None of the News that’s Fit to Print

I occasionally think it would be fun to have “business” cards that are just for fun, but I don’t usually want to pay a lot. I recently saw a VistaPrint ad for 250 free business cards (affiliate link), so I thought I’d check it out. It’s not quite “free” in the end because you pay shipping and handling, but you don’t get gouged. I haven’t seen the cards yet, but for $5 it’s a fun thing to do, with a couple of things to watch out for.
» How free is it? Read on »

I started working on a new/old laptop (new to me, but was my wife’s before her employer bought her a work-dedicated machine). Yeah, my old laptop was pretty much unusable at this point (like go make a cup of tea while waiting for it to switch from a Firefox window to a Word window). Great! Except for one annoying thing: over in the task bar, the tooltips are partially or fully hidden. Sometimes this is marginally annoying (as in the example below). Sometimes the tool tip is so covered over by the system tray that you can’t even read the message box so if you don’t know which icon you’re looking for, you can’t find it. Uggh! »Details on how to fix hidden tooltips… »

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. Sometimes it isn’t. There are a couple of tools that are fun to play with and may have practical applications as well. May. First have a look at a couple of screenshots from Touchgraph and Quintura.
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The Problem
I’ve torn my hair out so many times trying to get CSS floats to clear properly. The problem is that when you have a floated element and a non-floated element in a containing box and the floated element is taller than the non-floated element, the floated element overflows the box, like so: more on smart floats

Some stuff is worth paying for. Some stuff isn’t. But some stuff is worth paying for and it’s free anyway! I have to say that “free” is a relative term since

1. I actually do pay for most of this stuff. Not much, but if somebody has a donation button, I pretty much always donate somewhere between $5 and $20. It’s the right thing to do.
2. As they say in the open source world, this is all free as in beer, but only some is free as in speech.

Everybody knows about browsers and email clients, so that stuff comes last. I’m trying to list some stuff that you might not know about, but which will (er.. may) improve your life. Then again it may not. I’ve arranged the list in increasing order of geekiness, so things like MySQL clients are way down the list. Also, I have not bothered to include things like Firefox, Thunderbird, Winamp and such that everyone knows about.

So here’s the list. It’s Windows-centric, though some apps are available for other platforms.

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