Tuggie, again, with a Hint Hoot

Tuggie’s smart enough to know that nobody knows everything, and discrete enough to teach you things you can claim to have always known.

Mouses are wonderful things. But holding

Tuggie’s Back with a Hint Hoot

Tuggie’s smart enough to know that nobody knows everything, and discrete enough to teach you things you can claim to have always known.

I thought I’d entered an alternate universe when

Tuggie’s Back with a Hint Hoot

Tuggie’s smart enough to know that nobody knows everything, and discrete enough to teach you things you can claim to have always known.

It’s easy to get lost looking at a website. Here’s how to thumb

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Tuggie’s smart enough to know that nobody knows everything, and discrete enough to teach you things you can claim to have always known.

Howdy, my little owlets. Here’s another Hint Hoot. Hope to see you often here on the STUG blog.

Alas, this tip only works for dot com, not dot anything else. But it’s still fun to have in your Tuggie Treasury, right?

How Hewie gave me a week of my life back.

Now, I don’t mean to single Hewie out from all the helpful souls I know in STUG, ’cause there are many!… but he makes a good headline and besides he has these adorable mutton chops.

You see, I’d spent a week’s worth of spare time trying to do something, looking at programs and apps and basically tearing my hair out, when it occurred to me…

You see, I’d spent a week’s worth of spare time trying to do something, looking at programs and apps and basically tearing my hair out, when it occurred to me…

Ctrl yourself.

Here’s a Tuggie the Techno-Owl tip for you. (You know that Tuggie’s smart enough to know that nobody knows everything, and discrete enough to teach you things you can claim to have always known.)

A short history of a shortcut key.

Like many other elements of the computer keyboard, the control key is a vestige of earlier technology updated and adapted to remain relevant. Originally found on

What sound does a butterfly make?

It’s not as though the world isn’t noisy enough already. Ask Google for “animal noises” and you get a fun activity to share with a grand or great-grand.

Too tame for those jaded tweens? Visit The Creepiest Animal Sounds together for options like “lynxes having a conversation.”

Or if you have littlest ones to entertain, check out the nursery song, The Sounds that the Animals Make. (Note that I, Tuggie, make a cameo appearance in this production. I have a good agent.)

And the people they say blah-blah-blah. Ain’t that the truth.

The WIN Key is a winner.

Here’s a Tuggie the Techno-Owl tip for you. (You know that Tuggie’s smart enough to know that nobody knows everything, and discrete enough to teach you things you can claim to have always known.)

“The Windows logo key is a keyboard key which was originally introduced on the Microsoft Natural keyboard in 1994. [Golly, that means that Tuggie’s been avoiding it for almost 3 decades] . In Windows tapping the key brings up the start menu.” And so much more, Tuggie hoots….

But do you know the many other uses for the Win-key? My favorite is: it can hold a whole bunch clip-board items. Try using Win + V. It’s a, as they say, game-changer!

Yup, and I am SO thrilled at this.. it’s so helpful to “stack up” a bunch of clipboard items, whether URLs or blocks of text, and then be able to paste as needed. That’s actually how I saved the list of sites below. You can even permanently save things you’ve copied, by pinning them.

Maybe you learn better by watching? Or maybe your win key doesn’t work this way and you need to enable it? Or maybe you just love a man with a burly accent?

Here’s some resources about the multiple uses of the Win key. Be sure to make note of the functions that will make your keyboard time more effective!

• Computer Hope starts from scratch, like “where is the Win key?”
• PC Mag’s basic listing of Win key functions.
• Tech Republic has a listing too.

Introducing Tuggie the Techno-Owl

Welcome to the first post by Tuggie, the Techno-Owl. Tuggie’s smart enough to know that nobody knows everything, and discrete enough to teach you things you can claim to have always known.

Howdy, my little owlets. Here’s my first Hint Hoot. Hope to see you often here on the STUG blog.

When in doubt, right-click. I finally got it one day when, for the umpty-umpth time, I screamed at my screen and cursed at my computer. I actually wrote When in doubt, right-click on a Post-It and stuck it to the monitor.

It’s a good rule. Before you start thinking the programmer was a total idiot, the computer is having a meltdown, or the stars are misaligned and you might as well stop working and go float around in the pool with a rum and coke balanced on your tummy…. right-click.

Aha! There the little bugger is: just the menu choice you were clicking the left mouse button for, over and over, swearing it had to be there. All you had to do was…right-click. You’ll more than likely find a “contextual” menu. That means you’ll see a list of things you can do with whatever it is you clicked on.

Life lesson learned: take a different approach. Try a different path to your destination. And sometimes thinking outside the box works before you have to resort to A: throwing the whole problem out the window in disgust or B: dousing yourself with rum and cokes.

When in doubt, right-click.