for you

After Hamachi didn’t work for us to network a printer, we were disappointed and a bit downtrodden. Though we still have the network up at home, it doesn’t function like a regular network (least as far as we can tell). But regardless, we are still trying other things.

One thing that looks promising is Bonjour. Now, Bonjour is something that popped up under Processes in our Task Manager and ZoneAlarm a while ago, and we could never quite figure out what the heck it does or who put it there. We believe it is attached to iTunes in some way. And we did figure out that crippling it crippled our access to the Internets. Which saddened us greatly. And lifehacker says an actual download of Bonjour (different from say its embedded cousin in Itunes, perhaps?) can help us set up networked printers. Joy! Ask Metafilter also has some interesting lines on how to share information across computers in-house.

Edit: Yes, iTunes 5.0 and beyond installs Bonjour without your knowing it. Both Bonjour and iTunes talk to the Internets separately, as evidenced by their separate ZoneAlarm calls.

Also on the networking tip, lifehacker has a handy slice of info about how to set up subdomains on a server.

It would be passe to say now that GoogleMaps (Double True!) is a killer app. But we’d say it anyway. One of the things we love about it is being able to link it into our web pages. Exploration Age has a nice tutorial about how to add Google Maps to any web page.

It would also be passe to gush over Firefox. But we just came across yet another extension that makes us squeee like little girls. X-Ray for Firefox. With a simple right click you can see the markup of a page. Shazam. For little hackers like us who learn by watching, this is amazing. Kids these days have it so fucking easy. Back in my day we had to view source if we wanted to check markup!

And, if you can’t make it work, if you can’t get it done yourself, you can always ask a favor of someone. Favorville is a neat web community that allows people to ask and offer favors. Rock.

handy tools

Work Happy (via lifehacker) offers up a nice toolbar tool called foobar from Matrix Software. It’s a handy collection of tools that life down in the toolbar zone. The thing we really like about it is the time tracker.

But, oh! We fawn and we drool for FolderSize, which grants us a long-desired ability to see the size of a folder without hopping down into the folder properties. Swoon!

We have been on the lookout for tools and apps for our new/old Mac. Todayt, the mighty lifehacker gave us a collection of apps, some free some not. Some, then, we shall use and some we shan’t. Essential OS X Applications from MacSpecialist.

A site called Flagrant Disregard offers up a bunch of flickr “toys” which look interesting. Essentially, they are tools to mess with pictures on flickr. Nice.

And lastly today, we have a bunch of parenting hacks from parent hacks.  No, it’s not a site of parents who are hacks, but you know, hacks for, like, your kids… if you were Mr. Smith and your kids were Neo. Or something. Anyway, we like them.

Who stole the email?

No, today’s header is not a snarky re-working of Public Enemy’s masterpiece, “Who Stole the Soul”. Today, we talk about selling email addresses.

We have long been jealous (a wee bit, anyway) of our friends with their fancy domains and multiple email addresses. Why? Because they can set up email addresses for wherever they have to enter one (say, “yahoo@mydomain.com”). Then, when they get email to “yahoo@mydomain.com”, they know it’s yahoo BS spam.

Ah, but be jealous no longer, my boychicks! Gmail (oh, we love gmail), has got your back. Keen user Kevin Gunn figured out a very nice little hack for your gmail account. When you enter an email address, use “username+yahoo@gmail.com”. All your email–for those we-just-want-to-make-sure-this-is-a-real-address emails– will still get to you. However, they are also tagged with “+yahoo”. Set up a filter for those emails with “username+” in the “to” header, and bingo: instant spam filter.

Plus you know who stole your email address.

Once again, this is it
Turn it up
Here we go
But this time the rhyme
Gonna ask who did the crime
Then let’s get down to the nitty-gritty….

On the cheap: software

We love open-source software. It’s usually small, fast, and does one or two things wickedly well.

As we mentioned yesterday, Firefox 1.5 launched yesterday. Aside from a few extensions not working properly (grrr), it seems to work pretty well. Our current biggest upset is that the Calendar extension no longer works. We use Calendar to keep track of some serious stuff, so that’s a bad thing there. Lifehacker (whom we love) has a workaround for some externsion blargaring.

We were particularly excited about installing the update, as we had installed a Beta version on our machine, which created a huge Status Area at the bottom of the browser. Uninstalling the Beta did nothing to erase it. But thankfully, as we suspected it would, the release version wiped it up.

But more than browsers, we love to actually do stuff. And for that, we look to the Open CD, which has recently launched version 3.1. We have also recently found that Wikipedia has a nice directory of open-source software. The one software that we are most looking forward to is Jahshaka, a video and movie-making software.

On a parallel topic, we love things that make us more productive. This is why we began this who blogging thing. Okay, one of the reasons. The blog groupies are amazing. We recently heard Paul Ford — author of Gary Benchley, Rockstar, and frequent contributor to our favorite morning news site, The Morning News — on NPR talking about disctractions and computing. He had some compelling suggestions, but we don’t think we will be installing WordPerfect for DOS any time soon (sorry).

But he mentioned a keyboard that “stores your text”, but doesn’t do anything else. We were intrigued. Imagine, no (computer) distractions as you type! Lo and behold, here is the AlphaSmart Neo. It seems like it’s all the use of a portable word processing program–check out that fancy but low-fi software!–, but with none of the laptop overhead to go with it. (It dumps into a computer via USB come time to print.)

We are thinking of buying the rechargeable version, which has an AC cord. 269 bucks is a lot, but we are also thinking that future generations of Free Tacos (Free Taquitos?) will get much use out of it. Especially when daddy won’t let them chat or surf after hours.