More Reader Feedback

These past few weeks have brought lots of reader email. Why aren't we all outside enjoying the Okanagan summer weather? In any case, I am grateful to everyone who wrote in with questions, comments, and suggestions. Here are some great ones.

More Firefox Add-ons

"Jen" found two Firefox Add-ons not mentioned in last week's column (http://rlis.com/columns/column103.htm). She wrote: http://www.siteadvisor.com/. You can download it for Firefox and for IE. I like it when I am looking for something in Google and the Site advisor lets you know by putting a coloured tick mark if it is a safe site to download from or if that site will send you unrequested e-mails or send you to bad websites etc. If you hover your mouse over the tick mark it will give you the info on that site and then you can click it if you want to check it out further.

Even if you go to a website without going to Google first a bar will show up in the status bar to let you know if it is a safe site or not (green or red) or if they haven't checked it out yet it shows a grey bar.

One other one that I like is Form filler found here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1882 It is the simplest one that I have found that doesn't entail too much work setting it up.

Alternate Characters

"Mike" found an interesting article on Gordon Watts genealogy site, here: http://globalgenealogy.com/globalgazette/gazgw/gazgw-0101.htm, which shows one way to insert characters like the copyright sign, French cedille, and so on into documents composed on the computer. You can also do this with the character map utility built into Windows. More on that here: http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/international/accents/charmap.html.

Outlook Express Toolbars

I promise I don't know how this happens, but it seems to happen a lot. I received mail from several people whose Outlook Express toolbar buttons had wandered off on their own. It's so easy to click on "Reply to sender" and "Send and receive all" that we forget how to accomplish those tasks without a button to push.

If your toolbar has vanished, you can easily bring it back. Right-click anywhere in the area where the buttons used to be, and make sure there is a check mark next to "Toolbar." If there isn't, click once to put it there.

Once you know there's a check mark, choose "Customize" from the context menu. You'll see the "Current Toolbar Buttons" box. Just click on the "Reset" button to bring back the default buttons.

Now if you want to make your toolbar even better than it was, just select what you want from the "Available buttons" list and add it to your "Current" list. If you have something there you don't want, you can just delete it from the "Current" list.

Once again, thank you for writing with comments, questions, and suggestions. If you have something to ask or tell, please send email to Cate. Also, you can read any of the past columns at any time by visiting the archives, here. We're open 24/7/365!

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.