Here’s a tip that I’m sure will come in handy for many of you that work on document newsletters and brochures and are using Microsoft Word to accomplish those tasks. Sometimes while creating a document, you may need to get an idea for how text is going to flow around in the design, but you don’t have the final copy written yet for the document.

Many people are probably familiar with using Lorem ipsum text to place some dummy text into a document, but did you know that Microsoft Word has a built in function to generate any amount of text you may need?

All you have to do is type =rand(P#,S#) into your document. Replace "P#" with the number of paragraphs of dummy text you need and "S#" with the number of sentences you want in each paragraph. Then just hit enter and voila! Filler text to your heart’s content.

Source: Microsoft Tips & Tricks website

Windows has it’s own clipboard application; however, sometimes I find myself losing the last clipboard I pasted because I have overwritten it with another. As such, a better clipboard manager should make my life easier.

Introducing Clipdiary, this is a clipboard manager whose forte is managing clipboard history. As per product description, clip diary would make sure you never lose data once copied. The program has a clipboard history, which you can easily grab to be pasted back to the windows clipboard or just paste it directly to your application.

The Clipdiary is very easy to use and only uses “Ctrl+D” key combination to access it’s functions.

Image from Clipdiary.

There’s now a WordPress application for BlackBerry that allows users to manage and post to their WordPress blogs from their phone. I’ve been waiting on an application like this for years and it looks like I’ll still be waiting.

Although the BlackBerry app is in beta and the developers caution users and testers to be careful in using the application, we need more of these types of devices being built for phones and mobile devices.

I do quite a bit of blogging and there’s plenty of times where I’m sitting somewhere without my computer and have a quick post idea. The ability to pull out my phone and start typing away would be terrific! Especially with the ability to take a quick photo or video with your phone and pop that into a post immediately!

The BlackBerry application currently works with WordPress.com and custom hosted WordPress installations. Just what I’d be using for my blogs and numerous other client sites.

Source: WordPress for BlackBerry App Launched in Beta

Image: Image created by Jason Bean from WordPress dashboard and product images from BlackBerry

Gas prices have gone up like crazy in the past year before it went back to normal prices and it is said to go up in the near future. Most budget conscious people track their gas usage using a client accounting software or excel spreadsheet, and find ways to manage their expenses; as such, fuelFrog is one of the tools you can utilize for reading fuel usage data.

What is the process for fuelFrog?

1. Fill up your tank

2. Let fuelFrog know by logging data

3. You would be able to watch trends

The following information you would need to enter are: distance you traveled, price for the gas, how much fuel was added, etc.

By participating, you would be able to:

1. Easily add info to your account after filling your tank.

2. Read trends on gas spending.

3. Read gas price changes per city.

4. Learn you car’s gas efficiency

Image from fuelFrog.

About a month ago now I wrote about a website called Aardvark that combines the power of social media with searching. Search engines by themselves are great, but you’ve got to know some of the tricks of working the Google machine and its counterparts.

I received an email earlier today from Aardvark’s CEO, Max Ventilla, letting me know that they are now equipped to work with and take advantage of the power of twitter. I never knew aardvarks and birds could have produced such a symbiotic relationship as this.

The formatting of how to use Aardvark with twitter is very straight forward. All you need to do is the following three items:

1. ask a question
2. make sure you have a question mark "?" in your tweet
3. include @vark in your tweet

That’s it! Couldn’t be much simpler.

When you ask your question just sit back and relax. The folks at Aardvark will send your question to the right people and then direct message you back with their answer.

Great stuff. I’ve been trying to participate answering questions as much as possible when I can. Even when I can’t the interface and functionality of letting things go by or "passing" on them has been well thought out for the user base.

Before you get started, you do need to register with using Aardvark on your twitter account.

Netpals are netbooks that has Disney branding and are ideal for ages 6-12 years old. These notebooks which is priced at around $350 USD are built by Asustek and would be available in Toys R Us by the end of July.

There is also a Disney branded set of netpals which have higher specs but would be available in Amazon. The netpals is based on Atom and XP and has a monitor of 8.9-inch screen, 16GB or 160GB of storage, Wi-Fi, integrated web cam, heavy parental controls and a customized startup menu screen.

The question now is, are you buying your kids one?

Image from Asustek.

The 3GS has been on the market for several weeks already. People have responded to it, some good, bad. Here are some notable stories from all over the web.

iPhone 3G S image courtesy of Apple

iPhone 3GS Helps AT&T generate its best sales day
According to AppleInsider’ story the iPhone 3GS helped AT&T achieve it’s best sales day ever. They even broke other records with the launch of the iPhone. Here’s an excerpt.

The leaked e-mail characterizes “iLaunch Day 2009,” its nickname for the June 19th iPhone 3GS release date, as the “best-ever sales day” and just second in terms of actual floor traffic. Many of its other sales-related records were also shattered at the same time, ranging from the number of upgrade eligibility checks made in a day to the sheer volume of orders taken through AT&T’s website.

3GS smokes competition in OpenGL Benchmarks (via Extreme Tech)

The new Apple iPhone 3GS feels fast, but it’s always good to see your feelings confirmed with hard numbers. Laszlo Kishonti, creator of the JBenchmark benchmark suite that I use on all Java-based phones, managed to install his GLBenchmark OpenGL benchmark onto both an iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3G (please, don’t ask how) and watched the new model smoke the competition on low-level tests.

With great power comes… great electricity.. iPhone 3GS users complain about battery life (via LA Times)

Buyers are finding that the device, introduced two weeks ago, has trouble making it through a workday without a rest stop at the electrical outlet. It’s proving to be something of an Achilles’ heel on Apple Inc.’s flagship device, more than 1 million of which were sold in the first weekend.

The iPhone 3GS is hot! I mean literaly (via TMCnet)

The first known public account of the problem originated in France where one 16GB 3GS user noticed that his phone was hot during use. Later, the owner discovered that the white backing on the device had turned pink-toned near the spot where the battery is stored, the report said.

So there you go, some iPhone stories to help you decide if you really want one or if you’ve gotten one already, see if it was a good decision.

The one bit of technology that’s still around that surprises me is the fax machine. I understand that there are some documents where you say you need a signature, but do you really? Why can’t we have a digital signature really mean something?

With services like eFax, receiving a fax sent to your virtual fax number into your Inbox is very easy. It’s a little hard to find now on eFax’s website, but it’s still there. The other challenge is when you really need to fax something to someone else. Most of the times I’ll end up printing a document (or even scanning something) into my computer as a PDF and just emailing the PDF. Sometimes that’s just not an option and you do need to use the old-school fax function.

Here are a couple of sites that provide you these options. The vast majority of them charge per fax or offer a few free ones then charge for more usage (isn’t that a drug-dealer’s strategy too? Guess there’s another confirmation of why computer workers are called computer "users").

• How to Scan and Fax Documents Online for Free
• FaxZero service
• Five Ways to Send a Free Fax Online
• MyFax
• Online Fax

Image: sxc.hu

A client sent me an archived file that I could not open with Winzip and after exchange of emails he told me he used 7-zip, which I have just heard for the first time.

After some reading I found out that the 7-zip program is able to support RARs, CABs, JARs, and DEBs, and a lot more.

An additional bonus especially for those who aren’t fun of proprietary apps is that this application is open source.

Go ahead and download a 7-zip.

Image from 7-zip.

Jumping on your computer and quickly firing up your browser to search for something has become second nature to most of us. Opening your search engine of choice and throwing a couple of terms in the text box doesn’t take much thought. The question is are you fine-tuning your actions to get a manageable collection of results or are you pulling back a collection of haystacks looking for that one needle.

There’s a number of tips you can manage to add to your searching routine to help pull back that finer tuned section of results you’ve been looking for all this time. PC Magazine has an article that lists a variety of tips on succeeding with your searches.

Your first thought may be using a variety of operators in your searches to include, exclude or search for an exact phrase on the web. The PC Magazine article spotlights some other actions you can take to automate searches or remember some specific searches you make regularly as well.

Image: sxc.hu