Best Desk Gadgets For Dads, Christmas 2019

With the holiday gift giving season soon approaching, I’ve collated a list of the 10 coolest gadgets to give your Dad. And by that I mean a list of gadgets I would consider cool to keep on my desk at home or at the office.

1. Levitating Floating Globe

What could be a better conversation starter than an eye catching, spinning, levitating globe? Dad’s client will be forever impressed by it’s never ending spinning and levitating. Will it spin forever? There is only one way to find out.


2. Mini Retro Arcade Gaming Machine With 200 Games

Now this is pretty cool! Give Dad the gift of a trip down memory lane with a miniature arcade gaming machine with all the old school classics from the 80’s and 90’s. It is small, yes! But it is very well made and has the following games:

#1 1942
#2 spy hunte
#6 zaxxon
#23 gforce
#34 wack-a-mole
#76 defender
#79 load runner
#89 centipede
#93 mappy
#96 digdug 2
#110 xevious
#125 battleship
#127 arkanoid
#130 space invaders
#134 galaga
#142 kaboom

My Arcade Retro Machine Gaming System with 200 Built-In Video Games     

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How to find engaging tweets on twitter using Tweetdeck

If you use Twitter and you’re looking for engaging content to retweet (ie, steal) you can use Tweetdeck with advanced search operators and Hashtagify to find what you need.

If you haven’t visited Tweetdeck, the site is part of Twitter and can be reached by visiting http://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ and logging in with your normal account. Tweetdeck allows you to build up various columns of tweets which may be of interest to you and is a very powerful tool to keep on top of important tweets.

For example, I have an account on Twitter which only posts pictures and videos of cute animals. A simple strategy for myself is to do the following:

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Partially underlining text in an excel cell to give the appearance it’s a hyperlink.

I came across a problem recently where I had certain cells within an excel spreadsheet which updated a graph when they were double clicked on via a macro. The problem was that it was unintuitive to the end user that clicking on these links would update the graph.

After discussion with the customer, we decided that if they where to look hyperlinks it would be more intuitive that they actually did something when clicked on. “Simple!” said I, “I’ll have that fixed up before we next meet. I’ll just change their style to look like hyperlinks… colour them blue, underline them… easy peasy!” 

So I had a play around with the formatting in Excel, googled frantically for 20 minutes and discovered this is not so simple. The problem was the entire cell was being underlined, not just the text. This is the best that I could come up with.

Not sure why this happened as I’m sure excel is supposed to allow partial underlining of a cell. There is a solution however and it involves a bit of VBA.

  1. Click Alt-F11 to go into the VBA screen.
  2. Double click on the sheet you’re working on as we’ll store the VBA code there.

3. Paste the following code into the sheet.

Public Sub Hyperlink_Months(bHyperlink As Boolean)

Dim lFirstRow As Long
Dim lLastRow As Long

lFirstRow = 2   'First Row Number
lLastRow = 13   'Last Row Number

Dim i As Integer

If bHyperlink = True Then

    For i = lFirstRow To lLastRow
    
        Sheet1.Range("A" & i).Characters(1, 3).Font.Underline = True
        Sheet1.Range("A" & i).Characters(1, 3).Font.Color = 7884319
    
    Next i

Else

    For i = lFirstRow To lLastRow
    
        Sheet1.Range("A" & i).Characters(1, 3).Font.Underline = False
        Sheet1.Range("A" & i).Characters(1, 3).Font.Color = 0
    
    Next i
    
End If

End Sub

4. Ensure the immediate window is displayed – CTRL + G

5. Run the sub by typing the following into the immediate window (assuming you stored the code in Sheet1)

sheet1.Hyperlink_Months(true) – To turn on the partial formatting of the text (making it look like hyplinks in this case)

or

sheet1.Hyperlink_Months(false) – To turn them off again.

6. Your life is now complete!  😉 

What is the easiest way to remote into a computer?

I have a reputation amongst my friends and family as the technical person, which quite often means that when a cellphone, computer or any electronic gadget for that matter is misbehaving, I’m the first person they call. With computers, I try to determine the problem over the phone to figure out if there is an easy fix. If I can not determine the problem over the phone, or the fix is too complicated to explain, I simply pay them a visit so I can fix it for them.

Up until a year ago I had known about gaining remote access into peoples computers, but had never actually tried it. Basically you and your friend with the computer problem both download some software. You can then gain full control of their computer, mouse and keyboard, and diagnose and repair the problem from your home. It’s as if you are sitting right in front of their computer, without actually being there.

I tried out a number of different software solutions to do this, but unfortunately they all required a monthly subscription, except for one. That software was called “Team Viewer” Continue reading

How do I add youtube videos to my PhpBB3 board?

The problem

A client who owns the message board at http://www.electrofreaks.com/ wanted to allow his users to embed youtube videos within their messages. Currently people are able to link to youtube videos, but are not able to embed videos within their posts.

The Solution

Within phpBB3 there is a feature which allows you to create custom BBCodes. This means that it is possible to embed anything into your phpBB3 message board, so long as embedding is supported on the site which contains the content you wish to embed. Here are the steps:-

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