Inline images with GMail

Sure, blogger has a handy little 'insert image' icon, but why don't I see that button in GMail?  Of course you can always insert an image with the link button, by using a URL that links to it, but that's assuming you have the image in question hosted online.

For uploading snapshots and other images from your local machine, you'll need to enable GoogleLabs 'Insert Image'.

1. In GMail, look to the upper right corner of the page and find this little gear (Options).  Click it, and choose 'Mail settings' as opposed to 'Mail Help'.
2. You'll be under the 'General' tab, which is cool, but check it out later.  Skip over to the 'Labs' tab and click that.
3. You can use the search bar, or your knowledge of the English alphabet.  Either way, you're looking for 'Inserting Images' by Kent T.  Click the 'Enable' button.
4. That's it!  There are really only 3 steps.  The 'insert images'  button will show up in between the 'insert emoticon' & 'link' buttons.

Help systray help you

The windows taskbar has changed a lot over the years, and more so the start menu, but ever since Windows 95 brought me the System Tray, I've been glancing at the bottom right corner of my screen to see what's running.

Back in those days, if you closed a window, you closed the program.  Even the most ignorant user today probably knows that's not always the case anymore, but on the flip side, even the most savvy user is fighting a constant battle against monopoware that thinks it really ought to be running all the time.  A good interface includes the option to close, minimize, or minimize to system tray (notification area) when you hit the x.  Winamp and even (monopoware) iTunes are a couple of examples.  It's a great place for stuff that you like to keep running in the not-quite-background; you get more space for your foreground stuff in the taskbar.  It's not there to be a place for Skype and Steam to hide when you think you've closed them, though.  Or maybe you just don't care and you want to hide them all...

To the point:  Windows 7's system tray has that little arrow on the left side of the icons.  Click it and you'll find all those always-on programs, hit customize and you can set their behaviors.

An example of each of the three settings.

Now I know when Steam and Soluto are running on their own (the worst of these wares like iTunes and Skype will even reset this after some updates).  Now my antivirus and Windows update won't take up space on the bar unless I need to know something.