
In honor of iGirl, here’s another installment of our weekly endeavor to make you laugh, have fun and in all cases waste time.
I wrote about how to send an upside-down e-mail a few weeks ago and then I ran into the sideway screen. Hit the Ctrl+Alt keys and then either the left or right arrow. Your screen’s orientation will rotate sideways. You can likewise hit Ctrl+Alt and the down arrow and your screen flips upside down. The Ctrl+Alt and the up arrow key rights everything.

In the back of my mind, I knew about this Windows trick. But it wasn’t until Widget, my 5-month old, had her way with my laptop that I remembered it existed. I resorted to Google to find the cure and stumbled upon Eric T’s Internet Duct Tape, a tech blog. His post has 174 comments and quite a few are from people mention their kid did this.
Eric goes on to say that this feature was built into the Windows XP Tablet PC edition where flipping the screen is a useful feature. But Intel added the same feature to its video card drivers so if you want to disable it, you’ll need to get into the card’s menu.
But why disable it? I say try it on an unsuspecting colleague and stand back and watch the results. Maybe I should call this prank day?
(Attention Mac users: Widget doesn’t want to leave you out. She figured out VoiceOver, Mac’s screen reader. It’s Command+F5.)
Reader Comments
Comments are encouraged, but you must follow our User Agreement.