Anyone, who has used a touchpad as well as an external USB mouse would definitely prefer the latter one because a normal computer mouse is easy to grip and recommended for quick operation. If you work for long hours with your laptop, it’s certainly not recommended to work with the touchpad because this may induce finger strain.
Touchpads are great when you are away from your desk but can come in the way of efficiency if not managed well.
One of the problems with laptop touchpads is the frequent typing errors encountered when your fingers accidentally slip in the touchpad area. Suddenly, the cursor is misplaced to some other place and you find that the paragraph written a few minutes ago is disturbed by misspelled words or characters.
This is very annoying and in this article I am going to describe how writers can manage their laptop’s touchpad for better productivity.
Disable the Touchpad using the Function Key
The easiest way to toggle the activity of your laptop’s touchpad is to use the correct combination of function key and the assigned key between F1-F12. Different laptops have different keyboard shortcuts assigned, you have to check with the vendor’s website to know the correct combination which disables the laptop’s touchpad momentarily.
On my Leonovo ideapad, the keyboard shortcut for disabling the touchpad is Fn + F8. Whenever I am writing an article or preparing a document, I always turn off the touchpad to avoid typing errors.
Disable The Touchpad from Control Panel
Another way to disable the touchpad is from Windows control panel. If you have installed the proper drivers (synaptic pointing device) for the touchpad, you will see an entry listed in the control panel.
To do this, open Control panel and click the “Mouse” link. Then select the “Device settings” tab and click the “disable” button as shown below:
Disable The Touchpad Completely From the BIOS
If you want to completely get rid of the touchpad annoyance and do not want to use any tool or other windows tweaks, the best option would be to disable it from the BIOS. To do that, restart your computer and hold the F8 key (the keyboard shortcut to enter the BIOS varies from laptop to laptop).
You will enter the BIOS settings, now find the setting for disabling laptop’s touchpad – this path varies for different laptops.
Use Touchpadpal to Automatically Disable Touchpad when you are typing
If you do not know the correct keyboard combination to disable the touchpad and neither you want to tinker with the control panel settings, try using Touchpadpal. It’s a free little utility for Windows, which disables the touchpad whenever you hit any keyboard key. That means, whenever you are typing something, the mousepad is automatically disabled and it’s enabled again when you stop typing. Nice !
There are no settings to configure and no options to tweak, the only annoyance is that you have to run the program every time you start windows. But you can tweak Windows startup items from “Run -> Msconfig -> Startup” and add the program manually so that Touchpadpal runs in the background whenever you restart Windows.
If you are an Ubuntu user, please check out our earlier article on how to disable synaptics touchpad on Ubuntu.
Image credit: Web Developers Notes
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Ubuntu Hardy: How To Disable Synaptics Touchpad When Typing
How to Manage Your Touchpad and Avoid Unnecessary Typing Errors originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)
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What’s The Difference Between Facebook “Share” and “Like” Button?
Posted: 03 Sep 2010 12:00 PM PDT
Before the “Like” button even exists, the only way to get your post shared across the Facebook network is via the “Share” button. With the new “Like” button, many webmasters rush to implement it on their sites, with some even replaced the “Share” with the “Like” button, without understand the differences. Some even think that the “Like” button is just a newer version of the “Share” button.
In this article, we will show you the differences between the Facebook Share and Like button and how you can utilize them effectively.
Facebook Share
As the word implies, the “Share” button allows the users to share the current page link to their wall. This is akin to the user going into their Facebook account and paste the link onto their status update box (aka as the wall). Facebook will then retrieve images from the link and turn it into a snippet entry in your wall.
With Facebook Share, all your friends will be able to see the snippet in their news feed.
Facebook Like
The “Like” button allows the users to “like” a post. When a user “like” a post, it will show a single line entry in his/her friends wall, under the Recent Activity section (see the screenshot below).
Like is similar to the thumb up in Digg, except that there is no “bury” button.
The differences
The only purpose for the Share button is to allow your reader to share your content with their friends in Facebook. The shared item is more visual as Facebook will decipher the link, grab the image and show a snippet of the post.
The “Like” button is more like a personal endorsement of the post/article/content/site. What’s more, the power of the “Like” button involves more than just “liking”. It basically creates a connection between the users and the publisher. When a reader likes your website/post/anything, he/she is literally subscribed to your news feed. You, being the webmaster, is now able to send a notification/update to his/her news feed.
In addition, if you implement the Open Graph protocol in your site, you can also get analytic about the people who “like” your content. All in all, the Like button is a more powerful implementation than the Share button.
Usage
The Facebook Share button can be generated from the Facebook Share page. The code used is a combination of HTML link and javascript. As of any share button, you can choose whether to include the share counter (number of times the post is shared) in the button.
The Facebook Like button can be generated from the Facebook Developers page. It can be added as an iFrame code, or if you choose to integrate the Facebook social plugin deeply into your site, as javascript code.
Should you use either button or both?
You are not restricted to either one of the buttons. It really depends on your preferences whether to implement one, or both, buttons. In fact, in Make Tech Easier, we implemented both buttons so that our readers can share/like depending on their preferences. However, noting how power the Like button can become, it is definitely something that you should not ignore, especially in this Web 2.0 era.
That’s all for now. How do you make use of the Share and Like button on your site?
Related Posts:
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What’s The Difference Between Facebook “Share” and “Like” Button? originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)
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How to Style Up Your Quotes in Blogger
Posted: 03 Sep 2010 05:00 AM PDT
Virtually all blogging platforms, including Blogger, have the “quote text” function. This is useful when you want to highlight sections from other texts or where you need to highlight information from within your own article. Quoted text can be customised to look different from the main body of your article and these differences make it stand out.
In this article I will describe how to use the “quote text” function in Blogger blogs as well as how to customise its look.
How to Quote Text
Selecting text to quote is fairly easy. In Blogger, for example, you can “quote text” by selecting it and pressing the “quote text” button.
You can also select text to quote by adding the “
” tag around the text.
The default look is a simple indentation and this does not really help in differentiating it from the rest of the article. So, it is useful to change the look of the default quoted text.
Editing the Look of the Quoted Text
Editing the look of quoted text requires editing the basic HTML design of your blog. I covered how to edit this in my previous article on Blogger Favicons.
First, open your Blogger dashboard and select “Design”.
Next, on the main Blogger window select “Edit HTML”.
This will open up the HTML template editor. Here check “Expand Widget Templates” to ensure that all the HTML code for your blog is visible.
Then scroll down and look for the section that contains the word “blockquote”. All the relevant options for the quoted text will go between “{” and “}”.
Customising the Look of the Quoted Text
The options I use for my quoted text on my personal blog TechComet are as follows:
blockquote {
margin:1em 20px;
background: #dfdfdf;
padding: 8px 8px 8px 8px;
font-style: italic;
}
This produces the following effect when I select text to quote:
The text is slightly indented, it is italicised and there is a soft grey background. These changes really make the quoted text more striking and it is easy to differentiate it from the main body of the article.
There are a number of different options you can add to your quoted text and I will discuss them below.
Margin
First, you will want to indent your text so that it is not in the same line as the rest of your article. You can do this by adjusting the number of pixels that the margin is from the rest of the text. I have set mine to 20px. Adjust this value as you see fit.
margin:1em 20px
Background Colour
Next you can change the background colour by adjusting the “background” tag. I have chosen a light grey colour. The colours in HTML code are represented by six “hexdigits”. You can obtain a list of colours and their corresponding hexdigit from here.
background: #dfdfdf
Padding
The amount of “padding” you use determines the distance that the quoted text is from the edge of the box created by the background colour. The smaller the number of pixels, the closer the text will be to the edge of the box.
The first figure is the distance (in pixels) from the top of the quote text box to the start of the text, the second figure is the right indent, the third figure is the bottom indent and the fourth figure is the left indent (In short, the 4 figures start from the top and go in a clockwise direction).
padding: 8px 8px 8px 8px
Font Style
You can also bold or italicise the quoted text to really make it look different from the rest of your article.
font-style: italic
font-style: bold
Borders
I have not chosen to add a border to my quoted text, however, if you wish you can do this by using the “border” tag. You must chose the thickness, style and colour of your border.
border: 2px solid #dfdfdf
border: 2px dotted #dfdfdf
