Google Chrome Full Screen Goodness

Ok, here’s an awesome thing to do. With Google Chrome (my browser of choice, baby), hit your “F11″ key to go into full screen mode. Good, good… that’s full screen, nothin’ new to some people. But, did yo know you can use full screen mode and switch between different browser tabs, all without exiting full screen? Yeah, it’s tight, here’s how ya do it.

Go into full screen and simply hit “Ctrl + Tab”. And bam… you set.

Right now I’m writing this via the Wordpress admin area, while I got Pandora playin’ in another tab (among a few others). Here’s what it looks like.

Look at that full screen goodness. Those are full screen snapshots, not cropped or anything. What’s nice is that, if you got Windows Vista or Windows 7, you can hit the “Start” +  ”Tab” key to go back and forth to different programs without exiting full screen mode. And if you wanna’ create a new tab, just hit “Ctrl” + “T”, as in “Control… Tab! Now!” and you got yourself a groovy ‘nother tab.

I don’t know how to close a tab via command key. Hmm… “Alt” + F4″ is the command key to close a window, so I wonder what “Ctrl” + F4″ does? Yep… figured it out. “Ctrl” + F4″ to close a tab. Nice.

Few more commands at ya, that you outta’ know just because. “Backspace” to go back a page. “Shift” + “Backspace” to move go forward a page.

“F5″ to refresh a page.

“Spacebar” to page down. “Shift” + “Spacebar” to page up.

Google Chrome and full screen… it’s that easy.

Peace, JbB

Gansta’ Leanin’ Your Windows 7 Taskbar

I just got done talkin’ about PC Browser Windows Tips For Widescreen Monitors. The gist of it was about how to setup your browser window to the advantage of your widescreen monitor. Now it’s time to talk how about’ta gansta’ lean your Windows 7 taskbar to fit your widescreen needs.

Use That Extra Screen Space

So the shape of widescreen monitors are different than “letterbox” (regular) monitors. Widescreen monitors have extra space on the sides. The Windows 7 taskbar is different than XP and Vista in that it doesn’t include text in the taskbar anymore, only icons. This works out perfect because it means that your taskbar can function the same way, either at the top or bottom or at the left or right.

So when it comes to almost anything on your screen, you got more space on the sides. Web pages, programs, whatever… So throwing your taskbar to the left of your screen gives ya more use out of that widescreen area you’ve got to work with. The reason why you should throw it to the left and not right is because the start button stays in the same exact spot as if it were on the top of your screen.

Here are some screen shots of the taskbar switching from top to left, and you can just see that it makes more sense on the Neonote, my 15.4″ widescreen laptop.

As you can see, it gives you more space to work with. Macs have a similar function that a lot of advanced users use for the same reason. Now it’s not right for everyone, so I say try it out for a few days and see what you think. If you ain’t feelin’ it, then you’ll know gansta’ leanin’ your taskbar isn’t for you.

Why I Gansta’ Lean

How I made the transition was outta’ necessity. I was working with a program that I really needed the  most height from the window I could get. I had the taskbar audio hide itself when using this program just for five minutes one day, just so I could get what I needed done. When I unhid it, I thought “What would happen if I dragged it off to the side?”. I did that and it worked great for this program. So every time I used this program, I gansta’ leaned the taskbar.

But then, more and more, I realized that gansta’ leanin’ the taskbar worked great for other programs too. Eventually I realized that, with Windows 7’s icon-only taskbar, the taskbar could chill where ever you wanted it and it didn’t make much mind no difference any who.

So bam, I’ve been rockin’ my taskbar to the left ever since. Give it a shot.

Peace, JbB

PC Browser Window Tips For Widescreen Monitors

Ok, so here’s an interesting Windows problem. What happens when you have a big monitor, especially a widescreen monitor, and you wanna’ browse the web? A big monitor typically means higher resolution. That means you have more up and down space to see the page. But you also have more left and right space, and the problem is that 95% of web pages out there have “fixed widths”, which means no matter how much extra side space you have, the web page will only be one particular width. This is even more noticeable on widescreen monitors. So what your left with is a bunch of content in the center of your big ‘ol screen with a bunch of nothingness (dead space) on the sides.

So when it comes to browsing the web, your browser fills up your entire screen even though the web page may only take up 75% to 30% of your screen. But that’s just life, right? No, it doesn’t have to be.

PC Users Can Learn From 27″ Macs

The Apple Safari browser has a feature I really like. Have you ever been on one of those huge 27″ iMacs at the Apple store or at Best Buy? Those ***** are huge! I love’em. Browsing the web on those babies must be a big waste, right? No. When you maximize the Safari, Apple’s browser, it maximizes top to bottom, but it expands left and right only to the size of the web page. There’s a small percentage of people still using older computers set with a low resolution of 800 x 600. Just to give you an idea of how extremely tiny that crap is, 15.4″ widescreen laptops and 19″ monitors use a resolution of 1366 x 768. The largest non-eye squinting resolution, let’s take the 27″ iMac for instance, is 2560 x 1,440. Think about that. Widescreen resolution can go from a width of 1366 to a width of 2560, yet most web pages all have a fixed width of 800. See the problem?

That’s why Apple updated Safari a while back to that if you wanted to maximize a web page, it would maximize the width of the web page so that your entire screen wasn’t filled with the dead space of the web page.

Why Safari’s Maximizing Makes Sense

The reason why Safari does this is because your browser doesn’t do you much good if you can only see one page open at a time on a very big monitor, or can’t see anything else until you minimize. I mean think about it, would it make much since to use a small program, such as the calculator, but have it take up the entire screen? Of course not, and that’s Safari’s thinking on the Mac. People would be less inclined to buy or use a big screened Mac if they saw a tiny web page taking up 100% of the screen.

Using this method, Apple encourages you to have more web pages open on the same screen or to have more things open while you have a web page up. The bad news is that Internet Explore, Firefox and my browser of choice, Google Chrome, all don’t do this. But Windows 7 can help.

Rockin’ Windows 7’s New Maximizing Feature

Take a look at the screen shots taken with the Neonote below. The Neonote is a widescreen 15.4″ Hp Pavalion DV6 runnin’ Windows 7 at 1366 x 768 resolution.

aintageek.com front page.

nytimes.com front page.

nytimes.com news story.

See all that dead space? Now aintageek.com looks good, because the “dead space” is filled with that bad *** lookin’ design I created. But look at the New York Times. You can see the dead space on the home page to the right, and on the story, you can see the dead space on either side. What a waste. It gets even worst on larger screens at higher resolutions.

But with Windows 7, there’s a new feature you can use that’ll maximize just the top and bottom of the window. You resize the browser window so that it gets close to 800 pixels. How on Earth do you do that? Oh, it’s simple. Open your browser, make sure it’s not maximized and go to a web page such as a nytimes.com article and drag the sides of the window in or out until there’s no horizontal bar on the bottom. Drag it out just a tiny bit to be extra safe. Move the window to where you want it, I have mine on the right side of the screen. Then move your cursor up to the top of the window until you see your cursor change to the move cursor and then double click. Your window will now maximize the top and bottom. (This works for all windows by the way.)

The majority of all web pages out there will now neatly fit into this window. Here’s how the same web pages look “top maximized”.

aintageek.com front page.

nytimes.com front page.

nytimes news story.

As you can see, each page not only fits perfectly, the content of the web page didn’t change at all. All we did was guesstimate the size of our window into an 800 width so that we can bring up web pages and, instead of seeing all that dead space, we instead see our desktop or any other programs we happen to have open behind it. Every once and a while, you’ll run into a web page that’s wider than 800 pixels. But the odds are, that page has some garbage ad or something BS that’s stretching the size out. I mean, after all, the content of the actual web page is much, much smaller. There won’t ever be any web pages that’ll have their normal text content be bigger than 800, and if they do, their designer’s an idiot.

Another tip, which I didn’t show in the screen shots, is to Gansta’ Leanin’ Your Windows 7 Taskbar, so that you can take up some of that extra widescreen space at the left and leave more height for windows, such as web pages.

If I help ya out, shout at me in the comments, or follow me at twitter.com/johnBbaird.

Peace, JbB

Solution To Windows 7: 100% CPU Usage After Unplugging AC Power

Ok, so I just got a new laptop, the Neonote, but I was having a hardware problem with it. Well I found a solution. But first, the problem.

Windows 7 100% CPU Usage After Unplugging AC Power

Here’s the problem. When you have certain models of laptops, especially HPs, and your running Windows 7, when you unplug your laptop and your doing certain things, especially running Google Chrome, Flash videos (Youtube, etc), your CPU will jump to 100% and your system will grind to a halt. This is a problem many are experiencing.

The Solutions Relies In A Windows 7 Setting

Apparently it is a hardware problem, either a driver is not working with the hardware, or the hardware is slightly defective. Your manufacture  most likely won’t fix the problem, so it’s up to you to fix it yourself. Let’s go baby:

1. Go to Control Panel.
   
2. Click on Hardware and Sound.
   
3. Click Power Options.
   
4. Click Change plan settings.
   
5. Under Processor power plant > System cooling policy > On battery notice the Passive setting.
   
6. Change Passive to Active and click Apply then Ok.
   

And that should be it. Now try loading up a Youtube video and disconnecting the power. Is this a permanent fix? I hope so. If this works for you, let me know.

Peace, JbB