Keyboard Shortcuts for Manipulating and Navigating Text

Jan 152012
 
 January 15, 2012  Posted by Thomas Le at 6:57 am Articles, Beginner, Tom's Techie Tips , , , , , ,  No Responses »

There are various keyboard shortcuts that one can use to navigate and manipulate text very quickly and easily using only your keyboard. Some of these shortcuts include Copying, Cutting and Pasting. These are fundamental shortcuts that everyone should know because they are virtually universal in all text programs as well as in your operating system and will make your life easier.

For copying simply select the text you want to copy and press CTRL and C at the same time. Then move to the place you want to paste it and press control V. If you want to remove the text from the original spot you can Cut it by pressing CTRL and X and then paste it using CTRL and C.

You can navigate text quickly by using CTRL. Simply hold down the CTRL button and use the arrow keys and you will move by a single word. A word is defined by being separated by a space. Sometimes if there are hyphens this method will go to the hyphen, but in general it will move by the word separated by a space.

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What is Binary?

Jan 122012
 
 January 12, 2012  Posted by Thomas Le at 7:53 am Beginner, Tom's Techie Tips , , , , , , , ,  No Responses »

“There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don’t.”

Do you get it? If not, then this article is for you! Binary is the basic ‘language’ of computers. Common analogies are on and off switches. In binary, on and off are represented with 1 and 0 respectively.

Computers use bytes to store data. A byte is represented by 8 bits. A bit is a single 0 or 1. The highest number value a byte can go up to is 255. Technically it’s 256 values because 0 is a value which is a power of 2.

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Ludum Dare 22! Post Mortem

Jan 112012
 
 January 11, 2012  Posted by Thomas Le at 6:09 pm General , , , ,  No Responses »

So a couple weeks ago I met a group of 5 other people at Panera Bread in Mira Mesa, CA and we discussed working as a team for this Ludum Dare competition. Ludum Dare is a competition that is held 3 times a year and does not have a cash prize at all. The object of the competition is to create a game in 72 hours as a group or if you enter individually 48 hours. This time at Ludum Dare 22 there were 891 entries combined with the Jam(group) and Compo(single). Only 174 were Jam entries.

We discussed the types of games we liked to play and our skills we could bring to the group and it turns out we had 3 programmers and 3 artists. The competition took place over a weekend at 6pm PST Friday evening until 6pm that Monday evening. We decided to go with a top down game and we used Unity 3d as the engine for the game using c# as the language. Our artists used Maya and 3ds Max for the art assets.

Keep in mind I had only met this group a week prior and then spent just about 60-72 straight hours with them in the same vicinity. We, of course, took sleeping breaks and ate because there’s only so long you can go without sleep before you are useless at anything you might try to do.
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Prevent Spam With Mailinator

Oct 242011
 
 October 24, 2011  Posted by Thomas Le at 5:24 am Articles, Beginner, General, Reviews, Services, Tom's Techie Tips , , ,  No Responses »

Have you ever wanted to sign up for something that is ‘free’ but didn’t want to be subjected to the spam that might accompany that membership? There is this service called mailinator which let’s you use any randomly made up email and then check that email instantly, for free and without a password.

For example if I want to sign up for a free service of some kind, say a newsletter or something to see if you really will like it but don’t want to give away your real email. You simply signup with an email like dontspamme@mailinator.com (you can literally use that email address, but it might be a commonly used one too). When you sign up and it says that they sent you an email simply go to http://www.mailinator.com and type in dontspamme in the username box and it will check that email.

Keep in mind that anyone that knows the username can check that mailbox. There is no password required. You could use a random sequence of letters like ertyuiop@mailinator.com and just check it right away not having to worry about remembering it later.

 

Computer Terms You Should Know

Oct 072011
 
 October 7, 2011  Posted by Thomas Le at 6:44 am Tom's Techie Tips , , , , ,  No Responses »

A little over 17 years ago I started working with computers. Like most people when they first start with computers I was clueless with all these terms and acronyms accompanied with using computers. If you are a newbie or maybe even low-intermediate user I hope to enlighten you of at least one new term covered in this article.

OS: Operating System. The essential piece of software to use any type of computer. Whether it be a graphing calculator to the computer you used to get this article there is an OS instructing the computer how to turn the information it receives into something you understand..

Tech Fact: Microsoft DID NOT steal the idea of a GUI (Graphical User Interface) from Apple, in fact, they both got the idea from Xerox who developed the GUI and the mouse. Microsoft just released their product a little before the Macintosh was released and a lot of people hate them for that.
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