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Next week I leave for the US to attend WritersUA, the annual Conference for Software User Assistance, to be held in Seattle from March 21-24, 2010.

For the past few years, I’ve used this blog to write summaries of the sessions I’ve attended at various conferences. Last year, I observed others also Tweeting about the conference sessions, though at that stage I wasn’t using Twitter (I signed up during that 2009...

Did you know that Wikipedia has an extensive Manual of Style (MoS)? In it, you can find guidance on pretty much anything you want to know about writing articles for Wikipedia.

The main Wikipedia MoS is here:...

Over the past couple of years, the Opera browser people have created a course in HTML, CSS and web standards. All 40+ ‘lessons’ are freely available online from: http://www.opera.com/company/education/curriculum/

(On a personal note, two of the articles were written by my friend and fellow technical writer, Frank Palinkas, who now resides in Norway where he works for Opera.)

[Link last checked March...

There are a couple of ways you can set up Word 2007 to use SEQ fields for numbering — you can set them up as AutoCorrect entries or as Quick Parts. Both ways work; the method you choose is up to you. This long article describes how to create the SEQ fields and the numbering style in your Normal.dotm template; how to save the SEQ fields as AutoCorrect entries in Word 2007 (and how to use them); and how to save (and use) them as Quick Parts. The most consuming part of this process is...

For all the geeks, nerds, and science types out there, Popular Science magazine has now made available its entire 137-year’s worth of archives — for free.

You can search away to your heart’s content here: http://www.popsci.com.au/archives

[Link last checked March 2010]

I have occasionally purchased books from Fishpond.com.au, an online bookstore in Australia.

Their standard logo includes a happy fish:

However, their happy fish becomes a sad fish with a broken fishbowl if their site is down:

...

Do you need to know the official terms that Microsoft uses for various parts of the recent Ribbon interfaces? Well, look no further than these resources:

• Office 2007 Ribbon features: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/products/FX102774021033.aspx
• Ribbons (in Windows): http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc872782.aspx (for...

Looking at this map, it’s amazing to think that no-one’s thought of it before! What a clever, practical design — you start with your overview map, then fold out the sector you need for more details.

As I mentioned earlier, we’ve moved into a new house. A house with a reticulated garden. I’ve had reticulation before and the programmable controllers are a bit of a mystery — not at all helped by the invariably incomprehensible user manual that comes with them.

This system is a Rain Dial system from Irritrol, and the instructions to set up a manual override seemed easy enough. Not so. One critical thing that was missing was information about whether our system was...

Part of moving house and office was rethinking the HP OfficeJet multifunction printer/copier/scanner I’ve been using for the past 11 years (yes, it still works!), and the ancient thermal fax machine (it still works too). It was time for an upgrade.

I bought a Brother Multifunction Color Laser with print, scan, photocopy and fax functions (model: MFC-9120CN). It has a smaller footprint than the old beast, is lighter, and has a lot more functions, such as the ability to scan from...