Announcements

Have a Great Weekend!

Today's newsletter is a bit longer than normal, but it should keep you busy over the holiday weekend!

Speaking of which, we won't be publishing Thursday or Friday this week, but we'll be with you again on Monday.

So, have a fun (and safe :-) holiday weekend. Oh, and for those outside the US have a great (albeit regular) weekend :-)

I wanted to mention the new area at our site. We now have a "What's On Sale" page that's loaded with deals. Many items are at or below our cost and just need to be cleared out. So, be sure to check it out!

http://www.worldstart.com/store/whatsonsale.htm

Computers 101

Q:
So I was at this web site and their fonts were so small, I couldn't read anything on the page. Is there a way I can change this?

A:
Well, don't strain your eyes a moment longer. There are actually two ways you can change the font size of a web page in Internet Explorer. One is detailed in the computer tip below. The other involves one of those cool, little wheel mice...

Next time you visit a page with text that is too small, hold down your CTRL key and roll the wheel on your wheel mouse. You'll find that you can increase / decrease the font size as fast as your finger can spin that little wheel. Give it a try now if you like. Here's some small text to play with:

Wow! Look at this small text!

One more thing... If you start messing around with font sizes, you may discover the web site you're looking at doesn't display quite right. Most of the time, us web designers create the site to look good based on a certain font size. Just FYI.

Thanks to the reader who sent that one in!

Have a question for the newsletter? Submit it at the link below:
http://www.worldstart.com/submitquestion.htm

Tip of the Day

Building a Better Desktop Through Higher Resolutions!

Ah, the humble graphics card. Nestled deep in the heart of your computer, it quietly weaves pictures of light at thirty frames per second, all to keep you happily viewing your desktop or document or web page.

Would you like to get the most out of that fancy graphics card you’ve got? You may have tried ‘maxing-out’ your screen resolution when you first got the new system, but found to your dismay that at higher resolutions everything is too small to see.

Well, guess what? You can change all that! And you should!

WHY?

Resolution is generally specified as two numbers for a monitor. Something like “800 x 600” or “640 x 480.” Those numbers indicate how many pixels fit on the screen (horizontally x vertically). The more pixels you can fit, the more information you can display at once.

By default, when you increase the resolution in Windows, the system will simply squish everything up into the corner of the screen leaving you a lot more blank space to work with. For some people, that’s the greatest thing since pizza-flavored bagels (yum!).

However, if you like the size of your icons and text, you can tell Windows to use the extra space to display things in greater detail. This has a similar effect to increasing the dpi (dots per inch) on your printer from 150 to 300. The images are the same size, but since they are drawn with more, smaller dots, they look better.

HOW?

In this tutorial, we’re going to do three things:

First, we’ll check your screen resolution and see about bumping it up.
Second, we’ll adjust your desktop to match.
Third, we’ll increase the default font size in Internet Explorer so web pages look good.

Ready? Keep your arms in, and have a fun ride!

1. SCREEN RESOLUTION

Right-click on your desktop and select Properties. This will bring up the Display Properties window.

1. Select the Settings tab.
2. Under Colors, make sure you’re set to High Color (16 bit). Higher settings may be available, but unless you’re doing advanced image processing, you can’t generally see the difference, and higher settings just slow down your system.
3. Then slide the Screen Area bar to at least 1024 x 768. If you can go higher, try moving it all the way up! Click on Apply and see the difference! If there are no technical problems, you can just click OK and move on to the next step.

(If you get a weird flickery screen or static or something strange like that, just sit tight – the system will reset itself to your old screen mode in fifteen seconds. You might want to reinstall your drivers if there are problems here or just pick a different resolution.)

2. DESKTOP SETTINGS

With your new, higher screen resolution, you may notice that your icons seem a little smaller, and maybe that cool wallpaper picture you had doesn’t look quite as cool as it did. Let’s fix those!

Right-click on the desktop and open up the Display Properties window.

1. Click on the Appearance tab. This brings up one of the most powerful customization features in Windows. (Ooh!)
2. Click on the words Message Box in the sample window. Note the new options that appear in the bottom of the window.
3. Increase the font size until you can read the sample text comfortably.
4. Repeat this process for each element in the sample window that you’d like to enlarge.
5. While you’re at it, you can pick colors that match your wallpaper, if you’re the sort of person who can pick matching colors. (Hey, I sure can’t!) Once you’re happy with the changes you’ve made there, you’ll want to check out the Large Icons option available under the Effects tab. I prefer the normal icons, even on my highest resolution setting, but the choice is yours.

3. INTERNET EXPLORER DEFAULT FONT SIZES

Once you have your desktop and system settings the way you want them, you just need to configure your applications. Most will use the settings you chose in step two, but Internet Explorer has its own font system.

In Internet Explorer, open the View menu and go down to Text Size. Experiment with the different default sizes to see what works best for the sites you like to visit.

Many web pages set their fonts relative to whatever size you have picked in this menu, so some sites may require bigger or smaller settings. In general, though, the bigger your fonts are the better they will look. (Especially if you have enabled font-smoothing! See the 06/26/02 Newsletter for details on how to do this.)

For other programs, look for zoom options (Microsoft Word, for instance, will let you specify the default zoom) in the View or Display menus.

WHEW!

Got all that? I know there are a lot of steps, but once you’ve changed your screen resolution and learned how to work with the display properties, you will then truly own your desktop.

Now go impress your friends!

--Tom Dalton

Have a tip for the newsletter? Submit it below:
http://www.worldstart.com/submitatip.htm

Amanda's Cool Site of the Day

Geocaching

Do you have a GPS device? If so this is the game for you.

(For those of you like me who don’t know what it is here’s the definition. A GPS unit is a electronic device that can determine your approximate location within 6-20 feet on the planet.)

This is a adventure game for all you GPS users and is more or less a treasure hunt. You use your GPS devise to find the caches, that are stashed all over the place. So for those you hikers and travelers, this could be a fun game for you to play while you’re traveling.

The cache’s contains actually prizes for you to find, check out the site for more details.

In the most part this is an interesting site to just surf through. Have fun.

http://www.geocaching.com/faq.asp

Do you have a cool, non-commercial site that you want to share?
Send it to Amanda at amanda@worldstart.com