Taking a screenshot of your PC desktop is easy – look for the “print screen” key on your keyboard. On PC keyboards it will usually have PrtScn, PRTSC or PRTSCN on it. Often, you will have to press it in combination with the SHIFT key. Doing this will place an image of the entire desktop in the clipboard – a quick paste of the clipboard contents (CTRL+V) gives you an image of your entire desktop.

Adding an ALT to the mix (e.g., SHIFT+ALT+PRTSC) will place an image of the active window (not the entire desktop) into …

♫  Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye my love
I can’t hide, can’t hide, can’t hide what has come…♫

Lyrics, music and recorded by Avril Lavigne.

April 8, 2014 is a significant date for users of Microsoft XP and Office 2003. On that date, support ends for both of these venerable and well-loved products.

Microsoft wants its 100 Million XP and Office 2003 users to upgrade to Windows 7 or 8 and Office 2010 or Office 365.

MS has relented on MSE (Security Essentials updates) and will continue these until July 14, 2015 but that does not mean that you should stay …

One of the things we don’t talk about much on the legal research side of things here at Slaw Tips are Regulations.  Regulations are a form of delegated legislation made in the exercise of powers conferred by a statute. Regulations are the how to a Statute’s what. and are usually found online attached to the act that they are made from.

A fairly common question arises about the in force date of a regulation. In Alberta, the day it is filed with the Registrar of Regulations, unless a later day is specified. For federal regulations, section 9 of the Statutory …

On at least a few previous occasions(here and here), I have written about the necessity of backing up your personal data, pictures and contacts, regardless of where they reside – your computer, your smartphone, your iPad or other tablet, your camera, etc. It is a fact of life that hard drives and other devices will fail – you want to have your data backed up so you don’t lose it.

But what about all that data and information you have created on the cloud? Think about all the information you have created in Facebook, LinkedIn, the various Google …

Canada’s legal sector appears to be on the cusp of major change.

From the towers of Bay Street to our courthouses across the nation, we may be embarking upon a bumpy, but perhaps overdue ride of reorganization, re-prioritization and rationalization.

Last week’s sudden collapse of Heenan Blaikie and the Supreme Court of Canada’s January 23, 2014 ruling in Hryniak v Maudlin could be harbingers of the revolution ahead.

While the Heenan, Blaikie debacle may have more, ultimately, to teach us about human shortcomings and hubris than the perils of the immediate legal marketplace, it does underscore the reality that defections, …

It is a tricky thing to be asked a question that has a research component and be able to estimate how much time it will take to find and communicate an answer. Something that helps with estimating is knowing how much time a similar task encompased. Since, like most service industries, the legal industry tracks its time to help identify pricing structures and service value, why not use those time tracking devices to measure research time tasks and learn from the measuring?

Check out the Uniform Task Based Management System (UTBMS) – standards that were created to give …

When you are in low light conditions, a flash can be essential for taking a picture. But, in some circumstances, a flash can also be helpful in broad daylight, especially for portraits.

When taking pictures while on auto-flash in the daylight, your flash may not trigger. Your smartphone or DSLR simply decides there is enough light and it doesn’t fire the flash. But even in the daytime, you can end up with a dark face if your subject is in front of a bright background, or have shadows on one side of a face if your main light source is …

♫ Even though you’re going through hell
Just keep on going
Let the demons dwell
Just wish them well…♫

 Lyrics by Neil Peart, music by Geddy Lee & Alex Lifeson, recorded by Rush.

Yesterday I taught the first class of the 2014 term on legal technology for the Internationally Trained Lawyer’s Program at the University of Toronto law school. We started the session with everyone giving a bit of background on who there are, where they went to law school, what type of law they practiced in their home country and hope to practice following their call here …

Legal research is only one piece of the larger part of answering a clients legal problem.  With  the growing trend of fixed fee pricing, alternative fee arrangements, and other pre-arranged cost structures for legal work, it is more important than ever for a researcher to know several things that don’t relate to the problem their research is attempting to answer:

1. Is there a fee arrangement that applies to the file being worked on
2. Will he client accept research disbursements
3. Is there a legal project budget that the research costs should fit into
4. Will recorded time  for the researcher be billed

If you buy something online, you will likely have to enter various details into a form of some sort (e.g., name, address, phone number, email, credit card number, etc.). This can be a tad tedious if there are many fields on the form – you type a few characters, stop, reach for the mouse, then navigate to and click on the next field, go back to the keyboard, type a few more characters, then repeat the process again, and again… There is a better way to navigate through a form – and you don’t have to use your mouse.
The …