Toluu

the How-To Geek

Computer Help from your Friendly How-To Geek

Geek Fun: Remember the Old-School SkiFree Game?Yesterday

I was stumbling around the web yesterday when I came across a blast from the past: The original SkiFree game for Windows, written by a Microsoft programmer on Windows 3.0 back in 1991. Imagine my surprise when I found out the same game actually works just fine on Windows Vista.

The game is based on the original terminal game for VAX systems, the graphics of which aren't very impressive:

If you use the mouse to control the game, you can click the mouse button to make him jump… although I seem to land in the trees more often than not.

I'm really not terribly good at this game:

What old-school games do you miss? Tell us in the comments and we'll try and find them and do a roundup of classic games. (If you are reading through RSS or Email

How to Create and Share an iGoogle TabYesterday

This guest article was written by Paige Eissinger from the Unofficial Google Gadget Blog

I can remember back when the big deal about Firefox vs IE was that Firefox had TABBED BROWSING. And just what was so cool about that? If you're the type of surfer I am who likes to have multiple sites open at once, it was a royal pain to have to use the back button or click through open windows to go from site to site.  I found out during a training class in HTML that Opera had always had tabbed browsing. Hey, I even used Opera before I tried Firefox, just because my instructor said it had tabbed browsing (and loaded fast).

What does this have to do with iGoogle? Everything. If you have your own iGoogle page, and you really should, then you know how easy it is to get overwhelmed with gadgets on your page, just like it was easy to get overwhelmed with too many open websites.  Once again, tabs are here to save the day, or at least reduce gadget overload, by giving you the option to put your gadgets on different pages instead of all in one place. Tabs act as a table of contents that lists the name of each page (the title of the tab) and the gadgets that are on that page.

In case you don't know, iGoogle is Google's personalized homepage. It lets you take your favorite content from across the web and organize it all in one place. You can try it at

Activate Flip 3D With Your Mouse in VistaJanuary 7

Over the last few years I've had many people ask me if they can somehow activate Flip 3D by moving the mouse to a corner of the screen, and I've always told them to use the much more powerful Switcher replacement instead, but that's about to change.

The solution to this problem comes in the form of a tiny little application called Vista Flip 3D Activator, and it lets you assign a corner of the screen to activate Flip 3D, providing you haven't disabled Flip 3D like I have.

Using Vista Flip 3D Activator

Installing the application is as simple as downloading and extracting the program file and running through the install wizard. Once you've done that, you can then check the corner of the screen that you'd like to use for activating Flip 3D…

You can also assign a mouse button if you want, although you should note that it doesn't override IntelliMouse settings. Once you've activated Flip 3D, you can use your mouse wheel to scroll between the different windows, and then click to activate.

Note: for those of you that might be wondering, you can make Flip 3D stay o

Put Your Pidgin Buddy List into the Windows Vista SidebarJanuary 6

Have you ever wondered how to get your Instant Messenger contacts into the Vista Sidebar? Sure, you can use the previously mentioned AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) Gadget for Vista Sidebar, but what if you are a fan of the multi-protocol Pidgin client instead?

The solution is a small Windows Sidebar Gadget called Pidglet that interacts with an included plugin for Pidgin. Thanks to our extremely helpful forum member Justin for finding this gadget.

Installing Pidglet

Before installing the Gadget you'll need to install the Pidgin plugin… if you don't install in the right order you'll get some error messages, but don't worry because it's simple.

After downloading and extracting the zipfile, you will need to browse down to your Pidgin installation directory, and find the Plugins directory:

C:\Program Files\Pidgin\plugins

Once you are there, then you'll want to copy the pidglet.dll file into the folder (clicking through the UAC prompts if you haven't disabled UAC yet)

Ask The Readers: What Topics Should We Cover in 2009?January 5

At the end of every year, we like to look back and figure out what we can do better for next year. While doing so, we noticed that almost all of our most popular articles in 2008 were actually written in 2007, leading me to the conclusion that there's a problem somewhere.

My goal in 2009 is to do a better job in covering the topics that our readers are interested in, rather than only the random geek stuff that we seem to feature. So this is your chance… tell us in the comments exactly what topics you'd like us to cover.

Looking at Where We Are

In order to figure out what we need to cover, we have to take a look at what is currently the most popular. We'll go through a quick run-down of what people are reading.

First, we'll take a quick look at the traffic graph… You can see a clear upward trend, especially in the number of visitors that are stopping by… so what are they looking for?

This is a list of the top articles on the site (not necessarily in order of most popular)… every single one of these articles had more than 100,000 pageviews in 2008 alone, and the top 10 articles i