Ask Felgall

One advantage that modern wordprocessing software has over anything that preceded it is that it can make some corrections for you automatically as you type. The autocorrect option in Microsoft Word allows you to choose which corrections that you want the program to make for you. Some corrections that you can have fixed for you automatically are capitalisation errors, common typos (where you reverse certain letters eg. hte instead of the) and you can even use it to automatically expand out text when you type in a specific abbreviated code that you specify.

Setting AutoCorrect in Word

My January newsletter dealing with backups is now available to be read on the site. This was of course sent to those on the mailing list about four weeks ago. The February newsletter should be sent to those on the mailing list within the next few days while those not on the mailing list will have to wait until next month to be able to read it. Why not sign up to my mailing list now and receive monthly emails that not only contain what I hope you will find is an interesting article but which also contains a list of all the pages added to the site during the prior month so as to ensure that you don’t iss seeing anything that I write that interests you.

January Newsletter

In this second article for the week on emails we look more closely at digitally signing and encrypting emails. In order to do either of those things you need to have a digital certificate installed into your email program. I therefore look at the step by step process of obtaining a free email certificate from Comodo and and the extra steps required to install it into Thunderbird (since obtaining the certificate automatically installs it for Outlook and Outlook Express).

With the certificate installed, being able to digitally sign emails is something that happens automatically. Encryption can also happen automatically if the other party also has an email certificate installed.

Email Certificates

This week’s new additions to the site deal with emails. In this first article we look at some of the different MIME types that can be defined in emails and what they are used for. By using the appropriate MIME types in your email you can provide alternative parts in plain text, HTML etc, embed images in the email, add attachments, digitally sign emails, and even encrypt emails so that only the intended recipient can read them. All of this of course should be handled for you automatically by your email program however if for any reason you need to view the actual plain text source code of an email then this information will help you to see which parts of the email do what.

Multipart MIME Emails

I don’t have many general graphics articles on the site and this one was the very first one that I wrote. There are many different uses to which graphics can be put and the appropriate resolution for the image will be different on that use.

Determining what Resolution is Appropriate

Most Linux installs should take care of installing the appropriate driver for your sound card for you (assuming your sound is supported). If for some reason it doesn’t or if you replace the sound card and need to manually upgrade then you can easily do so with just a couple of simple commands at the command prompt.

Linux didn’t Install Sound on my System

After mentioning yesterday about people buying computers with Vista and then reformatting to install XP, the relative difficulty of installing operating systems was the next thing that occurred to me.

The main reason why people run Windows rather than other operating systems is because Windows comes pre-installed on their new computer and so they do not have to go through the relatively complicated process of actually installing an operating system and getting it to work with their hardware. At least that applies to those who buy computers with XP installed,, those with Vista installed who decide to revert back to XP still have the problem of doing the Windows XP install themselves or getting someone to do it for them.

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• IBM 1981-1995 - 15 years
• Microsoft 1995-2009 - 15 years
• Google 2009-

To me it seems like Microsoft is currently in approximately the same position that IBM was in 1994. Back then IBM was top dog on the PC and had been since releasing their micro-computer which they called the PC in 1981. We still refer to PCs and IBM compatible even though our current computers are thousands of times more powerful than a PC and are not compatible with anything IBM produce. IBM actually outsourced their operating system supply to a small insignificant company called Microsoft because Digital Research who they wanted to supply the operating system refused to talk to them. DOS was actually a temporary measure as was the original PC as Intel hadn’t quite got their 32 bit chip working properly yet. The plan was to migrate everyone onto AT computers running OS/2 as soon as possible but the popularity of the PC and XT computers made that impossible.

Microsoft released the OS/2 operating system in 1987 but few were interested even though it could run multiple programs at the same time and had a graphical interface. Still there wasn’t much interest in graphical interfaces for DOS back then either and GEM, Deskview, Topview, Windows etc were basically ignored. Even combining Windows and Topview (IBM’s GUI) together and releasing them as Windows 2 was ignored.

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