Unexpected Formats

Every now and then, I encounter something that’s the perfect combination of brilliant and ridiculous – this is one of those cases. Check the video below and you’ll understand the brilliant marketing at play. And it’s not fake!

The Re-Launch

Hi! Welcome to the new MattRefghi.com. To understand the significance behind this re-launch, I need to go back a bit into the past to explain how I got to this point.  Back in 2008, I discovered Jeff Atwood’s blog titled Coding Horror, a blog focused largely about software development. I was working as a web developer at the time, so naturally the topic was quite pertinent and interesting to me, as I was living the subject matter day to day. After following Jeff’s blog and being inspired by the quality of what he offered, in January 2009, I decided that I too would launch a blog. It started with technical posts, but since then, the content has diversified and I’ve … Read more

How to Reduce Sponsored Ads In Windows 10 (4 Different Settings)

Transcription “So starting with Windows 10, Microsoft got really comfortable with showing ads for apps, games, and, you know, Bing searches, things like that, in Windows. They’re trying to, of course, push their own products, push people to buy stuff in the Windows Store because they get a cut, things like that. So from their perspective they think they are being helpful, they’re offering us these “suggestions,” but personally I find these suggestions really irritating, because I don’t want sponsored content appearing everywhere as I’m working. So here’s 3 different places where we can turn off these helpful “suggestions,” and I’ll also show you how to keep your lock screen clean in Windows, so that you don’t have like these … Read more

How to Maximize Screen Space in Excel Online

Transcript “Hi everyone. Let’s say you’re working in Excel Online, and you find that you’re not able to see enough of the document at a time. Alright so, by saying, by Excel Online I mean in the browser, right? So this is an Excel document open in a browser. It looks a bit ridiculous of course because there’s a giant smiley face, but the idea behind this example is that let’s say I need to see many rows of data at a time, and I’m just not able to see them all in the browser… what can I do to improve the situation? In this case we’re just going to use the smiley as an example. What do I do … Read more

How to Send Files by Gmail When They’re Beyond the Attachment Size Limit

Description This video is a fresh take on my “Reducing Email Attachment Sizes With Compression” video, posted April 20th, 2011. Since then, things have changed – it was time to revisit it. As mentioned in the video, I had difficulty uploading the partial 7z files to Gmail as attachments. I’m not sure why – your mileage may vary. 7z would be preferable because it likely has more compression options, and even without instructions I like that searching for “7z” will inevitably lead you to conclude that it’s related to 7-zip whereas “zip” is more of a household term. I’m not sure that all applications that handle zips can handle the multi-volume approach done by 7-zip. Transcription “So let’s say you … Read more

Converting Old Office Files Into DOCX, XLSX, PPTX

Transcript “Hi everyone. In this video, I’ll be showing you how to convert old Office files into their newer formats. So by old files I mean the DOC extension, the XLS extension, or the PPT extension, how to convert those into their X equivalents. So DOCX, XLSX. So what happened is, in Office 2007, Microsoft introduced these newer formats, the X formats, so it’s possible that when you encounter old Office files, that you sometimes have to convert them to the newer formats – there’s a number of reasons why you’d want to do this, but let’s say you need to do this. Let’s start the Word document, let’s open it up. Once it opens up in Word, it’s actually … Read more

Canadians Brace for Impact

It’s been a while now that I’ve been observing the news, especially those written by Canadians outlets. And one thing that gets on my nerves from time to time is when I see articles written with a heavy Canadian bias in relation to world affairs. Consider a CBC article from today, as an example: “Canadians living in Florida are bracing for Hurricane Dorian as the monster storm pummels the Bahamas with catastrophic force.” Yes, let’s focus on the minority of Canadians bracing for impact rather than the massive numbers of Bahamians and Americans facing that same danger – that’s a great idea. The news of Hurricane Dorian makes me immediately concerned for everyone affected…. whether they are from the United … Read more

How to Launch an Executable On Startup In Windows 10

Most programs let you decide whether you’d like to them to open up automatically when you start Windows. Naturally, this is typically only an option when it’s logical to do so – for example, having Spotify immediately open with Windows makes sense. Having Notepad open with Windows… not so much. But what happens when a program doesn’t offer you that option, but you’d like still it to start up with Windows? Solution There’s a few ways to achieve this, but one of my preferred options is using the Task Scheduler in Windows 10.  Press the Start button, and search for “Task scheduler” or “Schedule tasks.” In the “Actions” menu on the right, click “Create Task.” On the “General” tab, specify … Read more

How to Configure Adobe Media Encoder to Automatically Render Videos on a Remote Machine

As much as I like working on videos, I must admit that the rendering process certainly takes a toll on a machine’s performance, particularly when you’d like to use your machine to do something else while it renders. In my case, my main computer at home is by far my most powerful and versatile machine, so when it’s locked up doing rendering for a multitude of hours, I’m faced with a terrifying prospect – actually going outside or reading a book. Determined to avoid this type of cruel fate when away from home, I started to think of ways that I could do the editing on a somewhat less powerful machine, but offload the actual rendering to my beast of … Read more

Working with High Resolution Images in WordPress

Transcript “So I was asked recently to demonstrate the basics of working with images in WordPress, particularly when you’re dealing with images that are of a high resolution. So if you look at my desktop here, I have three images. I will just display them quickly – this one, this one, and this one. Now, what they have in common is they’re all the same size… if I hover over them right here, you’ll see that they are 3200 by 2400, that’s a fairly large size, and I can demonstrate that by opening one of them in Paint. So in Paint what you see is a portion of the sky, in this particular shot, and the reason is that the … Read more