David's Tech Page at The new, new Juggle Zone

Welcome to the tech page.  It is here that great innovations, largely developed and implemented by others, are presented. 'Why are they here if you didn't develop or implement them?' you ask. Because I was nice enough to collect them and present them in a usable form to you. Enjoy.

My DigiCam Page

Handy PC Repair/Upgrade Links

Handy Tech Links

Some cool HTML based things

A very Cool Clock

My very own homemade color chart (and grays too!)

Check out this earthquake

IE 6.0 Status Bar in WinXP

If your status bar keeps disappearing in IE 6.0, under Windows XP, there's a very simple solution: Close all but one IE Window, ensure the status bar is showing (View | Status Bar), then hold down the Ctrl key while clicking the [X] in the upper right hand corner of the IE window!

Printing from DOS in WinXP

Having trouble printing from a DOS program using a netowrk printer? Even if it is mapped to LPT1 in Windows, you'll probably need to run the following line from a DOS prompt once (of course, substitue the correct IP address and printer name for the sample ones given). If the printer doesn't have it's own name and/or IP address, share it on a computer, then use the computer's IP address and the name assigned by the computer that's sharing the printer. You should see a response of "The command completed successfully."

net use lpt1 \\199.255.1.2\Printer-Name

Internet Spell Check

If, like me, you blog or fill out lots of online forms, you may well find the absence of a spell checker annoying. Hence the invention of ieSpell! It's an IE plugin that spell checks Text Boxes on webpages. It's free, and it works great!

Printing a PRN File

We've all done it. For one reason or another, you either click the "Print to file" checkbox in the Print dialog box, or under Printer Setup, you select "FILE" as the port. Then you click print, and a dialog box appears, asking for a filename. Things are going great. The file is saved to your desktop (or another convenient place), and everything seems perfect, until you actually want to send that file to a printer. You can double click it, right click it, drag-and-drop it on a printer, but nothing works! How do you get that darned file onto paper?!?!

New Answer: Use a freeware utility called PrintFile.

Old Answer: The answer lies here: If you only need a quick-fix, get a DOS console up and running, browse to the directory in which your file is stored, then at the command prompt type "copy filename.prn lpt1" (without the quotes and with filename replaced with your file's name).

OK, but what if you want to do this all the time? Create a new batch file (e.g. print_prn.bat) in your windows directory (or anywhere else you like), and enter the following line of text into "copy %1 lpt1" (again without the quotes) then save it. Double click a PRN file, and when the dialog box appears, asking which application you would like to associate with PRN files, browse to the location of your batch file, and select it. Tadah!

CSS

CSS (cascading style sheets) are great! Using code slightly more complex than html, a web author is able to apply complex design to a whole website, and, by changing only one file, apply changes to that website's design! Below, you will find some of my CSS code that has enabled me to do certain things that I wanted

Style.css CodeHTML Usage CodeSample
p.poetry{
margin-top:     0px;
margin-left:    1em;
margin-right:   1em;
margin-bottom:  0px;
text-indent:   -1em;
}
<p class=poetry>This pargraph 
starts aligned with the left edge 
of the table cell, but all new 
lines are indented.</p>

This pargraph starts aligned with the left edge of the table cell, but all new lines are indented.

body{
scrollbar-face-color:       #9999cc;
scrollbar-shadow-color:     #003366;
scrollbar-highlight-color:  white;
scrollbar-3dlight-color:    #003366;
scrollbar-darkshadow-color: #003366;
scrollbar-track-color:      #2E5285;
scrollbar-arrow-color:      #ffffcc;
overflow:                   auto;
}
N/A (As long as you have a reference to the style.css file)

Someday I'll add some more handy code and stuff here.