Q. How do I get my Windows Live Mail spell check back? It suddenly disappeared and refuses to work. Help!
A. Windows Live Mail (WLM) automatically checks messages and underlines, with a red squiggly line, any words it suspects are misspelled. If your Windows Live Mail is no longer doing this, it needs to be restarted, which is not difficult to do.
With Windows Live Mail open, press the Menu button at the top of the screen, or you can press the ALT + M keystroke combo on your keyboard, then click Options > Spelling tab. Click to check the “Always check spelling before sending” check box.
Place a check in the “Automatically correct common capitalization and spelling mistakes” check box, and the “Check my spelling as I type” check box.
Lastly, click to select the “Check spelling in current input language” box, then click OK to save your settings and close the Options window. Close, then reopen, Windows Live Mail and you will be good to go.
Q. What does the "hashtag” mean on Twitter? I hear people saying things on TV while reading a message like, “He was talking about his hashtag iPhone” and on screen it appears as the # sign. I always thought that was the symbol for sharps in music. Help! I'm so clueless, I don't even know I'm clueless.
A. Hashtags are a way to categorize and find tweets (Twitter messages) on particular topics. For example, if you include something like “#iPhone” in your tweet, it will automatically be categorized with all other tweets referencing the iPhone and will pop up if anyone decides to search for tweets that reference the iPhone.
Q. I have maintained a bookmark.htm file from my old Netscape days. I can access it on the iPad as an email attachment, but I don't see any way to directly access this file from Safari so I can put it on the Bookmark bar. Can I do this without going through my email attachment?
A. I don't know if it's possible with an old Netscape bookmark file -- and I doubt it is -- but try connecting your iPad to your computer, go to iTunes and select your iPad under the Devices list.
Go to the Info tab. Part way down you may see an option to sync Bookmarks. Even if you do and you select it, I'd be surprised if there was an option to sync with a Netscape bookmark file, but it's worth a try.
Instead of attempting to use your old Netscape bookmarks, I would suggest creating new bookmarks in your iPad's Safari browser. Like it or not, time marches on, so I would leave Netscape behind and start anew with your iPad's Safari browser.
With the exception of 10 or 12 Web sites that I visit frequently, I stopped using bookmarks years ago. With the advent of high-speed Internet access, I search (using Google) for whatever I need rather than continually returning to bookmarked sites. In this way, I often discover new and better sites.
If I was inclined to use bookmarks, however, I would keep them in the cloud (online) using Google Bookmarks (www.google.com/bookmarks), and not local on my computer. In that way they would be accessible at any time, from any computer or Internet-connected device.
Mr. Modem’s DME (Don’t Miss ‘Em) Sites of the Month
Behold, the Mouse
Historical videos of the first public demonstrations of basic computing concepts we now take for granted. In December of 1968 (Bill Gates was 13 at the time), scientists from the Stanford Research Institute presented these demos at the Fall Joint Computer Conference held in San Francisco. In one clip, researchers demonstrate for the first time a new device called a mouse. Also demonstrated that day were hypertext, dynamic file linking, and a mind-blowing (hey, it was 1968!) demonstration of something called "shared-screen collaboration." Fascinating, in a geeky kind of way.
Internet Archive
As long as we're scrolling down memory lane, the Internet Archive, affectionately called the Wayback Machine, has archived more than 10 billion pages of Web content dating all the way back to the olden days of 1996. If you would like to see how Web sites appeared in that primordial era of the Internet, they await your perusal just a couple of mouse clicks away.
The Mountain
The Vimeo Web site is intriguing by virtue of all the videos people have contributed, but “The Mountain” is one of the most compelling I've seen. It is a week-long, time-lapse video of El Teide. El Teide, for those who don't get out much, is the highest mountain in Spain, one of the best places on earth to photograph stars -- not Tom Cruise-type stars, but stars as in twinkle-twinkle. Under “Also check out” you will find three additional videos: The Aurora, The Arctic Light, and The Water. Each is well worth watching.
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