Chris: Geek Guy

I use Microsoft Outlook at work and have never purposely used the Ctrl+Enter keyboard to send an email. However, I am a fairly fast typist, and sometimes don’t let go of the Ctrl key quick enough after pasting something into an email before pressing Enter for a new line, the result being a half-finished email getting sent prematurely.

Fortunately there’s a registry hack to disable this annoyance once and for all:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\
Office\11.0\Outlook\DisabledShortcutKeysCheckBoxes]
"CtrlEnter"="13,8"

If you’re using Word as your email editor, add this too:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\
Office\11.0\Word\DisabledShortcutKeysCheckBoxes]
"CtrlEnter"="13,8"

Presumably, if you’re using a different version of Office, you will need to replace 11.0 with the correct version (10.0 for Office XP, 12.0 for Office 2003, etc.)

Via Reddit.

Free Rice is a fun word game that lets you build your English vocabulary and donates 10 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Programme for each right answer. It might not sound like much but the site has already donated over two billion grains of rice to help stop world hunger.

There’s an awful lot that can be accomplished using only free software, and web design is no exception. All you really need is Kompozer (to create and edit web pages), Paint.NET (to create and edit images) and FileZilla (client version – to upload pages and images to a Web server).

Microsoft’s free Office 2007 Compatibility Pack includes the new Windows Vista fonts (Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantia and Corbel) so that XP (also Windows 2000/2003) users can enjoy them too. The “5 Cs” are very easy on the eye and it’s nice to be able to get hold of them legally without having to shell out for a copy of Vista.

I have some invites for Vox, a new blogging & social networking service from Six Apart. If you’d like one, leave a comment and I’ll get back to you.

A quick plug for a website I’ve just finished designing – Rugby Mortgage Solutions. If you’re in or around the Rugby (UK) area and would like some free mortgage advice, give them a try!

Not sure how legal this is, but WinWorld is offering free downloads of old Windows versions (1.0 up to 98), various “abandonware” applications and even the legendary Microsoft Bob!

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The Spread Firefox community website suffered a security breach this week. There doesn’t seem to be any information on the site, but the Mozilla Foundation has sent out an email to all registered users advising them of the attack, the text of which follows:

On Tuesday, July 12, the Mozilla Foundation discovered that the server hosting Spread Firefox, our community marketing site, had been accessed on Sunday, July 10 by unknown remote attackers who exploited a security vulnerability in the software running the site. This exploit was limited to SpreadFirefox.com and did not affect other mozilla.org web sites or Mozilla software.

We don’t have any evidence that the attackers obtained personal information about site users, and we believe they accessed the machine to use it to send spam. However, it is possible that the attackers acquired information site users provided to the site.

As a Spread Firefox user, you have provided us with a username and password. You may also have provided us with other information, including a real name, a URL, an email address, IM names, a street address, a birthday, and private messages to other users.

We recommend that you change your Spread Firefox password and the password of any accounts where you use the same password as your Spread Firefox account. To change your Spread Firefox password, go to SpreadFirefox.com, log in with your current password, select “My Account” from the sidebar, select “Edit Account” from the sidebar, then enter your new password into the Password fields and press the “Save user information” button at the bottom of the page.

The Mozilla Foundation deeply regrets this incident and is taking steps to prevent it from happening again. We have applied the necessary security fixes to the software running the site, have reviewed our security plan to determine why we didn’t previously apply those fixes in this case, and have modified that plan to ensure we do so in the future.

Sincerely,
The Mozilla Foundation

I have mentioned before that I’m feeling restricted by Blogger, so I have started work on a new site powered by Drupal, an open-source content management system. Another reason for the change is that I am hoping to use Drupal or a similar CMS in a few upcoming projects, so I need to play with it anyway.

Updates on the existing site will continue, but may be less frequent than usual. The new site will be unveiled as soon as it’s ready, and I assure you that it will be worth the wait!