A friend tweeted me today to ask me what I recommend doing in San Francisco for seven days. The list is too long to put in a tweet, so here it is, touristiness be damned! Go to Market & Powell and enjoy the old buildings and the excitement of the crowds, many of whom are [...]
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Review of Targus Laser Presentation Remote
I had fun with this one, letting out a bit of my campy side along with my geeky side. I guess I’m just so giddy about getting a new laptop and this fancy new presentation remote. I don’t work for Targus, but I sure wouldn’t mind if they sent me a check! Ha ha. Really, though, I am so happy with this product and it fills a need that anyone who does presentations and has a MacBook Air is going to need to fill. I wish this information had been there for me when I was frustrated with the lack of any solution in the Apple Store yesterday. Just get one. You won’t be disappointed. Or your money back. (If the store you buy it from has a money-back guarantee, that is.)
P.S. There is a tiny switch inside the remote (which you can see when you pop off the back) that allows you to set it to Windows PowerPoint, Mac Keynote, or Mac PowerPoint. Very nifty, but you might overlook it if you didn’t know better. So now you know!
Yes, I am the kind of person who spends 15 minutes searching for the multiplication sign. 8-}
Yes, I’m the guy who just spent 15 minutes searching for the Mac keyboard shortcut for the mathematical “times” or “multiply” sign [×]. There is no shortcut; however, I did learn that the official name for this glyph is “multiplication sign” (who knew?), the Unicode identifier is 00D7, the HTML name code is “times”, the HTML number code is 215 (but I can’t show the HTML code without WordPress converting it, apparently), the Unicode identifier is 00D7, and the Windows keyboard entry method is Alt+0215. For my Mac, I opened Edit, Special Characters, typed in “multiplication sign”, and saved the glyph to my Favorites.
If you’re interested, some of my other favorites are the “beamed eighth notes” to symbolize music [♫], the “black heart suit” sign [♥] to symbolize love, the French quotation marks, or «guillemets», a.k.a. “left-pointing double angle quotation mark” [«] and “right-pointing double angle quotation mark” [»], the proper characters to denote the feet and inches in my height, 5′ 11″, called the “prime” [′] and “double prime” [″], and the “trade mark sign” [™] which I like to use sarcastically to represent that something that should be bottled and sold, such as doing typography The Right Way™.
Thanks to Arnold Winkelried aka Noodles for his webpage, Keyboard Shortcuts for special characters, which answered my question about the multiplication sign that I had read at least a dozen other pages in search of.
And now, with the (at least) 15 minutes I spent on writing this blog post, I have spent a half an hour more than the average (and maybe saner) person who would type 2 x 2 and be done with it. But I console myself with the knowledge that there are hundreds of nerds like me out there who will be glad that I shared this seemingly trivial information with them. So there! 
P.S. I just spent another 20 minutes trying to write the HTML name and number codes without having them converted to the × character itself. Fighting with technology before 8 AM on a Sunday morning, oy!
Missing messages on Android phone in silent mode? Here’s how to make them buzz.
In my line of work, time is money, and seconds count. While working, I have been keeping my phone in my pocket in silent mode when I’m working. After missing several assignment offers equaling hundreds of dollars of work, I decided something must be done. I had already set up my device preferences to vibrate with notifications, but that obviously wasn’t enough. I decided to look into my Gmail, Email, and Messages apps to see if I could set notifications on a per app basis, and found out I could. Here’s how.
In Gmail, tap Menu, then More, then Settings. Scroll all the way down to Vibrate. The default is Never. Tap the down arrow to change this. Select Only in Silent Mode or, to be safe, For all Gmail notifications.
In Email, tap Menu, then Account settings, and scroll down to Vibrate. Here’s where it can trip you up, because it is different from Gmail. In Gmail, what you see is what you get; i.e., if you see For all Gmail notifications, that’s when it will vibrate. In Email, it will say “Also vibrate when email arrives,” but that’s not what you get unless you select it. As with Gmail, the default is Never. To change this, tap the down arrow and select either Always or Only in Silent Mode. I select Always to be safe. Note that you will have to repeat this process for every one of your Email accounts.
In Messaging, Read the rest of this entry
Why I chose the Coraline theme & the Eaglefeather font
WordPress Blog Theme
The WordPress Coraline theme came out the other day, and I like it because:
- It has a “Leave a comment” link that can’t be missed. The one in the Twenty Ten theme is hard to find. I want to engage readers in conversation, and a loud “Leave a comment” or “# comments” link grants them easy entry.
- It allows for a body, feature bar, and two sidebars beneath the feature bar. This means I can feature my latest tweets. And knowing that whatever I tweet will be featured prominently on my blog might give me pause before I tweet while drunk. Not that I would ever do that!
- Like the Twenty Ten theme and the Kubrick theme before it, it allows me to have a banner image, which I think it is fun.
- I can use the right sidebar to feature my latest Flickr photos on par with my categories, tag cloud, etc. in the left sidebar.
Typekit Web Fonts
I’m also using Typekit to stylize my blog with a Frank Lloyd Wright–inspiredfont. I chose this font because: Read the rest of this entry
