The Smoke and Mirrors of Audio and Video Cables

Here's a common scenario: you just picked up some new electronic gizmo off the shelf at your favorite local electronics retail outlet, and you've got a sales guy "helping" you. He proceeds to tell you that if don't get this magical $80 cable, your purchase is going to look or sound no better than that $20 piece of garbage sitting a few feet down the shelf that looks like it'd fall apart if you breathed on it. Is he telling the truth, or is it a farcical sales pitch?

In the A/V cable world, there seems to be no end to cable selections. Take speaker cable, for example. You could get your average 14AWG speaker wire for around $0.50/ft, or you could splurge a bit and get AudioQuest's speaker cable for $9400 for 3 feet. Somewhere in between lies a plethora of cable options, not to mention all of the marketing telling you how each manufacturer's cable is better than the "leading competitor". How are you able to tell what you actually need and what's just a waste of money? As one of my engineering profs liked to say, "V=IR. You've got all the components, just bang it out!"

Let me explain. Any audio or video signal is really just an electrical signal. Electrical signals really don't like resistance. If you have too much resistance, your signal isn't going to get to the destination like it was intended. Look back at that equation: V=IR, where V is voltage, I is current, and R is resistance. If you make R large while V stays constant, I has to decrease (no, that's not a grammatical mistake, I'm talking about current, not me, you nimwit). You might ask something like, "What causes this resistance, and how do I get rid of it?" Thanks for asking, I was about to answer that! About all you have to do is make sure you have the right wire size for the right job. The larger the wire, the less resistance. If you pick too small a wire for the current you're throwing through the wire and the length of your run, you'll get too much resistance. If you're talking about speaker wires, your lows won't hit as hard and your highs will sound a little muddled.

Speaker wires are an easy one because the signal being sent to the speaker is a higher voltage than most other A/V signals. Another problem with cables is their ability to pick up RF (radio frequency) noise. This may be a feature depending on the cable's intended use (say, a radio antenna). All cables essentially are an antenna, and this RF noise induces a small voltage and current in a wire. The longer the cable, the more RF noise it will pick up. In pretty much all scenarios (save for that antenna), this is a bad thing. Since an audio amplifier is putting out a signal with a higher voltage compared to a CD player, the speaker signal is less affected by that small induced voltage than the CD player signal. The RF noise on the CD player signal is a larger percentage of the actual signal's strength. While this is a problem with professional installations where cables are commonly run 100' or more, you most likely won't run in to this if you're setting up your own home theater or sound system. Cables usually have some sort of built in shielding from this RF noise, and this is good enough for short runs.

I would like to caveat myself here, though. Under some certain circumstances, you can really shoot yourself in the foot. That circumstance looks something like this. Or if you create a huge magnetic field by wrapping a power cable up in a loop and running a signal cable through it. That would do it too.

Aside from those instances, you won't notice much of a difference. Suffice it to say that if you got a range of decent quality cables together and had a critical listening session with an unbiased audiophile (one not biased by paychecks from supporting companies or by the IJustBoughtThisMillionDollarCableSoItMustSoundBetter syndrome), there would be no audible difference. Sure, there might be a lab test measurable difference, but can any human actually hear that difference? The answer is usually no. I have actually heard of tests done with a metal clothes hanger pitted against high-dollar audiophile speaker cable (think of that $80 cable the sales guy told you that you just have to buy). Yep, no difference. It's all about resistance, and if you have picked a large enough wire for the distance you're going, you won't hear any improvement (unless you have that aforementioned syndrome).

It gets even better when you talk about digital signals. Think of digital TV over-the-air broadcasts. You either get a signal or you don't. There aren't any in betweens like analog TV, where you could get a perfect picture, complete static, or anything between the two. Digital signals are either there or they aren't. Sure there can be a DC offset voltage induced or some RF noise, but because of digital circuitry, most of that disappears when it gets interpreted by the receiving device. This is one of the main reasons why digital signal transmission works much better in non-ideal circumstances compared to analog transmission. If you're dealing with analog video cabling, the picture will depend upon the length of the cable. If you have two video displays hooked up with analog video cables, one cable being 3' long and the other being 50' long, the same image will look different because of the signal loss caused by the longer cable (longer cable equals higher resistance). If you had the same two computers hooked up with DVI (digital) cables, run the same distances as before, you wouldn't notice a picture difference.

Here is also an example of my point before about resistance. Some of you nerds out there (FOSO!!!) will have already thought something along the lines of, "Hey wait a minute, you can only run DVI 15 feet!" That is true, but some manufacturers have found ways to make the cable such that you can run longer than that 15' limitation. The secret there lies with...can you guess? Larger gauge wire! These cables are easily twice as thick as the DVI cable that came with your monitor. If you start pushing the limits of a digital video signal, you will start to see "green sparklies" right before you lose signal. These sparklies (yes, that's a technical term) are really just artifacts of data not being there when the receiving device expects it to be there.

So what does this all boil down to? Parts Express and Monoprice. Don't spend lots of money on cables and don't run audio or video cables right next to (or through loops of) power cords.

Further reading if you made it this far and are looking for some more punishment.

Topics, please

Ok so I haven't posted in a bit.  I have a few topics in the works, but PLEASE comment and leave some topics that you'd like me to touch on!  Computers, cars, audio, video, I'll tackle it.  Thanks!

Spatial Audio: Beyond Surround Sound

Here's an article that some of you may find interesting, covering 3D visuals and 3D audio.  It's about a university that recently got built in Saudi Arabia and the visualization lab that was installed in one of the buildings.  It's pretty intense.

Google Searching

Google has done some amazing things with their search engine, and I find that many people have no idea what the capabilities are.  Below are some that I use a lot.  The actual thing you need to type will be in bold, and any search words you need to add are in brackets.

"[insert a phrase here]"

Searching with some words with quotes around it will search for that exact phrase.  For example, search for "printer paper" if you want to find all web pages with the exact phrase "printer paper" instead of pages with the words "printer" and "paper" separately.  A search with just printer paper would turn up the latter pages.

+[keyword] +[keyword]

This will ensure that both search words are included.  I find that it seems sometimes words are excluded, and this forces the engine to include both of those words

[keyword] -[keyword]

Using the "-" symbol in front of a word will exclude that word from being in a page that comes up.  For instance, if you're looking for a used car, but not a Cadillac, you might search for used car -cadillac (as a side note, case means nothing to a search engine, except for boolean operations, covered next).

[keyword] OR [keyword]

You're looking for something specific, but it's called two different things.  To bring up all pages that have both names, use OR between the words.  For instance, a AA alkaline battery is also called an LR6, so search something like battery aa OR lr6.  This is one of the few cases where case matters - "or" MUST be in caps, otherwise Google will think you're looking for the word "or" in the web page.

inurl:[domain name here] [keyword]

This one is amazingly useful for web sites that have a horrible search on them.  Say you're having a hard time finding a Samsung article on Engadget.  Your search may look something like inurl:engadget.com samsung.  This will find any web page that has "engadget.com" in the URL and also has "Samsung" on the page.  Sure, you may have a few pages come up that just happen to have engadget.com in the URL but aren't part of Engadget's website, but those usually won't be too common.

define:[word you need defined]

This one is amazingly simple and awesome.  Say you don't know what dubious means.  Just type in define:dubious and a bunch of definitions from around the web come up.  This is also useful for defining acronyms you may not know.  Sure, you have to pick through a bunch that may be wrong, but using context clues, you can usually come up with the right ones.

[number][currency] to [currency]

This one is a little hard to explain without an example.  Say you're travelling to Europe, and you want to know how much something costs in US dollars.  The thing you're looking at is 100 Euros, so type in 100eur to usd.  This will give you the going rate at that point in time for 100 Euros.  It's not exactly accurate and shouldn't be used as such, but it will give you a pretty darn good idea of what the conversion rate is.  You can also just do searches like us dollar to euros to tell you how many Euros are in one US dollar.

[store name or type] near [place]

Say you need to find a Best Buy pronto, and you can't find your copy of the phone book (or you're in some weird place you've never been before).  Just go type in Best Buy near San Diego, CA and Google will bring up the closest Best Buys.  This can also be used for things like appliance near San Diego, CA to bring up any appliance stores near there.  Yes, I just picked a random city.  Yes, I would absolutely love to be there right now.

weather in [place]

You've just looked up the nearest Best Buy in San Diego, but you want to see what the weather is like before you step out the door.  If it really is San Diego, you probably don't need to actually check the weather, cuz it's always 60-70º and sunny, but for the example, let's play along.  Type in weather in San Diego, CA and the weather will be shown.  For big cities, you usually don't need to type in the state.

[mathematical expression]

You're stuck without a calculator and can't find the shortcut to the calculator on your computer.  What's a person to do?  Go to Google and type in 36164*4 (or whatever you need, obviously) and Google uses mathmagics to get the answer!

time [place]

Someone you know is travelling to Japan, and you want to Skype them, but you don't know what time it is there.  Type in time Japan and Google will tell you the current time in Japan.

Those are a few of the search operations that make life a lot easier.  These coupled with Google Chrome, cuz you can just type searches in the address bar, puts information in front of you that much faster.

Internet Browsers

When it comes to internet browsers, there's no shortage: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari to name a few of the popular ones.  Their job is all the same - to let you view the web and all of its content.  However, some do it better than others.  I'll talk a little about the three that I have used most here: Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome.

Internet Explorer

This is the most popular browser, if only because it's the one that comes installed on every Windows computer.  It is also by FAR the slowest of all browsers.  IE 8 closed the gap, but it's still far off from all other browsers in browsing speed.  If you compare speed tests of IE 8 vs. IE 7, the results are astoundingly bad for IE 7.  If anyone reading this is still using IE 6, you really, really, really need to upgrade.  Web developers are all but dropping support for it, so it's time to upgrade. Best of all, it's free (so are all these other browsers for that matter).  The good thing about IE is that it's compatible with about everything on the web.

Firefox

This is the browser that I used for quite some time until Chrome came out.  It's a little slower on initial startup than IE, but works a lot faster than IE once it's open.  Firefox does have (or at least did) some memory leak issues, so it will use a little more (ok, sometimes a lot more) memory than other browsers though.  Compatibility is generally pretty good, but you will find some pages that Firefox just doesn't agree with.

Chrome

This is and has been my browser of choice since it came out.  I remember being shocked at how fast it opened the first time I ran it.  It didn't fail to surprise even more when I continued to browse.  Chrome is compatible with most web sites, but just like anything other than IE, you'll find some stuff that it just won't do.  I much prefer to use Chrome whenever possible, but I do go back to Firefox or occasionally IE if some site doesn't work the way it's supposed to.  The biggest issue I've had with any browser other than IE is Adobe Reader, but that pile of junk doesn't want to work with anything most of the time.  Little tip - get the Chrome extension that appends a little URL in front of any PDF link to read any linked PDF in Google Docs viewer, and your PDF woes with Adobe Reader will be a thing of the past.  One of my favorite things about Chrome is the ability to type a few keywords in the address bar, hit enter, and see results of a Google search.  All in all, Chrome has my vote of best browser.

Here are some benchmarks from ZDNet.  They show Safari ahead of Chrome, but I remember seeing some more recent benchmarks (linked ones are pretty old) showing Chrome pulling ahead.  That may have changed again since I last saw, though.  If you're feeling adventurous, try out some of these or other browsers and comment about your thoughts!

Garage Heating and Car Work

A very valuable lesson was learned tonight.  I have a 900 sq. ft. or so garage heated with a propane heater.  I am in the middle of replacing the Ranger brakes, a process that I started yesterday and had to leave the Ranger up on jack stands because I got the wrong size rear shoes, but that's another story.  I had started coughing pretty bad a few times last night, and didn't really think much of it since it's really cold.  Tonight it got bad again, and I realized that it was right after I was spraying brake cleaner.  I then made the connection between brake cleaner and a propane heater - probably not the best combination.  So to all you guys that work on your cars in the winter with a heated garage - watch what chemicals you're spraying!  If you have to use brake cleaner (i.e. if you're doing a brake job), try de-chlorinated brake cleaner - it may help a little.  A carbon monoxide detector probably wouldn't be a bad idea either.

From a forum about using brake cleaner... "I know not to have the propane heater going, you'll end up with the worst hangover in the morning."  Sweet...

3D in Your Home!

Many TV's now being sold have the capability to display 3D (also known as "stereo," much like stereo audio for your ears).  Within the past few months, a 3D Blu-ray standard was settled on, so you'll be seeing some 3D Blu-ray players soon.  If you happen to be an early adopter of both of those, you'll still be waiting on 3D content to come out on Blu-ray.

To solve this problem, you could pick up nVidia's 3D Vision package.  This is a box set that comes with an infrared emitter, 3D glasses, and some drivers.  With this package, you can run any game you have one your computer in 3D.  Yes, that's right, you read correctly - any game you currently have on your computer can be viewed in 3D on a 3D capable display.  Nvidia has some 3D ready displays listed on their website, but you'll be seeing a lot more soon.  This year at CES (Consumer Electronics Show, which I had the privilege of going to this year), every TV manufacturer was pushing their 3D displays.  Some even could be making the nVidia package obsolete, as the Samsung 2010 model 3D-ready displays can take any 2D content and turn it into 3D real-time.  Neither of these are really great stereo, but it is 3D.

I doubt that 3D will catch on in homes quickly, but I believe that it will eventually.  Marketing departments have a lot of informing to do in the meantime.  Most people have never seen good stereo, and until the general public either sees good stereo or is well informed of it, adoption in homes will be limited.  Movie theater stereo is getting better, but what you would buy for your home would be active stereo instead of the movie theater polarized stereo.  See my blog post on "3D Video Explained" for more about this.  Active stereo is much better than polarized stereo, so in-home 3D has a good chance of being much better than a movie theater if you can deal with not having a huge cinematic display, unless of course you opt for a nice 3D projector - then you can just have it all.

Computer Upgrades

For those of you that might be interested in doing your own computer builds, here are some things to consider in your build.

When choosing RAM, there isn't much difference between DDR3 1333 and DDR3 1600 if you're not overclocking.  What matters more are the timings.  Look for RAM with the lowest timings at the standard 1.5 volts.  You'll see a lot of RAM that is rated at 1.65V, 1.7V, or 1.8V.  That 1.5V is key unless you want to spend a solid day messing with timings and voltages in the BIOS.  I would not recommend it (this is what I did practically all day today).  If you don't get the voltages correct, the system will generally just freeze on you, even while in the BIOS.  The tell-tale here is hitting the num lock on the keyboard.  If you're in the BIOS and the keyboard won't do anything, including num lock, it's most likely a RAM or northbridge voltage issue.  The northbridge is what controls the memory and the PCIe slots, then has a link downstream to the southbridge, which controls your USB and everything else.  So if your northbridge isn't working, you'll lose your keyboard.  This is what was happening to me.  Basically, get RAM that you can run at 1.5V out of the box, and you won't have to deal with all these shenanigans.

Order thermal paste with your motherboard and CPU.  If you need to do some troubleshooting or a motherboard RMA, you'll need to replace the stock thermal pad with some thermal paste.  Just save the hassle and order it to begin with.  Before you try to pull the heatsink off of a CPU, do a burn-in test on it to really heat it up (make sure your CPU is hitting 100%), then shut it down and remove the heatsink ASAP.  What this does for you is warms up that thermal pad so that it's a lot easier to separate the heatsink from the CPU, and the heatsink doesn't pull the CPU out of the socket.  You really don't want the CPU to come with the heatsink on most socket types, as the CPU could come off with bent pins, or in the worst case, no pins at all.  That actually happened to a guy on my floor in college.  He was not happy.  You can't really solder 938 pins (course it was 939 back then) back on a processor.

I hadn't heard of it til I tried to put my new motherboard in, but apparently the ATX 4-pin 12V lead that goes to the CPU and plugs in directly to the motherboard has been increased to 8 pins.  Basically all this does is spread the power across twice as many pins and traces for higher wattage processors.  It's only required for CPU's over 130W, but if you're buying a new power supply anyway, I'd look for one with an 8-pin 12V CPU lead.

I think that's all for now.  That first point is a big one for me right now.  I think that I finally have the system stable, but the next time is hangs on me, Newegg is getting an RMA request.

Oh and if you're currently working on something like an AMD Athlon64 3000+ and go to an Athlon II X4 630, you'll feel like you're working at lightspeed.

3D Video Explained

I'd like to spend a little time here explaining 3D.  You may hear about 3D as it deals with movies, and if you're up on your tech, as it relates to TV's.  What you may not know is how it all works.  To clear up some confusion and questions you may have, here's a little explanation of it all.

Principle of 3D
If you really think about it, your eyes and ears are pretty similar.  You have two of them, and your brain uses both to locate an object either giving off light or sound.  You can localize the object because your brain uses the difference of the two images (images here meaning either a sound image or a visual image) to create a 3D mapping of the environment you're in.

This is a little easier to think about in terms of sound, so we'll go with an example there first.  Say there's a noise off to your left.  You don't necessarily know how you know that it's off to your left, but you just know.  What's actually happening is that sound is going into both of your ears.  Because sound has a finite speed and isn't instantaneous, the sound gets to one ear (your left) faster than the other (your right).  Your brain processes this in terms of the delay difference between ears, and can then tell you exactly where the sound is coming from.

Now let's apply loosely the same principle to your eyes.  Your eyes work on the principle of being able to focus on an object.  If you try to focus on your nose, your eyes have to point in towards each other.  If you look at something very far away, your eyes are looking out almost parallel to each other.  Along the same lines of your ears discerning the location of a sound by the time difference between the sound getting to your ears, your eyes can discern how far away an object is by how much your eyes are pointing together when you focus on it.  Of course there are other visual clues such as juxtaposition (one object in front of another) and size relativity, but you get the point.

Now let's get on to the mind tricks.  Put your finger in front of you pointing up (like you're saying "one").  Now focus on something farther away.  Do you see two fingers?  We all know that you don't actually have two fingers, it's just your brain playing tricks on you since you aren't focusing on your finger.  With your finger still up, close your left eye.  You'll notice that your "left finger" is the one you see.  Closing your right eye instead of your left eye, you see that your "right finger" is the only one you see.  Now pretend that us audio/visual guys can do anything we want to, and we can actually somehow make both eyes see different images.  Think a pair of binoculars, but with pictures inside that you can see.  If you were to compare these two pictures side by side, everything looks the same, except for a floating finger in the middle of the picture.  It's the exact same finger, but the finger is in a slightly different position in each image, just like when you did it a second ago.  Looking into this magical pair of binoculars, what do you think you'd see?  Your brain actually wants to "fix" these images just like your finger you held up in front of you.  Because each eye only sees one finger, your brain sees it just like the finger you held up in front of you - as one actual finger.  If you were to focus on it, your brain resolves the image into one finger that actually would look like it's in front of the picture.  Using some different technologies, we can actually pull this trick off in the visual world.

Types of 3D
There are three main ways that we can actually pull this "different eye" trick off.  All three work on the same principle explained above - we want to send a different image to each eye.

Anaglyph
This is the old kind of 3D that was popularized back in the 70's (or something around there...yea, I'm young).  It used a pair of glasses with a red filter for the left eye and a cyan filter for the right eye.  Using an image specially processed with this color difference, each eye gets a different image because the filters pull out the color that the eye isn't supposed to see.  Do a Google search for "anaglyph" and you'll see plenty of examples.

Infitec
This one is really uncommon, but it's out there.  Two projectors are loaded with filters that only pass certain wavelengths of light.  Basically one projector will pass the lower half of the red spectrum, lower half of green, and lower half of blue, while the other projector passes the upper half of red, green, and blue.  Left and right eye images are sent to these separate projectors, land the glasses have the same filtering in each lens.  Because the color spectrum can't be split perfectly even across the two filters, one filter looks green and the other red.  A lot of color adjustments need to be made in the projectors because of this, and the color spectrum never really does look quite right because of the colors that are missing for each respective eye.  Nevertheless, it does look much better than anaglyph 3D.

Polarized Lenses
You may know of polarized sunglasses that reduce glare off of the road.  This is the same sort of thing.  Think of a wave on a lake or the ocean.  Looking at the wave, you see it travelling across the water.  If you were to look at a certain spot on the water, though, you'd see the water rising and falling as the waves go by.  Light acts in the same way - it travels through the air, but moves "up" and "down" through the space.  Normally light doesn't really follow the "up" and "down" rule though.  It just travels in whatever manner it wants to.  If, however, you were to put a whole bunch of really thin bars really close together pointing up and down, you could theoretically make only light travelling "up and down" go through.  This is actually a polarizing filter, and it's exactly what your polarized sunglasses do. If you've ever worn a pair, you know that some of the glare gets through.  No polarizing filter can be perfect.  In addition, if you tilt your head, you start to see a whole lot more of the glare.  This is because the filters are no longer oriented the way they're supposed to be.  Smart people have come up with ways to fix this by putting a "spin" on light coming out of a light source - either clockwise or counter-clockwise.  This is what we call circular polarization.  Because it's circular, you can tilt your head and the polarizing filter doesn't get disoriented.

Active or Shutter Glasses
This is currently the best way to do 3D.  These glasses have an LCD in each eye lens that can block light or let light through.  The display is configured to alternate between showing a "left eye" image and a "right eye" image very quickly, usually somewhere between 60 and 120 times per second.  The active glasses are synchronized to the display so that when the display is showing a right eye image, the right eye shutter is open and the left eye is closed.  Thus your right eye sees the image displayed and your left eye sees (theoretically) black.  When the display alternates to the left eye image, the glasses flip and your left eye sees the image while your right eye sees black.


The main goal of 3D technology is to do the best job of separating out the images to your left and right eyes.  The technologies I just talked about are listed in order of how well they work, with anaglyph being the worst at separating eye images, and active being the best.  Many of you have probably seen some sort of 3D show, whether it be a 3D movie or a place like Disney World.  Nowadays, theaters usually use polarized glasses because they're pretty cheap.  If people take them, no big deal.  Anaglyph glasses are usually used for magazines and commercials like the Superbowl last year because you can't control light polarization in either of these cases.  Active glasses are only used in places where the glasses can be easily kept track of because they still cost hundreds of dollars, but the cost is coming down.  Compared to a few bucks for a set of polarized glasses, it'll be a while before you see active glasses in theaters.

As a side note, here's a good example of 3D that you'd expect to see covered in news and hear about most often.  That's bad 3D.  Good 3D is much harder to come by because people want to do things as cheaply as possible most of the time.  Not only do you have to spend money on the way 3D is delivered to your eyes, but you have to pay for the content development.  I haven't seen it yet, but I've heard that Avatar was pretty good from some reliable sources.  Granted it's only using polarization technology, but it still was reportedly good.

Clear as mud?

Simple Keyboard Shortcuts

Here's my first topic: keyboard shortcuts.  Microsoft provides Windows users with numerous ways to do the same task - through menus (i.e. File, Edit, Tools, etc.), context menus (those popup menus when you right click), and keyboard shortcuts.  Keyboard shortcuts can save a lot of time if you know how to use them, especially for commonly repeated tasks.

First some ground rules:
Ctrl is the Control key.  Usually this is labeled as "Ctrl".  There are two of them, both doing the same thing, just in different locations for convenience.  One is on the bottom left of your keyboard, the other on the bottom right, usually right next to the arrow keys.
Shift is the Shift key.  Same deal as the Control key - there are two on opposite sides of the keyboard, usually the key above the Control key.
Tab key came from the typewriter's ability to move a set amount of space, usually for indenting paragraphs. It can be found on the left side of the keyboard, right below the numbers.
Windows is the Windows key.  It's a tricky little guy - it's not labeled as "Windows" - it instead has the Windows logo on it.  Sometimes there are two of them on opposite sides of the keyboard, but sometimes only one.  If there's only one, then it's usually on the bottom left of your keyboard right next to Control.

If you see a key combo written, for example, as Ctrl+C, that means hold down the Control key, hit the C key, then take your fingers off of both of them.  Think of it as the Shift key, but instead of making the letter capitalized instead of lowercase, you're being provided with a set of command keys.

So here we go.


Common shortcuts
Ctrl+C: copy the selected text, file, or whatever else you can highlight
Ctrl+X: cut the selected text, file, or whatever else you can highlight
Ctrl+V: paste what you just copied
Ctrl+Z: undo your last action
Ctrl+Y: redo your last action (generally only something that you just used the "Undo" command on)
Ctrl+A: select all - can be files/folders in a window, text in a document, or whatever else is up on the active window
Ctrl+S: Save.  If you haven't saved your document yet, it will bring up the "Save As..." window.

Alt+Tab: brings up a window that shows all windows that you have open.  Holding down Alt while hitting Tab multiple times will cycle through your options.  In Vista or 7, hitting the Windows+Tab will cycle through windows in a 3D environment.

Tab: Generally people will only use the Tab key while working in a program like Microsoft Word, but it is much more useful than that.  In any well-coded program, hitting the Tab key while in a window with some text fields, buttons, and whatnot will cycle through them.  The most common example is the Windows login screen - the one where you have to hit Ctrl+Alt+Del.  After you enter your user name, try hitting Tab instead of clicking in the password text box.  It will take you right from the username field to the password field, so you don't have to take your hands off your keyboard to log in.  Website forms can be the same way.  Next time you have to enter a whole bunch of information on a web page, just hit Tab to just to the next text box.  Also, Shift+Tab will go to the previous button or text field.

Ctrl+Left Click: Holding down Control while clicking files or folders in Explorer will select multiple items.  This also works for things like cells in Excel.  Pretty much any program with lists should allow you to use this.
Shift+Left Click: This one is a little hard to explain, so you just might have to give it a try to see how it works.  If you want to select a bunch of files or folders that are sequential in Explorer, select the first one.  Then, Shift+Left Click the last one in the list.  This will highlight your entire list.  As with Ctrl+Left Click, this one works for programs like Excel as well.


Advanced Shortcuts:
Ctrl+B: toggle Bold text in a word editor
Ctrl+I: toggle Italics text in a word editor
Ctrl+U: toggle Underline text in a word editor
Alt+F4: closes active window or program
Windows+Break: brings up System Properties window
Ctrl+Shift+Esc: brings up Task Manager
Shift+Del: permanently deletes a file or folder - this will skip the Recycle Bin, so be careful using this one
Windows+D: minimizes all windows and goes to the desktop
Windows+R: opens the Run window
Windows+L: locks the desktop on the computer.  Useful for when you get up from your computer at work.


Master these keyboard commands, and you'll save time in everyday computing.

If you're looking for more, Microsoft has a great page on about every shortcut there is.  Check it out if you dare.

Hopes for this Blog

This is the obligatory first posting for any blog.  I'd love to do without it, but I have some explaining to do...

I'm kind of stepping out on a limb here, but I'm hoping that I can use this blog to help people out.  I'd like to tackle everything from computer keyboard shortcuts (already working on that one) to how a car engine works.  Hopefully I can cover what I want to here without estranging anyone.  You don't have to read every blog post if certain ones don't interest you :)

This blog was actually a request by several people (you know who you are!), so hopefully it's everything you want it to be.  If at any time there are things that you want me to cover or try to explain, feel free to comment here or shoot me an email.  Those of you who know me know that I love about anything that deals with technology (like computers and electronics), but also love working with mechanical workings like cars.

So speak up if you want me to tackle a topic, and hopefully I won't run out of things to post!


-Tim