Windows Linux Mac

Why on earth would you want to invert your colors on your Mac? Well, what if you’re on an airplane, it’s a night flight and you’re looking at something that has a lot of white space. You might be able to decrease the brightness on your screen, but sometimes that may not even work. If that’s the case, you can essentially make a negative of your screen. Here’s how to do it:

Just press Ctrl-Option-Cmd-8 on your keyboard. This will change it back as well.

Here’s what my home page usually looks like:

This is it’s negative:

Changing your icons allows you to change the look and feel of your system. It mainly changes the standard icons to something new.

The first place to look for icons would be gnome-look.org. Click icon on the left. Or just click here. Search around for something that you like.

I like to keep my system looking dark since it doesn’t hurt my eyes too much. With my background being a night picture of London, it was only fitting for me to choose an icon theme that was mainly black. My favorite set is called black-white 2 gloss.

Once you’ve found your icon set, you will need to download it. I usually download everything to my desktop just so that I can find it easily, but that is up to you.

Your file should…

If you are used to using Windows, you probably have a favorite font.  Even if you use Open Office, you still need to have Microsoft fonts installed so that when you open documents created in Word they will look right.

Also, most web pages are created with Microsoft fonts in mind. So, if you have Microsoft fonts installed, web pages will look the way they were intended to.

To install the fonts make sure you have the multiverse repositories enabled.  To do this, click System -> Administration -> Software Sources.  When the window appears, make sure there is a check mark beside all of the repositories except “Source code”

Once you have done this, type the following code in the terminal to update the available software:
sudo apt-get update
When the update is finished, run…

If you have used Windows for more than a few days you have probably noticed that as you install more software your computer begins to get slower, especially when you first log into Windows.

On most computers this is because you have lots of programs trying to start up every time you login. Here’s how to eliminate unnecessary programs from your startup.

Step 1:
Identify which programs are running on startup. There are couple ways to do this. Before you begin, you should restart your computer to make sure you haven’t already closed some programs that would normally run on startup.

Many of the programs will have icons located in the taskbar (beside the clock) that shows they are running. Simply hover your mouse over the icon to see…

If you have ever used a Linux system you will probably have seen the boot up text. The boot up text can be quite informative if you’re ever having hardware or system problems when you boot up. Or the boot up text can look kinda cool and make you feel like you’re in one of those old school green screen computer movies.

Almost all new processors have the ability to scale down their frequencies.  With laptops this allows you to save a ton of battery life.  Read my previous post on how to save battery life in Linux.

With desktops (and laptops), scaling the CPU frequency will not only save you money on your power bill but will also let your computer run cooler.  Why would you want your computer running at full speed all of the time when you don’t need it?  Instead, here is how to scale your CPU frequency for on demand performance.

Step 1:
Right click on one of the panels (top or bottom of screen) and then choose ‘Add to panel.’

Step 2:
When the Add to Panel…

Ever left your computer alone for 5 minutes to come back and realize it crashed and restarted itself?

Here’s a quick guide on how to keep a log of your shutdowns. Logging will give you a time and reason for your crash/unplanned shutdown so hopefully you can fix the problem.

Step 1: Go to the start menu, click Run and then type in ‘regedit’. You should see a screen that looks like this:

Step 2: Find your way to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Reliability.  The complete path is located in the bottom left corner of the window.

Step 3: Right click on ‘ShutdownReasonUI’ (if you don’t have that file go to step 3.1) then click Modify. You should see something like this: