Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Wolfram Alpha - a new way of accessing data on the Internet

Something from Joyce :)


Rather than giving you a list of search results, Wolfram Alpha (what an awful name) will combine your terms to give you meaningful data. For example a search for Napier + Weather, results in:


http://www16.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=napier+temperature


 


You can access WA here: http://www.wolframalpha.com/ and to get started it gives you some suggestions for searches on the right hand side.


 


And you can read about other ways of using WA here:


5 Things that Wolfram Alpha does better (and vastly different) from Google which looks at complex queries, localisation, precision, calculation and comparison.

Friday, May 1, 2009

Moving/recovering/finding windows on multiple monitors

On the theme of multiple monitors something that can cause you problems ( grief) is if change monitor types (e.g. I have an external wide screen  at work and a square one at home). So what happens is that some applications remember what the position was when they closed and try to do this on the new monitor. Sometimes this means that the top of the window (including all the toolbars are off the screen and unaccessible).

If the applications have been well designed they should have a move option available if you right click on the button on the Windows status bar.  If this is so you can click move, now the sneaky bit - just tap one of the arrows on your keyboard - somehow this attaches the mouse to the mindow and by moving your mouse you can get your window onto your current screen.

Note: You may have to double click the button on the status basr as in order to move the window it has to be in the windows desktop.