It can happen that your new LCD monitor is having dead or stuck pixels which can be rather unfortunate depending on the location of the pixels and the laws of the country you bought the monitor in. Some dead pixels on a newly bought monitor may not be enough to return it.

It can also happen that dead or stuck pixels appear after using the LCD monitor for a while. It’s a good idea to test the LCD monitor before or immediately after purchase with a software that can reveal stuck or dead pixels. The best case scenario would be obviously a test before buying the monitor to be sure that it does not contain dead pixels.

The tiny application Is My LCD OK [via Shell Extension City] provides several test color schemes that reveal if pixels on the monitor are not working properly. It can be run from any location on the hard drive. The first start uses a German interface, press E to switch to the English interface.

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Short question to get this article started: What is the main advantage of a circle based menu when compared to the usual rectangular menus in Windows ? Right, every menu entry is the same distance away from the mouse pointer. It looks nicer as well but that’s just a cosmetic difference.

Orbit (discovered at the Donation Coder forum)provides a circle menu to Windows that should not be confused with the right-click menu. A middle-mouse click opens the circle menu with the five items Internet, Applications, Windows Explorer, Tasks and Configuration. Some of the items contain another circle that displays applications. The tasks item for example displays all open windows in a second circle while the Internet circle lists the three default items Internet Explorer, MSN Messenger and Outlook Express in its second circle. Those default items can be removed if they are not used or installed on the system.

New items can be added by right-clicking on a circle. If you wanted to add Firefox to the Internet circle you would right-click that circle and select New Item from the menu. The program requires a link to a file, folder or website and an icon that goes along with it. Hint: I have been using the icon search engine Icon Look to find icons for the additions which can be dragged and dropped into the configuration dialog.

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Webmasters do not like the Microsoft Internet Explorer because of its inability to comply to web standards and the changes in various version that make it extremely hard to code a website that looks the same in every version of Internet Explorer. Testing the websites in various versions was not that easy in the past because only one version of Internet Explorer could be installed on a operating system at once.

Some web services like Browsershots, standalone versions or virtualization was used to test a website in various Internet Explorer versions. This could be a thing of the past with the release if IE Tester (via Ajaxian), a standalone application that provides access to the rendering and javascript engines of Internet Explorer 8 beta 1, Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 5.5.

A basic tab driven browser interface is provided that can display a website using each version of Internet Explorer on a per tab basis. It comes with a few additional controls like back and forward buttons and access to the Internet Options.

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Add-ins, Add-ons, Extensions and Plugins are a great way to extend the functionality of a product. The new features can be supplied by third party developers or by the initial developer. In the case of Microsoft Office 2007 it’s more often than not Microsoft that is providing add-ins to the community.

The so called Article Authoring Add-in is a Microsoft Word 2007 add-in that is currently supplied as a beta version on the official Microsoft homepage. The add-in enhanced the authoring of scientific and technical articles by providing the ability to read and write files from Word 2007 into the XML format used by the National Library of Medicine for archiving articles in the U.S., the National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature and PubMed Central.

Information on the Microsoft website is sparse but from the information provided it looks like a niche add-in targeting “the staff of scientific and technical journals, Information Repositories, and early adopters within the scholarly authoring community, as well as developers of publishing solutions and workflows”.

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RSS Feeds are slowly taking the place of the good old bookmarks at least when you take a look at how computer geeks use the Internet. Not everything can be managed with RSS Feeds though and bookmarks are still an important way to keep track of interesting websites. The major problem is that bookmarks do not get verified automatically after adding them to the browser. No browser yet supports the feature to automatically check the bookmarks. (I think a Firefox add-on can do that)

AM-DeadLink is a third party software that can check the bookmarks of all major browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Mozilla) as well as url files, comma separated and tab delimited files. The Internet Explorer bookmarks are discovered automatically while all others have to be manually selected from the hard drive. The selections will be remembered in the future.

The main purpose of AM-DeadLink is to check all bookmarks. Error codes and additional information are displayed during and after the check and the dead bookmarks can be checked manually by opening them in the default browser or viewed internally. Favicons can be downloaded optionally if desired during the check.

continue reading "Check Dead Bookmarks in Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer"