Okay, so computers aren’t really my thing. I’m fine with them, I can do all the basics and a few advanced things too. But aside from typing or photo/graphics/aesthetics-related tasks, I don’t pretend to know a whole heck of a lot.
Sometimes that’s not a big deal. I mean, Google is just a click away, right? But then there are times when my laptop gets a raging case of PMS and a simple two-second Google search isn’t enough to solve my problem.
I won’t lie — this post is meant more for me than for you, as an easy means of remembering how to work around certain issues that crop up more often than I’d like them to. But if just one other frustrated person comes across this blog post and it helps them? Well, then it was completely worth writing.
Hope someone finds these tips useful, I know I will!
*****
How to Get Single Spaces in WordPress
This would drive me crazy before I learned the trick. You’re writing a post in WordPress, you hit the enter key and this happens…
It drops you down two lines instead of one. Which is great when you’re starting a new paragraph. Not so great if you’re making a list and you don’t want the extra spacing.
Thankfully, there’s a really easy solution.
Enter = Double Space
SHIFT+Enter = Single Space
By holding down the SHIFT key while you press Enter,
you can get the cursor to drop down a single space
instead of that annoying double space.
Ta-da!
How to Toggle Between English and French Keyboard Settings
It’s happened to me more times than I can count. I’m clicking away on the keyboard when suddenly instead of a ? I get a É. What the…..?
I would struggle and fret trying to turn this weird Frenchness back off, having no clue how it got turned on in the first place. I’d always have to resort to a restart. Which wouldn’t be a big deal if I wasn’t always juggling 15+ open tabs at the same time. But happily, it’s very easy to toggle back to English-only, no restart required.
CTRL+SHIFT = Enable or Disable French Character Keyboard
Au revoir, ÉÈ! Vive le ?????!
How to Turn on Your Audio Service
Searching through online forums, I learned that I’m not the only one who occasionally has this problem. I turn my laptop on in the morning and there’s an ominous red cross-out circle on the audio icon, and it says “The audio service isn’t running”.
Great.
The troubleshooter was always useless, telling me it couldn’t fix the problem – whatever the problem was. The solution I found online? A simple restart. And for an entire year, a restart always did the trick.
Until one day, it didn’t. Three restarts and nothing. So I dug deeper into the online forums (because Microsoft is useless), and found a Start key search that led me to what I needed.
Click the Start button and type services.msc in the search bar. Click the result to launch the program.
Double-click “Windows Audio” to open the “Windows Audio Properties” dialogue box.
Now, when the service wasn’t running (sorry, I took these screen grabs after the problem was fixed), under “Service Status” it said “Stopped”. All I did was click “Start” and it fired up immediately.
Problem solved!
Do be aware, though, that something still wasn’t working after I did this fix. The on-screen volume notifications. Normally when you press the volume keys on the keyboard (or use the manual volume control slider that’s always in your taskbar), the volume pops up on the screen so you can see what its numerical value is. But that’s of little consequence. Not something I actually need to have working. I was just happy to have sound again!
Alt-Codes You Might Actually Use
While I can’t say that alt-codes are something I use all the time, there are a few of them which I use often enough that knowing them is handy.
Remember that alt-codes will only work when NumLock is turned on and you’re using the number pad on the keyboard.
Alt+0169 = © (copyright symbol)
Alt+248 = ° (degree sign)
Alt+0162 = ¢ (cent sign)
Alt+3 = ♥ (heart)
Alt+13 = ♪ (single music note)
Alt+14 = ♫ (double music note)
I know that most of these (if not all) are pretty easy “hacks”. But they’re all things that at one time or another I’ve found myself doing a Google search to figure out. Lord knows that I’d have been grateful to find a post like this that explained everything clearly and simply. Typically you end up having to search long forum threads for any useful information and those can get pretty jumbled up and confusing.
If you have any easy tricks of your own, feel free to add them in the comments below!
