Jean Galea» Computer Tips Archives – Jean Galea – Internet Consultant in Malta | WordPress Expert

How to Take Care of Your Laptop Battery

Jean Galea — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 00:00:51 +0000

Laptop batteries are expensive things, and so it is important that we learn how to take best care of our laptop batteries and thus prolong their life as much as possible. Follow these guidelines to achieve a longer life for your laptop battery:

Heat is your battery’s worst enemy. Avoid keeping your battery in hot places such as your car during the daytime.
A full discharge puts more strain on your battery than several partial discharges. You do not need to worry about battery memory with Li-Ion batteries. Get into the habit of recharging the battery when it reaches 10-20%.
Never discharge your battery to 0% – as this can render your battery useless.
Calibrate your battery’s fuel gauge by doing a full discharge every 30 cycles. Run the battery to the cut-off point in your notebook to keep the battery’s fuel gauge accurate.
If you will be on AC power for an extended period of time, you can prolong your battery’s lifespan by removing it and putting it into prolonged storage.
Prolonged storage should be done with a 40% charge-level and in a cool, dry place. Some experts recommend you place the battery in your refrigerator. Use a sealed plastic bag to keep moisture out if you do this.
Do not freeze your battery.
Allow a stored battery to warm to room temperature completely before using or recharging it.

Maltese fonts for download

Jean Galea — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 09:25:17 +0000

Just a few fonts that might come in handy to people who open documents written in a Maltese font. Remember nowadays Windows supports typing documents in Maltese, in many fonts such as Times New Roman, so ideally when creating a document in Maltese you should use one of the standard fonts which are available on all Windows computers, such as Times New Roman, Arial, Verdana, Georgia etc.

Click here to download Maltese Fonts (Fonts tal-Malti) (.zip Format)

Instructions:

To install these fonts, download the compressed file above, then unzip it using a program such as Winzip or Winrar.

Once you have the extracted files, copy them to the Fonts folder found at C:\Windows\Fonts.

Update

Thomas Pace, one of this blog’s readers, has kindly made us aware of a very useful manual regarding using Maltese fonts on a PC, which can be downloaded from this location:

http://kunsilltalmalti.gov.mt/filebank/documents/kompjuter.pdf

Simple technique for compacting your Gmail inbox

Jean Galea — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 11:30:13 +0000

Image via CrunchBase

When you start reaching the limit of your Gmail account space, it is time to delete some bulky emails. I use a simple search phrase that gives me all those emails having movie attachments (usually the biggest attachments in my email account), then simply go through them and delete those I don’t really need.

Here is the phrase that does the trick, you need to type this in the ‘Search’ box in your inbox.

has:attachment (*.mov || *.wmv || *.wm)

You can then substitute the file extensions within the search phrase to include other big files you might have in your inbox, such as mp3s, “*.mp3″ and “.zip”.

Reduce the size of PDF Files with this software

Jean Galea — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 09:45:32 +0000

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How I organise my photo collection

Jean Galea — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 15:35:24 +0000

Related posts:Photo gallery Related posts:

Photo gallery

3 Handy Uses for Gmail’s Canned Responses Feature

Jean Galea — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 15:28:31 +0000

3 Handy Uses for Gmail’s Canned Responses Feature.

Accurate colour rendering on your PC

Jean Galea — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 21:32:39 +0000

Calibrate your monitor

http://epaperpress.com/monitorcal/

Adobe Gamma can be used to calibrate your monitor, and you can also buy hardware calibrators.

My personal favourite is the calibration tool found here: http://tft.vanity.dk/

Photoshop CS4 Colour Management

http://www.computer-darkroom.com/ps11_colour/ps11_1.htm

http://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1332853

PS: Very important to have your monitor set to the same colour profile being used by Photoshop, else you will have different colours in Photoshop when compared to the rest of your Windows applications

Some Technical stuff about sRGB

http://www.w3.org/Graphics/Color/sRGB

Recommended Settings

When taking photos, shoot at defaults: sRGB color space, which is the world standard for digital cameras and the Internet. Because its the world standard, if you use it, every printer and lab will get it right because they all expect it.

sRGB is the world standard for digital images, printing and the Internet. So long as you haven’t screwed with anything, you and the world are shooting in sRGB.

Use sRGB and you’ll get great, accurate colors everywhere all the time.

Here is my colour setup in photoshop, which I use for web design and photo editing mainly:

Bad habits on the internet

Jean Galea — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 08:02:23 +0000

Today I was wondering about my very annoying habit of forgetting attachments when sending out emails. I also have a habit of temporarily putting these attachments on the desktop and then deleting them as soon as I send the email. So when the recipient informs me that there was no attachment I have to go back to the recycle bin to restore that file and attach it. I wonder what are other bad habits people have, leave your bad habits in the comments section

Anonymous browsing

Jean Galea — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 12:16:28 +0000

http://toonel.net/

toonel.net is an experiment in a technique for conserving network bandwidth. If you are paying a fee based on the amount of data you transfer (e.g. 3G/GPRS/DSL/CDMA) and have monthly download limit, or if you have narrowband connection (e.g. dialup modem) then you are most likely to appreciate the service toonel.net offers. There are number of toonel.net client application packages. All solutions are 100% Java based and therefore this service can be used on any platform with an installed Java Runtime Environment, including mobile phones.

How to free up space on Gmail

Jean Galea — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 11:00:32 +0000

While most Gmail users have more than enough space on their accounts, some heavy email users like myself might actually near the storage space limit. Freeing up space is not so straightforward as there aren’t any real sorting options available, so my solution is to download all the emails to Outlook, then sort them by size within outlook, and go back to Gmail to delete the emails with big attachments, provided I don’t need them anymore.