Cursor Moves To A Different Line While Typing – Disable Touchpad on Dell Latitude

After about three years of a slightly irritating habit my laptop appears to have, I have finally been bothered enough about it to find a solution.

When I’m typing, occasionally my cursor will skip to a different line of text.  So I’m happily writing away, only to realise that half of my paragraph has been added to my signature line or to the paragraph above. It happens a couple of times a day, and is the result of a sensitive touch pad on my laptop, which my sausage fingers seem to keep brushing while I type.

I’ve been unable to disable this, and most of the tech support or forum content on the web direct you to the mythical touchpad tab on the mouse properties settings in control panel. Other advice given is to update the drivers (mine were shown as the latest drivers), to uninstall and re-install your touchpad driver, disable the touchpad in BIOS, or check that the Touchpad driver (Alps or Synaptics) is flagged ON (via Start > Run > msconfig).

The solution that worked for me, thanks to Joel Mansford was to install the Hewlett Packard touchpad driver, which gives you a full control panel for your touchpad – enabling you to customise settings, tailor tap sensitivity and most importantly disable your touchpad and stick when you have a mouse attached.

* loud sigh of relief *

Edited: February 10th, 2010

Sony Digital TV Recorder With Extra Megabites & Pixels

I don’t condone excessive bad language… except in this video where it is the key to making you cry with tears of laughter.

Thanks to Simon for distracting me at work with this fantastic video from The Onion:

I actually have one of these at home, I bought it from a bloke on ebay…

Edited: February 10th, 2009

Google Phone – Android Platform

I’m always excited by the latest innovation in phone technology – and I’m looking forward to see what Google’s phone is like.  It’s made by the same manufacturers as my phone (HTC), so I’m wondering if it will have the high spec/dodgy camera combo!

The BBC have some basic info on this here and the video is below:

It looks to be the perfect phone for developers, gamers, and technology enthusiasts, because it’s so open to customisation.  You can even play Quake on your mobile!

Google has set up a developer centre and commmunity for Android here.

Can’t wait!

Edited: September 23rd, 2008

Using Technology To Learn Languages

I’ve been learning Spanish recently, and naturally, I have been making the most of the technology available to me.

The BBC has a decent section with a number of tools for different levels & uses:

• Spanish Section
• Spanish Steps
• Spanish GCSE Bitesize

And here are some of the Spanish Podcasts I’ve been listening to on the way to work:

• Notes in Spanish
• Edufone
• Voices en Español
• Medical Spanish & Spanish Grammar Review
• Spanish Pod
• Spanish Pod 101

I’ve been listening to Podcasts and reading bilingual Spanish/English books for about 3 months now, and have just started a college course.

I’ve found that the real life interaction, practicing speaking and receiving feedback has accelerated my learning greatly, even after just a couple of sessions.  It just shows that although these technologies can help you, there’s no substitute for real people!

Edited: September 18th, 2008

Women Video Gamers

Michael Abbot wrote a great summary of the games designed specifically for girls in the past few years.

I found one of these games slightly disturbing – Babies. I personally couldn’t think of anything worse than playing a game based around a crying baby with smelly nappies; but everybody’s different.

It’s a dichotomy; you could say this reinforce gender stereotypes, but on the other hand, the average little girl really does like playing with baby dolls.

Research has shown that whilst there is a growing number of women who enjoy playing the action packed violent games and shoot-em-ups, overall they tend to prefer a different genre of games such as online games, puzzles, card games, trivia, word challenges and action arcade games.

Nintendo has done exceptionally well to target this growing interested group, with the Wii and the Nintendo DS, which have a range of less violent games and challenges. Both come in white, arguably more feminine than the Playstation, and the Wii even has fitness and yoga games.

Keren Kang writes about how Halo 3 could have been modified to appeal more to women gamers. She raises some good points, but doesn’t get the fact that Halo 3 was an international best selling game; you can’t compromise to please everybody and release a generic game for girls and boys with guns, girls and matching handbags.

Games that are primarily aimed at boys tend to be the best sellers and have wider appeal. In general, a game aimed at boys will appeal to both genders, but boys will be put off by games with a more feminine slant.

That’s not to say game producers should not design for women, there’s a lot to be said for niche games, but I’d say Halo is fine as it is.

Edited: May 12th, 2008

Slightly Off Topic… Picture Framing

I’m writing this post with my family hat on, as opposed to my normal Geek beret.

My sister is a picture framer, and she entered a framing competition with the Fine Art Trade Guild at the end of April.

I’m so proud that she won First and Third place for the two projects she put forward in the North West category. She’s now in the national competition, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed for her!

This is not my normal choice of topic, but I can crow-bar some technology related things in here though:

• For her first place entry, she scanned the image she was framing and printed an enlarged copy in muted shades. She dry mounted this image to mount card*, and used this for an outer mount.
• And for both projects, she used a computerised mount cutter that she programmed with the shapes and sizes of card she needed.

Here she is with her winning project… she’ll hate me for publishing this!!

*Just a quick translation – in the UK framers use “mount board”, this is known as “mat board” in the US.

Edited: May 7th, 2008