We find Skype works best for all of our video conferencing. Previously we would have to dial people in manually at the time of the meeting. But recently Skype added the ability to share links to conversations which has made logistics a lot easier. I'm sure it works for PC too, but we use Mac here so the instructions are Mac-based.
Image scaling in web browsers (or at least Google Chrome) still has a bug where the bottom edge can appear clipped if important pixels are right up against the edge of the image. Even worse: if you use image sprites for your site, pixels from one portion of the sprite can bleed over into another when scaled.
Thankfully, this is really only an issue for logos, icons, and other illustrations. Photos don't generally have such sharp details right at the edge where it noticeably affects things.
The easiest fix for this is to add a 1px border around all of the logos and icons on your site. It's a pain in the ass, but it's the easiest way to deal with this.
I often want to pull tabular data off a web page or out of a document into Excel to do some math manipulations on it. You might think that Paste Special > Text (aka Paste and Match Formatting) might be how to do it. But unfortunately that removes all of the table data too, leaving you with all of the data collapsed into one long column.
So what you do is Paste, and then immediately Insert Hyperlink… (Cmd K). I know it’s counter-intuitive to insert, but in that dialog box, there is a button for Remove Link. Click it, and that cleanly removes all of the links in the pasted data.
Have you ever wanted to see a previous version of a web site? Maybe of your own site? Well there’s a tool for that, and it’s called the Wayback Machine. It’s from the great folks at the Internet Archive (whom I’ve personally donated to).
We've used South Bay Scenic to put on 4 all-day expos where presenters give talks backed up by slides and videos. They have been a pleasure to work with and I can’t recommend them enough.
Previous events we put on all had some sort of technical glitch, whether with the presentations, the clicker to advance the slides, the mics, or the sound on videos. You name it, we experienced it. These guys have collectively put on hundreds if not thousands of events and it shows. They are prepared for almost any contingency. At the latest event we were having issues with the built in speakers. Danny told me not to worry. If they couldn’t fix it, he had brought speakers and stands that he could put on the stage and bypass the venue’s audio system entirely.
They’ve been able to scale up with our needs too. In the last year we started livestreaming our events, and they took that on without a hitch.
They also do video and audio recording as well as editing. They produce high-quality clips of our presentations that they upload directly to our YouTube channel. Check them out for some real-world examples of their work.
If you need someone to run the tech and A/V for your next event, I highly recommend at least talking to them.
Non-profits don’t have the budget for marketing resources, so a site like All The Free Stock is a valuable aggregator. A cool thing they offer: stock images of devices that let you upload you own screen to make it look like someone is using your website/app on a device. Pretty cool.
I always hated Caps Lock. It causes me to mistype passwords, and functionally I never use it. ALL CAPS is a holdover from the typewriter days when it was used for emphasis. Modern computers have bold and italic. All caps is simply no longer needed. And—to me—this vestigial key causes far too many problems.
Thankfully macOS has a way to turn the key off. It’s in System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard (tab) > Modifier Keys… (button). You can map the button to No Action, or do like me an map it to Control. That is the physical location of the Control key on the UNIX systems I used back in school.
The only downside to this is that you need to do it for every unique keyboard you connect to the computer. I wish I could set a global default.
For my PC, the fix is in many ways simpler; I removed the key altogether so it’s physically impossible to accidentally (or even purposefully!) turn Caps Lock on.
Bad UI here. If you are trying to customize the picklist values for a field on a SalesForce object, you of course go to Setup > Customize > [object] > Fields. However, when you scroll down to the field, there is an on-so-tempting Edit link sitting right there in the Action column. Resist! Click the link just to the right of it in the Field Label column to get to the page where you can add, edit, and delete list items.
We use Google Apps Suite here. There was an account set up before I joined that was automatically redirecting messages from the work account over to a personal account. This was done way back in the day before browsers supported multiple profiles.
I was trying to stop the redirect, but there were no filters set up, I had turned off forwarding, and both POP and IMAP were turned off.
Turns out there is a setting for this in the Admin console. Click Users, then a specific user, the Account, and scroll down to the Email Routing section. There was another “destination” set up for her personal account, and the G suite email and inherited routes were both unchecked. I removed the additional destination and checked both of those checkboxes, and now everything is working as expected.
I had switched over to a D-Link router since it had the ability to prioritize streaming media. But I was having problems with the router randomly forgetting the QoS settings, and the router simply stopped working several times. It was too unreliable.
So I'm back to a Netgear R8500. Their Dynamic QoS setting is just a check box, so we just have to hope that it does the right thing when it comes to voice and video traffic. But so far—paired with a dedicated symmetric pipe from WebPass—it’s been working well.
We had a storm last night that knocked out power for about 4 hours. Thankfully—because I have an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS)—my internet connection stayed up, as did my Network Attached Storage (NAS) and backup desktop. It gave me enough time to cleanly shut down these devices before the battery ran out.
Some CyberPower UPSs (and other brands too) have USB ports that can tell your computer or NAS that it is on battery and will trigger an automatic shutdown.
Be sure to calculate how much power your equipment will draw so that you get the appropriate size. For my setup of a modem, wifi router, NAS, and desktop computer + display, I got 650VA.
More tips for MailChimp users. We discovered that the internal list name we chose (“Master List”) was exposed to our subscribers when they click on why did I get this? in the footer of the email. Also, if you want to edit the content on that page—for example to add your logo and make it look more legitimate—click on the list, then click Settings > Required email footer content.
Similarly, when subscribers click on the update subscription preferences link, they go to a page for where they can update their display name and email address, and any other fields you've defined. On that form, MailChimp shows them all of the categories and groups you've created and let's them change which groups they are in. So make sure those names are donor-friendly!
