I was recently asked by a friend if I might know why the Print Screen (PrtScn) button on her keyboard wasn’t working correctly. When I questioned her as to what she thought it should be doing, she replied that she thought it should (obviously) send whatever was on her screen over to her printer to be printed.

Nope.

The Print Screen button on your keyboard, when pressed, actually takes a screenshot of whatever is on your monitor and places that image onto your computer’s clipboard. You can then paste (Ctrl + V) this screenshot into whatever program you’re working in (Word, Photoshop, etc.).

Email Tip of the Week: How to Use BCC

When you’re using your email program (Outlook, Outlook Express, Mail, Thunderbird, etc.) to send out an e-mail to a group of people who don’t know each other, make sure you don’t drop everyone’s email addresses into the “To” or the “CC” fields. Instead, use the BCC field and put your own address in the “To” field.

BCC stands for Blind Carbon Copy, and not only should it be used when your recipients don’t know one another, it should also be used when your recipients shouldn’t be able to know who else received your email — as in the case of a company sending out an email to a group of clients.

Grab Bag: Five Links of the Week

1. www.informationageprayer.com — Information Age Prayer is a “subscription service utilizing a computer with text-to-speech capability to incant your prayers each day.” In other words, if you don’t have the time to pray but you’ve got a bit of extra money sitting around, they’ll be happy to have their computer pray for you.

2. www.postbox-inc.com — Another solution designed to help “free your email,” Postbox purports to work behind the scenes to “catalog everything in your e-mail” — and by everything … they really do mean everything (images, text, attachments, etc.). And it’s all searchable. Works on both Windows and Macs.

3. http://tinyurl.com/ckfw57 — A little blip of inspiration for a maximizing surface area in (and minimizing the footprint of) a home office.

4. http://tinyurl.com/5wmjbn — Thank goodness for the Internet. Without it, we wouldn’t have unlimited access to fascinating, surprising geographic facts such as these. I mean honestly, did you know that San Francisco and Melbourne are equally distant from the Equator? Or that approximately 90 percent of the world’s entire population lives in the Northern Hemisphere?

5. http://tinyurl.com/5pk9nc — A sweet app for your iPhone that navigates automated phone systems to get you straight to an operator, meaning you no longer have to sift through menu options yourself. All for a whopping 99 cents.

And that’s it for today, everyone. Have a great week, and see ya next Monday.