I hope everyone survived St Patrick’s Day. We marched in the parade in St Paul! That was the height of it. The highlight of my week has been getting the new motherboard for my laptop. It’s been that kind of week.
I’ve had a lot of troubles with my latest laptop. Today I learned something that I thought I’d pass on. It’s best not to keep your laptop plugged in all of the time. I didn’t realize this and actually I felt it was better to have it plugged in. As the tech put it, the battery can build up a memory that the battery only needs so much power. So if you’re constantly plugging in when you only need 50 percent more – the battery gets into the habit of charging only the necessary 50 percent.
I don’t think that’s my greatest problem with this laptop – but I’ll take any advice to keep it going.
Have a great weekend!
So I’ve been looking into embedding video to PowerPoint presentations. On the surface, it seems easy to do. You simply click on the “Insert” tab in the menu bar and select video from your desktop or add the address of an online video. (Or when you are looking at the slide layout you can click on the video icon on the slide to add the video.)
My hiccup was that I wanted to include a video so that I could send the PPT to a colleague and they could view it without going online. So adding a link to a video was out. Adding from the desktop is easy enough, except when I tested only WMV and AVI files seemed to work for me. (YouTube files tend to be MP4 and the videos off my camera are MP4.)
So the next tricky part is turning MP4 into WMV or AVI files. So I found an online video converter: http://www.mediaconverter.org You can either upload your file to convert or point to a video on YouTube to convert. Once it’s converted, you can simply add to the PPT.
So this worked great. Now I had a PPT that showed a video on at least one slide.
The final issue is that the file you create with the videos tends to get very big – so big my email package wouldn’t send. I was able to get around this last hurdle by uploading the PPT (up to 100MB) to SlideShare: http://www.slideshare.net. The video didn’t show on the site – but when I downloaded it from the site to my desktop the videos were visible.
I know that’s kind of specific today but I hope that will help someone out.
Earlier this week someone asked me which was better Flickr or Picasa, both are online photo sharing tools. I have used both – but I must admit that I found some articles from other experts rather than do extensive research myself. (After all I’m a librarian, not a tester!)
I found a couple of articles that lay out the differences:
http://www.priteshgupta.com/2009/05/flickr-picasa-web-albums/ – a great article – but it doesn’t give an opinion per se
http://www.stealblade.com/2010/01/facebook-photos-vs-flickr-vs-picasa-vs.html – they lean towards Picasa, but give some good reasons and mention other tools
http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/12/picasa-web-albums-vs-flickr-which.html – they lean towards Flickr
It seems as if Flickr may be best if you want to build a community – for example invite others to add their image to your collection. Picasa is better if you think folks might want to download the images for any reason. The second article mentioned Facebook – which might be worth considering if your main goal is reaching people and you already dabble in Facebook at all.
Today’s Byte of kind of a hodge podge of things I’ve been meaning to mention. Most are kind of Minnesota-specific so I apologize to folks outside the Twin Cities.
First – my favorite online newspaper (Twin Cities Daily Planet) is now offering daily discounts – kind of like Groupon: http://shop.tcdailyplanet.net/ The special today is for Surdyk’s, a great wine and cheese shop. Earlier this week they featured a Minneapolis sushi restaurant. (One difference between TCDP and Groupon is that you have more than a day to buy.)
Second – When I went home last month I went with a very broken computer and a lot of tears. Luckily I got a heads up on a great computer repair place: General Nanosystems http://www.nanosys1.com/. They could not have been nicer or cheaper and they got my computer working again.
Finally just in case you’re ever thinking of visiting Dublin, I think this is the best guide of free events in Dublin: http://www.dublineventguide.com I know it won’t be useful to most of you this week – but someday you may be glad to know about it.
Last week I needed a tool that would let me and a client view the same computer screen remotely. I found a great tool using the Blandin Toolkit: http://broadband.blandinfoundation.org/toolkit/applications.php
CrossLoop http://www.crossloop.com turned out to be exactly what I needed. My client and I each downloaded the software. It was free and easy. Because we each had the software downloaded either of us could share the view of our desktop. One of us just needed to share our unique code with the other. (The code changes per session.) Once I got her code, I entered it into the software. She got a message saying I was looking to connect with her. She approved my access with a click and then I could see her screen. It would be the perfect solution for a one-to-one demo or tech support.
Today’s Byte is kind of a cheat in that I’m copying from a resource I found. Here’s a way to close lots of Word Documents at once – if like me you ever realized you have way too many open:
To save or close multiple documents at the same time in Word
- Hold down the Shift key while clicking the File menu option. This will bring up two hidden options in the File menu: Save All and Close All.
- Select the option for the task you want to perform.
When you select Close All, Word will ask you if you want to Save your changes. Choose this option if you want to save all your work and close out of Word quickly.
I got this from Vicki’s Tech Tips: http://www.vickiblackwell.com/tips.html She has lots of simple and super helpful Word type tips.
Remember when I used to be so good about the Byte of the *Week*? Well, to make up for the days I’ve been late, I thought I’d send one early:
Wolfram Alpha: http://www.wolframalpha.com
It’s a new search engine that focuses on computation power. So I typed in “to be or not to be” and the answer is OK. But I type in [$100 in euros] and I get the exchange rate, a history of the exchange rate, comparison to other currencies.
You can learn a ton more about it here: http://www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html
Thanks to Aileen in Minneapolis for sending it to me.
A friend asked me yesterday about résumé templates online. After 10 minutes of searching I remembered by old friend Microsoft templates: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates/default.aspx
They have templates for just about anything – graduation invitations, expense reports, résumé and more.
Just do a search on the template you need. Click on the name of the template in the search listing to see a sample of the template. Click on download to download the template. Generally then you can just delete the content in the template (by section) and add your content.
One note – just keep an eye on the file format and make sure you have the software to open the file. For example the first résumé template I found was in Microsoft Publisher, which I don’t have. So I skipped over that.
I hope that helps. Also happy mother’s day for moms on the list – and a subtle reminder for kids on the list.
Just a super quick byte this week.
http://premium.pdfonline.com/BCLOnline/PrintOut.aspx - this is my new favorite site for converting Microsoft items into PDF. So far I’ve only tested Word Docs. You upload and they convert, you download and save.
Have a great weekend!
I hope everyone had a great time last night and is settling into a fun day. I have a semi-regular New Year’s tool to share:
PCPitstop (http://www.pcpitstop.com) is a free service that will scan your computer for any performance or security risks. I’m about to run the scan on my machine. Usually it reminds me to defrag files or delete old cookies or it might give me a heads up on more serious issues emerging.
One thing I really like about is that it gives you easy to follow instruction for fixing many of the potential problems they find. The other nice thing – you can’t use your computer when the test is running. You have to click continue or run a couple of times but otherwise it’s a good excuse – especially on a holiday – to quit working for a little while.
I hope everyone has a safe and prosperous 2009!! Thanks! Ann
