Monthly Archives: March 2018

Travel

My Tech Travel Kit

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I was listening to the “Gadgets” section of the 20 Minute Delay podcast and it inspired me to share my tech travel kit.

First up is the bag I carry it all in, the Maxpedition Fatty Pocket Organizer

Photo of Maxpedition Fatty Pocket Organizer
Maxpedition Fatty Pocket Organizer

Other sizes are available, but this works for me. It allows me to organize the myriad pieces of cords and kit that are a part of modern life.  Here is an interior view –

Inside the Maxpedition Fatty Organizer
Maxpedition Fatty – Interior view

Next up is a Powerseed portable charger that will charge phone and tablet. One of the nice features of this model is the light. In a pinch it acts as a flashlight, and it certainly has saved me from fumbling around in an overly darkened hotel room a time or two.

Powerseed Charger photo
Powerseed Charger

This model doesn’t appear to be available anymore, but I like being able to charge multiple devices and as I said the light has been unexpectedly helpful.

Powerseed - view of ports and light photo
Powerseed – view of ports and light

Next is a nifty Bluetooth wireless speaker. The Anker SoundCore nano.  Having a speaker on hand allows me to leave the TV off, and listen to my music of choice.

Photo - Anker SoundCore Nano
Anker SoundCore Nano

This has an amazing sound to size ratio. Its volume will fill a hotel room and is very light.
Also from Anker is this 4 port USB charger.

Photo Anker Charging Block
Anker Charging Block

It saves time and weight and made a noticeable difference when I started packing only this instead of all the different phone/tablet charging blocks. The newer version has foldaway prongs.

Lastly is this small extension cord.

Photo Travel extension cord
Travel extension cord

I don’t know how many hotel rooms I’ve been in with inadequate or inaccessible wall plugs. This one came from our local Princess Auto and in addition to having yet more USB ports, I like how it’s designed to plug into itself. This makes it much easier to pack, since it’s the one item that doesn’t fit into the tech bag. BTW,  Princess Auto is often a great source for discount tech type gadgets.

 

PowerPoint, Presentations

Pictures and Transparency

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In my last post, I mentioned I was working on a Jeopardy game in PowerPoint. In this game I want to present a series of visual clues before the answer is revealed. The audience is presented with the foreign cover for a popular book and has to guess the name of the book.

Book cover transition from greek to english cover version
Can you guess the book, by seeing its foreign (Greek) version cover?

I want to slowly reveal the English book cover, by gradually making the foreign cover more transparent. With this particular cover, I also wanted to crop the foreign cover image to reveal additional clues. Each clue will be revealed by a click of the mouse.

Hmm is this a problem? I can not control image transparency in PowerPoint, there is no option for this in the Picture Tools menu.

Nope, no problem at all. You can control image transparency by:

  1. Create a shape the same dimensions as your picture.
  2. Remove the outline for the shape.
  3. Change the fill option to Picture or Texture Fill and insert the picture file.
  4. Transparency will now be available

Its’ interesting that placing a picture inside a shape allows you to manipulate that picture as if it was a shape. This concept allows me to play with things like irregularly shaped (non-rectangular) images as well.

 

PowerPoint, Presentations

Thursday – PowerPoint Links

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I’ve just been working on a PowerPoint template for a Jeopardy style game. I inherited this template, and as frequently happens a little cleanup is necessary to ensure the PowerPoint template works as desired.

To help you visualize the problem – a picture of the game board

Jeopardy Game Board 1st slide
The Game Board

Each square hyperlinks to a separate slide with the question (and answer).

I felt there were a number of improvements I could do to make the presentation easier to use and maintain. I won’t go into every change today, but a couple of changes involved hyperlinks
(shortcut key Ctrl + K, if you are editing 25 hyperlinks, then the reason for using a shortcut key becomes obvious).

The first maintenance problem I ran into was that the previous designer had applied the hyperlink to both the shape AND the text on the shape (now there are 50 hyperlinks – if you are counting).

Button shape with text selected
Shape with text on top

They did this for a very good reason; that the text on a hyperlinked shape does not change state like normal hyperlink does (the state change shows if the link has been visited or not).

So if the slides the shapes are linked to are reordered or edited, the links have to be painstakingly tracked down and edited and since essentially the links are layered one on top of each other it is a real pain.

I had a better plan. Move the button shapes to the Slide Master (after creating a layout designed for the Game Board slide). Then insert text placeholders (yes, 25 of them) for the dollar values. Position the placeholders over each button. No hyperlinks here.

Now moving back to the Game Board slide in Normal View, I can hyperlink the text box. Text boxes behave differently from shapes, and do change state to show the link has been visited.

Another advantage of the text placeholder is that if the user inadvertently moves the text boxes, the Reset command will snap them back into position. (A definitely plus when editing 25 text boxes).

The other visual difficulty I had, was with the colours of the hyperlinks themselves. They didn’t have a strong contrast with my (new) button colour, and the visited colour was still (kinda) visible. I wanted a strong link colour and once visited I wanted the link to disappear. I could add animations, but why bother when I could solve both problems easily by changing the link colours in the Color Theme.

Theme Colour Panel PowerPoint 2016
Theme Colour Panel PowerPoint 2016

Here is the theme colour panel after I adjusted the Hyperlink and Followed Hyperlink Colours.

The colours in the theme were picked after playing with the free https://coolors.co/ app I also got some good advice from this article. The image at the top of the article is the colour palette created by the Coolors.co app – translated into RGB. I usually add this information as a layout in the slide master.