Using background images for web pages is something most people do not know how to do correctly. Typically most will use an image that is not suitable for the text on the web page, as some parts of the image will be light and others dark. In addition, the image looks terrible tiled.

A small tiled image is by far the best thing to use if you want a background image for your social profile, blog or web pages. Not only does it load very quickly, but also looks the same on all resolutions and with the right tile looks seamless.

But how do you create one of these? Where do you get ideas from?

That’s easy, use BgPatterns. It is an app that exists only in the browser and is super-easy to use. Many different types of tiles are available in all colors. You’ll have a perfect image for tiling in no time. See video below for details.

Also bear in mind creating tiled images works great for computer wallpaper as well, particularly on older computers with limited video display abilities. If the redraw speed on your video card is slow but you still want a nice wallpaper, a small tiled image is definitely the way to go.

One of the lesser known – but very handy – features of Windows XP is the ability to select multiple separate running applications in the taskbar as a group, then using the right-click context menu to do things you more or less can’t do anywhere else.

To select running apps in the taskbar, you click the first one so it’s "indented", then hold down CTRL and left click the others you also want to select. After that, you can right-click any one of them and get your context menu.

It looks like this:

From here you can do the following:

• Cascade – Resizes windows of selected applications to cascade on screen.
• Tile Horizontally – Resizes windows and "stacks" them one on top of the other.
• Tile Vertically – Resizes windows and puts them in "columns".
• Minimize Group – Sends all apps selected to the taskbar
• Close Group – Will close all selected apps

You will find these features most useful when you want to group apps that "relate" to each other but are inherently separate. For example, if you have open Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird and another Firefox with an RSS reader page in it, you can group these, then tile horizontal or vertical, then when done just minimize the group.