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!

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!

• Go to Market & Powell and enjoy the old buildings and the excitement of the crowds, many of whom are residents, not tourists. Be there at the cable car terminus to help push the trolley car around so it faces back to where it came from. While there, go to the Gap in the Flood Building.
  
• Take the Powell–Hyde cable car to Ghirardelli Square.
  
• See the Six Sisters Victorian row houses from Alamo Square.
  
• Take in the view of San Francisco from Twin Peaks.
  
• Walk across the Golden Gate Bridge.
  
• Rent a paddle boat with a buddy at Stow Lake.
  
• Go to the Castro and get that Gay Card stamped. See a movie at the Castro Theatre. Explore Castro Street and the bars, of course. I love the walk–in pizza place on Castro just south of Market. (I just Google Mapped it and it came up Marcello’s Pizza. I don’t know if it’s always been under the same ownership, but I’ve seen that pizza place there every time I’ve gone to the Castro since 1985. The sit–down restaurant just down from there is really nice too (I just Google Street Viewed it, and it looks to be the Cove Cafe).
  
• Go to City Hall and, if possible, go inside. It’s amazing.
  
• Go to North Beach, San Francisco’s “Little Italy.” While you’re in the neighborhood, see Coit Tower.
• Eat! Other than the pizza place and cozy restaurant I mentioned, San Francisco has amazing places to eat.
• Last but not least, savor those “only in San Francisco” moments. I have at least one each time I go!
  
  

All the photos on this page were taken by me, Daniel Greene. All rights reserved.

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,
follow the same directions as for Email. As always, the default is Never. Why Google would make never the default for all these messaging apps I cannot understand, especially when the wording is misleading in the settings for Email and Messaging. What’s even more misleading is that the messaging apps settings do not honor the system settings for the device itself. I had already set device settings to Vibrate: Always. So why should Always not apply to messages? Pretty stupid, if you ask me.

So, now you know how to make sure your Android device vibrate when new messages come in. I’m happy to give free advice as a netizen who has benefited from other bloggers, but I’m also happy to donate to bloggers when their helpful hints save me a lot of dough. If this blog post saves you money, please consider donating to my blog by going to the home page and clicking on the PayPal Donate button. Thanks!

I work as a freelance interpreter for the deaf, and the agents I work for send out mass emails whenever they need to fill requests. In this age of email, when every interpreter I know carries a mobile device with them, I can respond to a request in 60 seconds and the agency will tell me it was already filled by another interpreter who responded in 30 seconds. It’s not always that fast, but when I don’t even realize I got an email from an agency until 20 to 30 minutes after the fact, it does me no good to have a mobile device. That’s why it’s so business-critical that I be notified the moment an assignment offer goes out.

Posted from WordPress for Android

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:

• Frank Lloyd Wright is associated with the Valley of the Sun because of his Taliesin West architectural school and the Arizona Biltmore, the latter of which he did not design but did inspire. To me, Wright’s letter forms are emblematic of the southwest region I live in. (The letters that inspired the Eaglefeather font were from the Eagle Rock project in Los Angeles, California– still a part of the “southwest.”)
• The southwestern themed font ties in with my blog’s current title, “Just Singin’ & Signin’ in the Sun,” which itself is a takeoff on the lyric “Just singin’ and dancin’ in the rain” from the show Singin’ in the Rain. I’m singin’ and signin’ (American Sign Language interpreting) in the [Valley of the] Sun. Get it? I know. I’m so clever.
• This is a full-featured font with real italics, bold, and bold italics.The font’s swash S’s and distinct forms capture the viewer’s attention and have a certain “wow” factor. When you see a blog in a font you don’t have on your computer, you think, “how did he do that?” and the answer is Web fonts.

Typekit Revisited

If you remember when I wrote why I wasn’t using Typekit Web Fonts yet, you might wonder why I changed my mind. Well, it’s basically because I learned from Matt McInerney, the designer of the font I tried, that his font looked bad bolded and italicized because it was a regular-only font. I should know all about regular-only fonts and why they don’t look good bolded or italicized, but I experienced some temporary synaptic leakage.

Once I tried fonts that had a complement of regular, italic, bold, and bold italic variants, I was quite happy with the way they looked on my blog. And the problem with the CSS selectors was mostly solved by David W. Bole’s list of CSS selectors for the Twenty Ten theme. I’m now happy with the way this and my family blog look with Typekit fonts.

Related Posts from Daniel Greene

• Choosing the right font styles & variants
• Why I’m not using Typekit Fonts yet
• The Typekit Fonts Tutorial for WordPress.com (via United Stage)

content, body, p, h3#comments-title, h3#reply-title, #access .menu, #access div.menu ul, #cancel-comment-reply-link, .form-allowed-tags, #site-info, #site-title, #wp-calendar, .comment-meta, .comment-body tr th, .comment-body thead th, .entry-content label, .entry-content tr th, .entry-content thead th, .entry-meta, .entry-title, .entry-utility, #respond label, .navigation, .page-title, .pingback p, .reply, .widget-title, .wp-caption-text, input[type="submit"], #access .menu-header, div.menu, #colophon, #branding, #main, #wrapper, blockquote, blockquote cite, blockquote em, blockquote i, body, input, textarea, .page-title span, .pingback a.url, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6

UPDATED:  July 4, 2010 I spent the afternoon trying to figure out how to code Typekit Fonts into all 14 of my WordPress.com blogs to add some spectacle to the drama of this United Stage blog.  The process isn't simple or intuitive and since there really isn't any  step-by-step documentation that I could find to help me, I decided to help myself — and you — by constructing this Typekit walk through for the new default Twenty Ten theme.  You star … Read More

via United Stage

Have you seen all the blogs with the tweets / retweet buttons? They make it very easy to spread the word about the blog posts you like, don’t they? Great SEO for bloggers, too. I wanted these buttons for my blog so I did some searching to find out how to add them. Here’s what I found.

Mirella McCracken had the easiest how to add a retweet button tutorial I’ve found; in fact, she had the only correct answer I have found anywhere! (Where did she get it, I wonder?)

I can add to Mirella’s post by saying that the answer is a shortcode. WordPress developed these since they don’t allow embedded scripts in WordPress.com blogs for security reasons. I learned about shortcodes when I moved my blogs from WordPress.org to WordPress.com. In a WordPress.com blog post, you can use a simple shortcode to embed a YouTube video or a Flickr video. What I didn’t know about was the TweetMeme shortcode.

The TweetMeme shortcode for WordPress.com looks like this:

For example, my twitter name is danielgreene, so my shortcode for “_# of_ tweets / retweet” button would be

It’s really quite easy. Facebook “Like” buttons, on the other hand, are not so easy. There is no shortcode for Facebook links that I know of yet. There are a few ways to get that “Like” button on your WordPress.com blog posts, but these services, such as GetSocial Live, require you to individually enter blog post titles and URLs into a web form to get a different button for each blog post. Then these buttons send the visitor who clicks them to a different page where they have to click something else. Sorry, but no. Not easy and seamless enough for me. I will wait until WordPress comes up with a Facebook shortcode; until then, I’m happy with the TweetMeme shortcode for Twitter.

Do you have a favorite method of helping your visitors spread the word about your blog posts?

This is a brief video I uploaded to see if a movie rotated in QuickTime 7 Pro can appear on YouTube in vertical format. I took this video with my Nexus One upright (vertically) at the Sea Life Aquarium in Tempe at the Arizona Mills shopping mall. Looks like it worked!

How to do this? Quoted from QuickTime 7 Pro help:

To resize or rotate a QuickTime movie:
In QuickTime Player 7, choose Window > Show Movie Properties.
In the Properties window, select a video track and click Visual Settings.
To resize the movie, type new numbers in the Current Size fields.
To keep the same height-to-width proportions, select Preserve Aspect Ratio.

To rotate the movie, click one of the rotate buttons.

I ordered the Nexus One Car Dock the day after it was released, and it arrived today by FedEx Ground. I put it in my car tonight to see how the car dock, Car Home, speakerphone, etc. worked. I’m happy I got the Car Dock, though I do wish the other Android apps like Phone and Contacts would go into landscape mode, because that’s the way I like to view my Google Maps GPS navigation.

Why don’t blog spam filters recognize as spam those generic comments that link to commercial websites? Akismet used to filter all the spam that came into my blog, but now there’s a type it never catches– generic comments linked to a money-making (or even phishing or malicious) websites. These spammers write adulatory comments that don’t address the content or topic of the post. They tell you that you have just earned a new follower and that they will add you to their RSS feed straightaway. They say things like, “This is the best post I’ve ever read on the subject.” Note they say “the subject” without naming it. Sometimes they even write editorial comments that have nothing to do with your blog post. Here is an actual examples taken from a recent comment on my blog:

Here’s one posted on my blog entry “Comparison of EPUB Download Sites“

How risky is blogging really? Blog firings are relatively rare. In a recent survey of 279 human resource professionals by the Society for Human Resources Management, just 3 percent of companies reported disciplining bloggers and none reported firing anyone for blogging. You’re more likely to get in trouble for fooling around online or downloading music at work. About half the companies in the survey said they’ve fired or disciplined employees for Internet use that was unrelated to work duties.

Note I didn’t say anything about “blog firings” or the risk of blogging in my post.

If there’s any risk of blogging, it’s for your blog to be highjacked by people using your publication to promote their get-rich-quick schemes.

Here’s one on my blog post “My first Speak & Spell workshop“:

This is an excellent post. I have a similar blog myself so I will keep coming back to read more.

And this from a guy who runs a blog about magic spells. At least his comment addressed the topic of my blog post, even if incorrectly.

I’ll add more examples as they come in, which I’m sure they will.

P.S. This is not a paid advertisement, but I do like using WordPress for Android because new comments to my blog show up as notifications on my Nexus One and I can follow the notification to open the app and mark comments as spam if I choose. It helps me stop spammers sooner than if I had to wait to get to a computer and log into my blog’s admin dashboard.