Category: Computer tips

Recently, I received a cool looking gift from Microsoft – a Microsoft Arc Touch Mouse. The mouse lies flat for storage, and you bend it, to snap it into shape, when you want to use it.

It has a very small transmitter, that sticks out about 1/2″ when plugged into the computer’s USB port. When you’re not using the transmitter, just put it on the front or back of the mouse, and it magically (or magnetically) sticks there.

Instead of a scroll wheel, there is a slider, and that feature was very easy to use.

Testing the Arc Touch Mouse

The mouse was easy to install and use – I just plugged in the transmitter, and it was ready to go. On my first try, I didn’t bend the mouse far enough (one click, instead of two), so it didn’t work. After checking the Getting Started guide, I gave the mouse another click and it fired up.

The mouse handled well, for the most part, but it was a little sticky when trying to do some fine work. Maybe it gets better when the mouse has been used a little longer, or the operator has more experience.

Back to My Old Mouse

I worked with the Arc Touch mouse for a couple of hours, but couldn’t get used to it, so I’ve put it away for now. It would be better suited to someone with larger hands than mine, I think.

In my hand it felt too wide, and I was always conscious of the edges of the mouse. For now, I’ll stick with my little Logitech M305, which is a better size for me.

Have You Tried It?

Have you used the Arc Touch mouse? Did you like it and stick with it?

___________

Help! Would you please try to add a comment here, and let me know if you have any problems?

[Update] Thanks for the help — things seem to be working better now.

Flooded With Comment Spam

Over on the Contextures Blog, I’ve been flooded with spam comments. The Akismet plugin catches some of the comments, and puts them into the Spam list. However, there is still a long list of comments in the Moderation queue every day.

Most of those Moderation comments are spam, but I don’t want to accidentally delete any of the valid comments. I appreciate it when someone takes the time to add a comment, and don’t want to lose those.

I accidentally deleted one of Dick Kusleika’s comments yesterday, because something in his comment was on the “banned words” list. No, not his name – I had blocked “SEO” because of all the spam on that topic, and Dick’s blog is dailydoseofexcel.com.  Oops!

So, it takes a while to check through them, approving the real comments, and trashing the rest (carefully!)

Growmap Anti Spam Plugin

Today I installed the Growmap Anti Spam Plugin, which might prevent some of those fake comments from being posted.

It adds a check box below the comment form, and the comment is not accepted unless you check that box. That sounds easy enough, but sometimes things don’t work exactly as expected.

If you add a comment here, and have any problems, please let me know. ddalgleish AT contextures.com

Thanks!

______

Last week, on a very snowy day, my sister, Nancy Nelson, drove to a nearby town, to do a presentation at an Electronics Day for grade 8 girls. One of the tech teachers at the school is trying to get young people interested in engineering and technology.

Nancy is an electrical engineer, and a professor at Conestoga College in Cambridge. Her program, that she talks about in the video, is “Integrated Telecommunication and Computer Technologies”.

The event was shown on the 6 o’clock news in London, and you can see Nancy in the video below. She starts talking around the 1:00 minute mark in the video.

At the end of the video, a couple of the girls are interviewed, and one seems interested in a technology career. The other girl has something more traditional in mind. I wonder if the split was really 50-50, or if the reporter looked for two girls with opposite views. Maybe they should all consider working with Excel!

_______

After a long hard day in Excel, this wine glass might be just about the right size. Did they name it “XL” in honour of our favourite spreadsheet program?

In case you can’t read the box labels, that are behind the glasses, they say, “XL Wine Glass – holds a whole bottle of wine!”

P.S. I wasn’t sure what category to assign to this post, so I picked “Computer tips”. 😉

_______________

Sure, you can program in Excel VBA, but what other programming languages do you know? Maybe VBA is enough, but if you’d like to expand a bit, there is a free course in JavaScript programming that I’m trying out.

The course is online and interactive, and they’ll send you an email each week, announcing the new lesson. You don’t have to register on the website, unless you want to track your progress as you go along.

Easy Steps

To get started, I did the mini-course, “Getting Started with Programming”.

So far, I like the lesson setup and interaction. You read a short instruction step, type something in the interactive box, and get immediate feedback. In the screenshot below, I’m in lesson 5 of the total 8 lessons.

I lost track of the time, but best guess is that it took about an hour to go through all the lessons. In the CodeYear course, you’ve got a week before the next lesson arrives, so you could spread it out over a few days. Maybe those lessons will be tougher than the lessons in this intro course.

You’re Not in Excel VBA Anymore

The course is just starting, but I’ve already learned a few key differences between JavaScript programming and Excel VBA programming.

1. Variables are case sensitive. In Excel VBA, after you define a variable, you can type it in the code, and the case automatically corrects. I use that as a tool for catching misspellings. In JavaScript, that doesn’t happen.
2. End with a semi-colon. At the end of each line of JavaScript code, you have to remember to type a semi-colon. Unless, of course, the semi-colon is on the next line, with a curly bracket. This might take me a while to remember!
3. Arrays are enclosed in square brackets. In Excel, we use curly brackets instead.
4. Three equal signs for “equal to”. In Excel VBA, it only requires one = to check if one value is equal to another.

This should be interesting! If you sign up too, you can let me know in the comments, and we can compare notes.

______________

One of my hobbies is photography, and I post the results on the family blog, and a few on the Contextures blog. Unlike the old days of film, when you thought about the cost of each print, now you can take hundreds of pictures, and not worry.

Usually, things go smoothly, and I upload the pictures from my Nikon D3100 digital camera (Amazon link) to the computer, with no problems. The camera takes photos and videos, and I clear it off after each upload, to make room for the next photo session. Those videos can take up a lot of disk space!

Missing Pictures

Something went wrong yesterday though. I pressed Ctrl +A to select all the pictures on the camera’s media card, and copied them to the computer. Then, I put a backup copy on my laptop, as usual, just to be safe. I always take a quick look at the thumbnails too, just to be sure that the pictures were copied. After that, I cleared the pictures from the camera, and put it away.

A short time later, I took a closer look at the pictures on my laptop, and realized that several were missing. I had taken my last picture around 4 PM, and the latest picture on the computer was from 2:30 PM.

I checked the desktop computer, and they weren’t there either. Nope, not on the camera either. Those pictures had vanished into thin air, or the Ethernet, or somewhere.

Picture Recovery Software

Google can be your friend, at times like these, so I started searching for picture recovery software. There were lots of suggestions, but all of the programs were free to preview your missing pictures, and pay $25-$50 for the full program, if you wanted to download the pictures.

I don’t mind paying for programs, but vaguely remembered using a free program, a few years ago, that worked great. Finally, I found the free picture recovery software that I was looking for – Recuva, by Piriform. They make CCleaner too, which I should run again soon.

Pictures Recovered

I downloaded the free version of Recuva software, scanned it for viruses (all clean!), and installed it. The program is simple to use, and quickly recovered all my pictures, and even the 3 videos that were missing.

I took the media card out of the camera, popped it into the laptop, and Recuva showed me all the pictures that had been deleted recently. I added check marks on the ones that I wanted, and copied them to the laptop. The recovered pictures were the same quality as the other pictures, so that was a relief.

The program is now on my computer, and I hope that it’s never needed again! But without Recuva, I wouldn’t have this amusing picture from our afternoon game of hide and seek. Can you find my granddaughter?

___________

Note: This article contains an Amazon affiliate link.

YouTube sends me an email if anyone comments on one of my videos, or on my Contextures channel page.

Most of the time, it’s easy to log in to YouTube and approve the comments. For the past few months though, I’ve had problems with the comments on my profile page. I follow the link in the notification email, and there’s no comment to approve.

It’s frustrating, and I’ve tried digging into every corner of YouTube, with no success.

Finally, after receiving another comment today, I found the solution. Buried in one of the YouTube help forums, there was a suggestion to add a new comment on your own profile, then delete it, and refresh the page.

It seemed clumsy, but I tried the tip, and it worked! All the mysterious hidden comments appeared, and I approved them.

If yours was one of the comments, thanks for posting it, and sorry it took so long to approve.
_________________