Inbox highlights

Compiled by MICHAEL FOREMAN

Welcome to InBox, where we attempt to answer your internet questions.

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* Dave, your luck is in. After your request last week for online sources of digital maps, many of our cartographically inclined readers have chipped in with their favourite sites. Thanks to Glen, Rod, Ross McClennan, Ray, Marsden, Terry and Anne, Bert Harris, Terry McComish, and finally Chris, for the following recommendations:

UBD E-Directory - includes a comprehensive selection of New Zealand street maps; Map Request - this America Online-owned site covers the whole world, but the most detailed maps are provided for the United States and Europe; Travelmate - Australia-only site includes detailed street maps of towns and cities; Multimap - excellent map site covering the United Kingdom, including an aerial photography section. See also Streetmap and the map section of Teldir.com.

* Meanwhile, after reading our advice to Mabel last week on saving photos in the jpeg format, Peter has noticed that jpegs take up much less disk space than bmp files: "I cannot detect a drop in quality from bmp to jpeg. Can you see any reason why I should not re-save all my image files as jpeg?" he asks.

You may not notice a difference on the screen, Peter, but any compressed file format such as jpeg sacrifices some quality in order to cram the photo into smaller file sizes. If you printed your jpeg files at full size, you would then notice a tiling effect that mars their appearance.

For this reason, as another reader, Brian, pointed out, it is not a good idea to rely on jpegs alone to store images that you may wish to reproduce at full resolution in the future. It's best to stick to uncompressed formats like bmp, tiff or png. A helpful article on this confusing subject can be found at Scantips.

* Mike Morley complains that his keyboard is not working properly - sometimes keys seem to have swapped positions, at other times strange characters that don't appear on the keyboard are displayed.

I once experienced similar symptoms after spilling coffee on a keyboard, Mike. The only cure for that was to buy a new keyboard, but from the detailed description in your e-mail, your keyboard may be set to the wrong country layout. Go to Start/Settings/Control Panel/Keyboard and check which language setting is being used.

Links:


UBD E-Directory

Map Request

Travelmate

Multimap

Streetmap

Teldir

Scantips