Daily Archives:December 3rd, 2008

Sequel server

Many of my readers, I know, have been good enough to read Rose’s novel, The Blackstone Key, and I suppose it would be terribly churlish to suggest that it might make a good Christmas present for somebody, so I shall avoid doing so.

I have had fun revamping Rose’s web site over the last few weekends, though, and those of you who enjoyed the story might be interested in the first batch of historical facts that we’ve added to the site, which give a little more background to the novel – you can find them on the left hand side of the book’s page under ‘The world of The Blackstone Key‘. More to come…

You might also be interested to know that the sequel, The Counterfeit Guest, will hit UK shelves three months from today (at about the same time as the paperback of the first book). Both are available to pre-order from Amazon.

Mac tip of the day

Here’s a simple keystroke that I find I’m using more and more:

Shift-Option-Cmd V

As I get older, I find it harder to remember long strings of modifier keys, so I think of this as ‘V with everything except control’!

This does a paste from the clipboard without any formatting. In days of yore, most cut-and-paste operations were just plain text anyway but, increasingly, I’m finding that when I copy text from a webpage to an email, from a document to a blog post, and so forth, it brings across too much of the formatting with it and I end up with chunks in the wrong font size, or with funny line spacing etc. Occasionally this is useful, but more often than not I just want the plain text, or I want to control the formatting carefully.

That’s when you need today’s mantra:
Cmd-C to copy, V with all but Control to paste!

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser