Tips & Tricks on A.J. Elsinga

Paste text as plain text

Sun, 24 Dec 2017 11:28:34 +0000

I prefer to use the keyboard instead of the mouse, especially for actions like cutting and pasting. For cutting and pasting I actually only use keyboard combinations. I find it quite annoying when I paste text from an HTML page into a Word document. I then have to do something with my mouse, namely clear the formatting. As a keyboard jockey, I don’t really like that, especially when I have to struggle to come up with [writing]/how-to-get-writers-block-7-tips/.

Punctuation marks or diacritics on macOS

Wed, 09 Aug 2017 07:00:32 +0000

In the past, as soon as I had to use diacritics on the Mac, I had to search the internet first. You know, the umlaut, diaeresis, grave accent and things like that. I didn’t use them that much. I don’t think you come across them very often in English. Fortunately, I now have a mnemonic that helps me remember them better.

Diacritical marks

in macOS you insert these types of special characters by using alt with another key. In the table below you can see my mnemonics. They are sometimes a bit obvious, or they are simply missing. Then I keep trying until I get the right one. In the table below I have used the term ‘alt’. On my Macbook this is on the keyboard. Depending on the version of your Mac, this may contain option or this symbol:

Place screenshots on macOS wherever YOU want

Thu, 03 Aug 2017 09:06:34 +0000

Taking screenshots on macOS is relatively easy. Without taking your hands off the keyboard, press cmd-shift-3 for the entire screen or cmd-shift-4 for part of the screen. With the latter you can select a part of the screen, after which a snapshot of that part is taken. These screenshots are placed on the desktop by default.

Personally, I don’t find that very useful. In no time my desktop is full of screenshots. I also regularly forget that they are stored there. I then have to look for where they are, since they are not in the most logical location that I feel. That’s why I find it more convenient to automatically place the screenshots in a folder under Pictures.

Manage Google Bookmarks in FireFox

Tue, 16 Jan 2007 23:00:00 +0000

One of this I love most of the google toolbar is the option to use Google bookmarks from every computer running Internet Explorer and the Google toolbar. This was one of the reasons why I still used Internet Explorer instead of FireFox.

After switching my laptop to Linux I started to miss that bookmark gadget. Luckily there is a button available for FireFox which gives you the same abililty. Now I can enjoy the portability of my bookmarks between FireFox and Internet Explorer on both platforms again.