Nick Fox-Gieg's Tutorials » Internet

Gmail Reply-To Address

Nick — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 00:58:52 +0000

Step 1. Go to Settings.

Step 2. Go to Accounts and Import.

Step 3. Choose Send mail from another address.

Step 4. Enter your preferred name and address.

Step 5. You probably want to leave this setting at Send through Gmail.

Step 6. Send yourself a verification email and confirm that you own the email account.

Step 7. Once you’ve verified the address, it will appear as an option under Accounts and Import. Click make default and Always reply from default address, and all your Gmail replies will now use your new address.

You can undo this at any time just by clicking make default for your original Gmail address—you don’t need to repeat these steps.

Send HTML Email

Nick — Tue, 13 May 2008 15:50:09 +0000

Sending correctly-formatted HTML email can be a more complicated process than you might think. But the free, cross-platform Thunderbird email client is a decent solution.

Step 1. Click the Write button to compose a new message:

Step 2. Click in the body of the email.

Step 3. Go to the Insert menu and choose HTML:

Step 4. Paste in your HTML code and then click the Insert button:

Step 5. You should now see a preview of your page in the body of the email:

Step 6. Click the Send button:

Step 7. Choose Send in Plain Text and HTML and click Send again:

(Made with help from Jamie Ryckman.)

CSS and Internet Explorer

Nick — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 12:23:42 +0000

All versions of Internet Explorer have problems correctly interpreting CSS. There are ways to improve IE compatibility, however, and one of the simplest is the following code:

"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

Paste it at the top of your document, before anything else. See here for a detailed explanation of how it works.

You Don’t Know How to FTP?

Nick — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 12:31:03 +0000

FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is a way to send large files over a network from one computer to another. This tutorial uses FireFTP, an excellent addon for the Firefox browser. (If Firefox is already your regular browser, you won’t even have to leave it to send files by FTP.)

If you don’t want to use Firefox, you can also use the cross-platform FileZilla FTP client; the setup steps are nearly identical to the tutorial below. (If you’re on a Mac and use FTP frequently, I highly recommend Transmit, USD $34.)

Before proceeding, get the following pieces of information from your server administrator:

* The address of your server–usually, although not always, the same as the ordinary web address.

* Your username and password to log in.

* The directory you should put files in to make them visible on the web. (Putting files somewhere else can make them visible only to FTP programs, not to browsers.)

And now you’re ready to send a file:

Step 1. Start the Firefox browser and launch FireFTP from the Tools menu.

Step 2. Click Create an account.

Step 3. Give your new account a name and enter the information mentioned above.

Step 4. Click Connect.

Step 5. Each time you connect, you’ll be asked for your password.

Step 6. You should now be able to see the directories available on your server. Choose where you would like to send your file.

Step 8. Drag and drop your file to send it.

Step 9. Watch the progress bar in the lower left-hand corner as your file uploads.

Step 10. Once your file is uploaded, you can rename or delete it by right-clicking on it.

Step 11. While FTP programs generally have no restrictions on what you can name your file, remember that, to make it properly accessible on the web, you should use no spaces or uppercase letters.

Step 12. If you uploaded your file into a web directory, type the address into your browser and see if the link works!

Now, this is a somewhat involved process for a beginner. There are lots of other ways for people to exchange files, so why should you bother with FTP? Because FTP has no built-in file size limit. (Email attachments, by contrast, are generally capped at 10MB or less.) For getting a few hundred megs into the hands of somebody on the other side of the world, right away, this can be extremely useful.

Improve Wireless Range

Nick — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 17:56:44 +0000

In the course of figuring out how to get good wireless reception throughout my new apartment, I discovered a few very useful tricks.

Step 1. First, find a utility to detect wireless networks in your area, like the excellent MacStumbler. See if a network shows up with a channel number near yours. If so, it might be causing interference and shortening your range.

Step 2. Go back to your router’s web control panel and experiment with changing the channel number to something further away from the other network. (If your router offers auto channel select, it’s worth trying that too–although I haven’t seen it do a very good job of avoiding interference.) My router was set to channel 7 out of the box, which was too close to the neighbors’ network on channel 6. After switching to channel 11, I saw my range improve.

While you’re at the control panel, you might want to also experiment with turning off any “special modes” that the router manufacturer has left enabled by default. Here, unchecking “802.11e QoS” solved a problem I was having with dropped connections. (This happens because these special modes deviate from established industry standards, which can have unpredictable results on your particular computer.)

Step 3. If that doesn’t help enough, you may have to reduce the security of your wireless network in order to squeeze a little more coverage out of it–you’ll have to decide if you’re willing to make that tradeoff. WEP and WPA encryption, the most common security options available to you, will reduce your antenna’s range. However, if you have a newer router, you might not need to compromise—before trying any of the steps below, see if you can set your encryption type to WPA2/AES. It provides decent protection without a significant range or speed penalty; if your router and computers can handle the new “N” wifi standard, instead of only “B” or “G,” this is likely to work well.

Step 4. If you don’t have WPA2/AES support, your encryption options are less attractive. Experiment with WEP, the original password-protection option for wireless networks; it’s relatively easy to defeat and won’t let you choose your own password, but it will only slightly shrink the area your network can cover. Although its successor, WPA, lets you pick your own password and provides better security, it doesn’t work with older operating systems, and its range penalty is more severe.

So if you’re willing to accept weaker protection in order to get better range, head to your wireless router’s web control panel. (Typically, you get there by typing 192.168.1.1 or 192.168.2.1 into any web browser while connected to your router.) If you’re using WPA, try WEP, and if you’re still not getting enough coverage, turn them both off.

Step 5. With both WPA and WEP disabled, we’re going to set up the third security option, MAC address filtering. It takes a bit more work to turn on, and the protection it provides isn’t too strong, but it gave me a dramatic range boost, and it’s enough to keep out casual visitors. Each computer has a unique MAC address, and we’re going to set up the wireless router to only accept connections from computers with specific addresses.

Start by going to your Network preferences (this will work more or less the same way in Windows, too). Copy the MAC address. (Here, it’s called an “Airport ID”–see why this isn’t method isn’t more commonly used?) Ignore any spaces, colons (:), or other separators.

Step 6. Next, find the MAC address filtering option in your router’s web control panel, and turn it on. Choose “allow,” and then carefully enter your MAC address in the space provided. Be sure it’s correct! (If you lock yourself out accidentally, connect to the router with a wired ethernet cable, go to the web control panel, and delete the offending entry from the list.)

Step 7. Once you have everything set up, there are two last things you can do to improve security. You can hide your SSID, so the first time you access your network you have to type its name in manually.

And you can set a router password to protect your web control panel settings.