Just a few minutes ago I completed the article that explained how to read 20 digital magazines for free by changing the browser’s User Agent to the one of the Apple iPhone. I decided to look for additional free iPhone offers and discovered that Texterity Magazines are also providing 50 magazines to iPhone users free of charge.

Again the User Agent is used as the only mechanism to check if an iPhone connects to the service. If you have already installed the Firefox User Agent switcher add-on and added the iPhone user agent to it you are ready to visit the iPhone start page at Texterity Magazines to read any of the 50 magazines for free in your browser.

If you have not done this visit my first article that explains how you can change the User Agent in Firefox to be identified as an iPhone (Iphone user agent) when browsing the Internet.

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Apple Iphone owners get more. They get free Wireless access at AT&T Hotspots, which no longer is that easy to defeat and now they also get to view free digital magazines of 20 or so popular magazines without costs, courtesy of Zinio. Guess how they are providing those free digital magazines and figuring out that an Apple iPhone user is actually requesting it and not someone else ?

Yes, the same insecure User Agent check that did not work on so many occasions before. All that needs to be done is change the User Agent in your browser to the one of the iPhone which will trick the website into thinking that you are accessing it with an iPhone. This in turn will give you access to those magazines, among them PC Magazine, Technology Review, Macworld, Lonely Planet and, um, Playboy and Penthouse.

The content is provided in full screen in your browser and you can flip through the pages with a click. It’s probably not the most comfortable way but it’s free and easy enough. Pages are actually shown as images which means they can be saved to the local hard drive.

continue reading "Read 20 Digital Magazines for Free"

Desktop users will probably question why someone would need a shortcut to turn off the monitor when the button to switch it off is just a few inches away. It does not really make much sense to turn off the monitor with a shortcut if you can reach the power button of the monitor from your seat. However it does make sense in other situations.

Notebook users normally do not have a power button for the monitor and that’s probably the main application for the shortcut to turn off the monitor. It might also be useful for users with old huge CRT monitors that have the power switch on their back.

I have tried several programs that can be used to turn the monitor off on a system and only one was working perfectly on my Samsung 19″ LCD monitor. I tried NirCmd which worked fine during the first test but not in consecutive ones. The monitor turned off in the first test but all other tests had the result that the monitor turned automatically on again after pressing the shortcut.

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When I’m helping friends and family members who are not that tech savvy with their computers I always notice that they do not use keyboard shortcuts. Instead of doing the plain old CTRL C, CTRL V to copy and paste selected text they use the mouse to do that. Thinking about this for a while I thought it might be useful to list ten Windows keyboard shortcuts that I cannot live without.

It hopefully might help some users who are starting to work with Windows and probably even some users who rely on the mouse to do everything in Windows. But before I start I would like to explain the reason why I’m using keyboard shortcuts in certain situations and not the mouse.

The main advantage of a keyboard shortcut is speed. Take the copy and paste example. A user who is using the mouse marks the text that he wants to copy, presses the right mouse button, selects copy from the list, moves to the new document where he wants to paste it, right-clicks the mouse again and selects paste.

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There is still some confusion about the use of screensavers and I would like to explain it to those who do not know if it makes more sense to use a screensaver or to turn off the monitor. Screensavers were invented in a time to prevent phosphor burn-ins from images that were displayed for a long time on the monitor. They made sure that the image on the screen changed frequently to eliminate the chance of a burn-in.

Today’s monitors however are not prone to those burn-ins which makes screensavers for that purpose obsolete. If you want to save energy you should therefor turn off the monitor. I have set the Energy Saving options to turn off the monitor after fifteen minutes of inactivity.

Moving the mouse turns the monitor on again and work can resume afterwards. Screensavers these days serve mainly two purposes. The first is entertainment. A wide variety of possibilities exist including video screensavers, virtual tours or graphic demos. The second is a basic protection of the computer which can be configured to ask for the user password before work can commence.

continue reading "Shall I turn the monitor off or use a screensaver ?"