I work as a UX designer, program manager, and general IT consultant to help non-profits that are making a real, positive difference in the world. This blog is one of the ways I give back to the community.
I'm currently staying at place that has a central WiFi access point at the main building, and my room is the furthest. I can get reasonable signal on my laptop, but my phone—which has a weaker antenna—cannot reliably sustain a connection.
My solution is to use the Internet Sharing feature in macOS to use my laptop as a bridge between the WiFi and my phone.
Connect your phone to your laptop using a lightning USB cable
Swipe up from the bottom of the screen to bring up the Control Center
[Marketers have] created highly visible “virtual populations” of these [threatened] animals, which had led us to believe the animals were much more common than they actually are.
Because of this misperception, there is less urgent public pressure to conserve these animals…
[C]ompanies should compensate for this by paying money towards wildlife conservation when they use images of endangered species to promote their brands.
Refurbished items are a great way to get a discount on something that will look and work like brand new. It makes a lot of sense for gear I buy that will be used overseas. A longer warranty doesn't make sense if there's not a convenient way to get the item back to the US for repairs. And we nearly always unbox items for travel to save on space, so the packaging is irrelevant.
I do a lot of shopping on eBay, if only to get an idea of the market. eBay’s size and low overheads for sellers make it a great resource for finding out how much things are really worth (at least for things with reasonable liquidity). Check a Flip (which uses eBay current and historical prices) is a fantastic resource for getting a rough average of a particular item. Be sure to weed out broken items sold for parts, or actual replacement parts for an item!
On eBay there used to be just 3 options for condition: new, refurbished, or used.But savvy sellers started listing used items as “refurbished” to command a higher sale price. And sure, some sellers do go the extra mile to clean up a used item. But unless you are truly restoring it to "like new" condition (for example replacing the battery in a laptop so it has no power cycles), then it's not really refurbished, it’s just used.
eBay now has values for “Seller Refurbished” and “Manufacturer Refurbished” to distinguish these two cases. I always filter out the Seller Refurbished items, unless I am looking for something used (and even then I often do because I think anyone who uses “Seller Refurbished” is arrogantly trying to get more money than something is really worth). I recommend you do as well.
The technology of dash cams is progressing so quickly, the four-year-old one I have is pretty dated at this point. I did upgrade to a newer model about a year later and moved the original to the rear of my car, so I now have front and back views. You can get a really good one for about $100 now, and an adequate one (probably even better than mine!) for even less. For a really great price on one, daily deal site meh.com has them for sale every couple of months if you want to wait. Essentially, it's to the point where I think everyone should have at least one in the car.
I have digital photos from the late 90s and early 00s that just aren't very high resolution. In fact I have my first-ever selfie that was taken on an Apple QuickTake 100 back in 1994 at 640✕480 pixels; ⅓ of a megapixel.
But neural networks and machine learning are making it possible to add detail and resolution to photos like this. It's basically making an "educated guess" about what detail was there and "restoring" it. But it does a pretty good job, and I think it gives a better overall effect to older, smaller, or noisier photos. Science fiction becomes reality. 😊
There are some open-sourced tools out there that you can use for free. But they certainly aren't the easiest to use. I'm sure more user-friendly tools will be coming out in the next year or two. In the meantime, the one I've been using is a site called Let’s Enhance. It’s a paid service, but they do give you 5 free conversions when you sign up. And if you are really strapped for cash, I’m sure you can create multiple accounts to extend your number of free conversions.
If you have been the victim of ransomware, before you pay for the key, definitely check No More Ransom first. They are publishing known keys, so you may be able to unlock your files without having to pay.
I just watched this TED talk which was a fantastic introduction to the web site Dollar Street. It is a massive database of images taken from all over the world of people, homes, and the artifacts it their life. Anyone who is thinking about problems or opportunities in a particular area of the world or in a given community would do well to start here and get a rudimentary understanding of how those people live. That is going to provide a lot of valuable context.
An interesting point that seems obvious in retrospect: images don't vary by country but by income level.
When you are involved in wildlife conservation, you spend a lot of time traveling in undeveloped areas. That's sort of the point, right? Keep wild areas wild.
As a guy, I'm lucky that I can relieve myself pretty much anywhere there is a bit of privacy and not too much wind. But unfortunately the same cannot be said for my female cohorts.
Thankfully there are inexpensive and cheap solutions. I obviously don't have first-hand experience with any of these, so I encourage you to do your own research. However I generally trust Cool Tools, and they recommend the pStyle.This article in Backpacker recommends the Pibella first and SheWee second, with pStyle coming in third.
If you travel a lot, like most of the wildlife conservationists I support, then you will likely want a Kindle or other eBook reader. Amazon makes its easy to manage books purchased on the Kindle or at amazon.com, but not so much for books you aquire outside their ecosystem (like a PDF for example).
That's where Calibre comes in. It's great at converting between formats, and for pushing eBooks from your computer onto your Kindle. It's free (yay!) and looks to be a passion project by programmer Kovid Goyal. If you like it and find it useful, I recommend donating to him to thank him and encourage him to continue supporting it going forward.
I just watched this TED talk by Joel Jackson about his company Mobius. The concept is simple and brilliant: design a vehicle specifically for the rough roads in Africa, leave out all non-essentials to keep costs low, and build it locally (in Kenya) to avoid import duties. There's also an important side benefit of investing in the local community and creating jobs.
The web site says the base model starts at KES 1.3 million (~$13,000 USD). The second version—which incorporates customer feedback from the original that was launched in 2015—comes out later this year (2018).
My previous non-profit supports dozens of international wildlife conservationists, who come to the states 1–4 times each year for about 1–2 weeks each. As we all know, it is super useful to have a working mobile phone with data plan, especially for on-the-go logistics planning.
FreedomPop is a good solution to this problem. I just signed up myself and—while the process was a bit cumbersome—I now have a working SIM card in my backup phone that does basic voice, text and data. And I only had to pay a nominal set up fee. Oh, and you will need a US credit card with a US billing address to sign up for an account, so in the case of my org, the US-based program manager would be the one to do it on behalf of the partner. But it will ultimately be in the name of the program manger.
Keep in mind that their business model is to use the free plan to get people to sign up, and then try to keep them on a recurring paid plan. They do this by initially assigning a premium plan to your account with one month free, and hoping you never bother to call in to downgrade to the free plan.
The other thing they do is try to send you additional SIM cards on your account which are also assigned a premium plan and will start charging your credit card after a month. Every time you call in, there is a voice menu option that makes you choose “Yes” or “No” to another SIM card. You can say no to these, andI suggest you do unless you have a specific use in mind. I’ve no doubt if you ever want to add another line to your account, they would be happy to do so at any time.
I had technical problems signing up using their web site (despite trying a VPN and several different browsers including private/incognito windows), so I ended up buying the SIM card from Best Buy (they are also at Target and probably other brick&mortar stores) and then calling their Sales dept to activate it.
While I didn't try it, you might be able to request that they downgrade your service plan to the free one immediately when signing up. If not, just be sure to call back before the 30 days are up and get through to tech support, who will do this for you. There is no way to do it online, and the wait to get through to support will probably be 20–30 minutes. Use a headset and multitask on your computer while you wait. This is the cost of “free”. 😊
One of my favorite comedians is Myq Kaplan. He recently posted on Facebook asking his fans to comment on a memory of meeting him or hearing his material. He made the point of responding to each comment, including mine. And now I see his posts all throughout my feed.
So I can only conclude that the Facebook Algorithm™ will give a higher weight to posts from people/pages that you've had a conversation with. Which makes sense. And it also means this is a great way to get more exposure of your content in Facebook without spending money on ads.
Create a post that encourages people to post a comment about something, and then—this is key—respond to each and every one of those comments. Even if it's a simple "thanks!". It will take some time and effort, but I believe you will see an increase in exposure and engagement on subsequent posts.
Send me a note and share your experience if you do this. Thanks!
Since the non-profit I worked for helped wildlife conservation worldwide, finding cheap international fares was important. I found Scott’s Cheap Flights to be a great resource. They look for flights to pretty much all destinations. But at least every week or two a deal will crop up for one of the relevant locations.
They have a free version that everyone should sign up for. I paid the $40/year for premium, and I think it’s well worth it. It will more than pay for itself after the first discounted fare you purchase.
Just like last year, Pixelmator is on sale for ½ price for black Friday. It will be this price through December 6. If you don’t have it yet, get it now. Even at full price, it’s an amazing deal for a full featured photo editing app. Here’s my original post recommending it.
If you don't know about it, Task Rabbit is an on-demand handyman service. We used it extensively at my workplace to set up and move furniture (desks, shelving units, etc), to mount TVs and wifi access points to the walls, and other assorted tasks. I recommend it.
Yet another org that I volunteer with has had a hacker try to scam them out of money by spoofing an email that appeared to come from the executive director sent to the finance guy.
What many people don’t realize is that it is very easy to spoof an email. They don’t even need to have your password to sign in as you. Most email systems will let you create a separate “send only” account with a custom display name and email address. This is useful if you want an email to come from Marketing <marketing@yourorg.org>. Of course you don’t have to use marketing. You can use anything, even Drumpf <president@whitehouse.gov>. And that’s what these hackers do.
Some emails (like the one that this particular org received) try to get you to wire money to a bank account. Others are designed to look like a security message from Google, Microsoft, or Apple in an attempt to get you to go to a page that looks like an official password reset form, but is actually a forgery that looks legit on the surface. If you fall for it and type in your username and password, the bad guys will now have access to your account and will use it to do bad things. This is what happened to John Podesta. And also to the staff of the Reply All podcast.
So what can you do to protect yourself from spoofed emails? In a nutshell: be cautious. If this is someone you know well, you will notice if the wording or request in the email is out of the ordinary. And when in doubt—and especially when there are costly ramifications to getting it wrong—verify the email with the person using a different communication channel.This part is essential, as it is practically impossible for a hacker to have access to multiple communication channels of their target. I recommend talking to them in-person or over video chat if possible. A phone call or audio chat is next safest. And text message will suffice if the first two aren’t possible.
And for all unsolicited “please reset you password” emails you receive, go directly to the site by opening a new tab and typing the site into the address bar. Never, ever click a link in the message and then enter the password into that page. To help with this, I highly recommend using a password manager. It will never auto-fill your password into a site it doesn’t recognize. Just don’t defeat this protection by copying and pasting the password manually. 😉
If you would like an online training option for your employees so that they can learn best practices of online safety, I’ve heard good things about KnowBe4 (although I’ve never used it personally).
I spent 3½ years administering a RingCentral VoIP system of 15–20 lines. I would say they are ok. They are definitely feature-rich, with a decent mobile client and a partnership with Zoom for video conferencing. Coupled with the non-profit discount we negotiated, it was reasonably priced. However ease-of-use—both for the administration and the end users—was mediocre at best. And I spent far too long trying to work out all of the quality of service (QoS) issues with the network to ensure that calls were rock solid. Their technical support was underwhelming when it came to helping me troubleshoot and fix that.
But the number one reason why I recommend you go with another vendor* is because they are purposefully deceitful with their billing. Granted I had billing issues that I needed to contact them to resolve, including overcharges and fraudulent long distance. Unfortunately that seems to be par for the course with telecom companies. But they take it to the next level.
RingCentral adds an item to the bill called Compliance and Administrative Cost Recovery Fee. It is placed in the list of charges that include Emergency 911 Service Fee, Federal Universal Service Recovery Fee and State and Local Taxes. So you’d be forgiven for presuming this was of that ilk. However if you dig into the fine print, they make it quite clear: “The CRF is not a tax, nor is it mandated by any level of government or government agency.”
Now granted, this additional charge is not a lot of money. However just the fact that a company would deceive it’s customers by boosting profits by burying standard costs of doing business in with the mandated fees shows just what they think about their customers and acceptable business practices. This puts them squarely in the realm of telcom companies like Comcast, Charter, AT&T and Verizon. Comcast does this sort of thing and they are routinely crowned the WorstCompanyin America.
Unfortunately switching costs for your phone service are high, so unless they do something truly awful, my org will likely be locked into using them. But if you haven’t made the decision yet, or if you are small enough that you can switch without much pain, definitely check out Jive or a few other alternatives.
* I’ll say up front that this might just be a pet peeve overreaction on my part; use your own judgement.
Using a search engine is a pretty important skill to have these days. So much so that this should probably be a core requirement in high school and college these days.
The “minus” operator—which excludes results that have the word after the minus character—is useful when there are several different domains that use a particular keyword. For example Apple was using big cat species for it’s operating system versions, so a search of snow leopard -apple -machelped narrow the results down to just pages about the animal.
Google presumes an AND between search terms. But if you want to use OR, the AND clarifies the specific Boolean logic you want. For example, I have several Google Alerts set up for news about particular species, and this is the general template I use:
Finally, you can put a phrase in quotes to get even more specific. This is especially when each of the the terms separately are generic. That said, Google has been getting better and better about surmising what you mean, so"African wild dog" doesn’t even need to be in quotes to get to the same set of results.
On my MacBook Pro, there are dedicated keys at the top of the keyboard for changing the brightness of the screen or volume of the audio. However there are only 16 discreet values, plus a 17th one for “off”. Sometimes you want a bit more granularity.
Hold down the option and the shift keys simultaneously, and then press the brightness or volume keys to adjust in ¼ increments instead (giving you 64 total settings).
(Also, if you hold down just the option key while pressing brightness or volume, it will bring up the appropriate system preference panel.)
The wildlife conservationists I help work in very remote areas where there either is no electrical grid, or the one that is there is unreliable. In these scenarios, it’s important to have your own powered light source.
These days it is super-easy to capture quick video clips that you want to post to social media or embed in a blog post. For quick and easy editing, I use the QuickTime Player app on the Mac.
Open the clip in QuickTime, then click Trim… in the Edit menu (or press Cmd T). Drag the yellow handles from the left and right to narrow down to the start and end frames respectively, then click the Trim button to finish the edit. The newly edited clip will open in a new window, and you will have to save that out to a new video file.
I’ve been wanting to create an automation for these tasks ever since I first did presentation wrangling for all of the 18 or so presenters at the 2014 Wildlife Expo. The best presentations are the ones where the slides are a simple as possible, and presentation is carried by the storytelling ability of the presenter. For these presentations, most slides are simply a single image or video.
The problem with PowerPoint is that when you drop an image onto a default slide, it is put in the same bounding box with the same margins as bulleted text. Now text absolutely needs some margins to make it more readable. However with an image, the visual margins are already part of the image. The image should be maximized to fill the entire slide (and of course centered and cropped as required). Same goes for videos.
So I created two AppleScript apps. The first one—Create PowerPoint slides from photos or videos —lets you drop a folder containing photos and/or videos onto it (or even just a selection of files directly), and uses those files to create a new presentation from them, one slide per file.†
The second one—Resize and align PowerPoint photos or videos on selected slides—operates on the frontmost open presentation in PowerPoint. It will center, scale, and crop the photo / video on each slide that is selected in the slide pane. You can hold down the Command key or the Shift key to select multiple slides at once. Or Cmd A to select all of the slides.
If you are holding down the Shift key when you run the second script, instead of filling the slide with the entire media (which will crop off the wider dimension), instead it will scale the media down so that if fully fits on the slide, leaving black bars to the sides (or possibly above and below depending on the aspect ratio). It’s hard to describe well, so I suggest you just play around with it both ways so you can see the difference.
Caveats: I didn’t do a ton of testing on these, so it might not work in all scenarios. There aren’t any destructive commands in there (like delete), but even so I recommend you always use these on a copy of your files. Also since it’s in AppleScript, they only works on the Mac. I would love to port them to VisualBasic or JavaScript so it can work cross platform, but I would need access to a Windows box, and I don’t have one just now. If anyone wants to take this on, please do so! I’m happy to help answer questions.
* Since I am not registered as a trusted developer with Apple, if I distribute the exported applications you won’t be able to run them without lowering the security permissions on your Mac. So instead, I have provided the AppleScript source code files. You can open them in the Script Editor app yourself, then Export out as an Application.
† For security, Apple has recently added an annoying “Grant Access” dialog box that you need to respond to for each and every image / video file. Here is a good overview of the issue, and also a workaround on where to place your files so you don't have this dialog box coming up all the time.
The biggest downside of the most recent line of MacBooks is that they are unable to be upgraded. The memory and storage chips are all soldered directly to the logic board.
However at least with the MacBooks (both Pro and Air) made 2012–2016, there is a workaround. You can use the SD card slot to add more space. If you use a standard SD card, it will stick out from the edge. But you can get a micro SD card and a short SD card adapter, which will sit flush with the case (or at least close enough for practical purposes).
It's my photos, videos and music files that are eating up all my space. So I bought this 200GB micro SD card to use as and expansion to store my media files. (I looked into the 256GB ones, but they were nearly double the price for only 28% more storage.)
There are several different short SD card adapters out there. I tried the one by Adafruit designed for the Raspberry Pi, but unfortunately it doesn't work on the Mac. Or at least it is intermittent so I can't count on it. I ended up going with a BaseQi adapter. It's more expensive, but the review are good and it is designed specifically for this purpose. Be sure to get the right one! There are several different sizes, each designed for a particular year and model of MacBook. There are also some by 8mobility that look reasonable too.
When people talk about tech, they often mean electric devices that need a power source and usually have an on/off switch. However there are at least a couple of different kind of tech that can be just as (or even more) useful: design tech and materials tech. OXO products—especially their measuring cups and can opener—are good examples of design tech. And the items below use innovative materials to better solve problems.
Gorilla Tape- this stuff is far superior to duct tape for field-based repairs. I keep a roll in my car and at home.
Goo Gone - Great for getting stickers, tape residue, and other sticky/gooey residues off pretty much anything.
Fix-a-Flat or a tire puncture repair kit - The conservationists we support work in pretty harsh and remote conditions. Getting a puncture in a tire is inevitable, and being able to repair it in the field is invaluable.
I just double-booked myself because and event I had committed to on Facebook wasn’t in my personal Google calendar. So I decided to fix things to prevent it from happening in the future.
I did find articles on the web about how to do this, but since Facebook updates the UX so often, they were of course out of date. Here is the current way (as of Oct 2017):
It’s coming up on the end of the year giving season, and you are planning to donate $1000 to your favorite charity. You could just give it via cash / check /credit card like most people do, and they will happily take it. And of course you can then deduct $1000 from your taxable income for the year which will save you $373. But there is a better way if you have appreciated stock.
Rather than me walking through the math here (and risk getting it wrong), I’ll just link to this donation tax calculator that will show you the difference. For a $500 investment that appreciated to $1000, by donating the stock rather than cash, you reduce your taxes by an extra $96 and the charity receives an additional $75.*
One of the charities I donate to and occasionally help with consulting recently sent out an email to donors that simply included a paragraph describing this. They immediately received 2 stock gifts along with several other commitments to donate stock at the end of the year.
Donors already want to help you, and if you give them a way to have it be a win-win for both of you, it will result in more donations. So I recommend making this a regular message in your donor communications.
* For simplicity, I assume that the yearly income is in the 28% federal, 9.3% California state and 15% capital gains tax brackets.
Since I primarily manage Mac and iOS systems, I haven’t blogged much about Windows. However if you are a Windows admin, then you absolutely need to know about Microsoft’s Sysinternals toolset.
I use Process Explorer as a much more powerful replacement to the standard Windows Task Manager. And Autoruns is a great tool for managing which processes start up with Windows. This is essential when cleaning up all the crap that installers add under the covers to “phone home” or even arguably malware add-ons that get installed with some other driver or utility.
More recently I used SDelete to clean up a system that was being decommissioned. Really hard drive destruction is the best way to ensure data cannot be recovered. But barring that, SDelete is a the next best thing. And best of all, they are all free. Thanks, Mark!
The folks I support often do presentations in whatever venue they can book for cheap or free. Sometimes it’s just a large living room in a supporters house. So having the right gear is important.
For the projector, I highly recommend one with a “short throw”. That allows you to place the projector just 2 or 3 feet from the screen so it isn’t in the way of the audience or the presenter. I also recommend 1080p resolution, and a reasonably high brightness (at least 2000–3000 lumens) so the image will stand out even with ambient light in the room.
When I researched one for my org, I ended up with an Optoma. I don't remember the exact model, but this Optoma GT1080 looks very similar to it.
Finally, if you have the room to transport it, a roll-up screen like this is the best. But if you just need a cheap, portable surface to project onto, get this cloth and some cord and clamps to mount it.
Since this info isn’t readily available, here are all of the small-ish Pelican cases that most projectors will fit in, and their internal dimensions. I recommend at least 1" more that the dimension of the projector to leave enough room for padding.
The Centre for Effective Altruism in the UK runs a great website called 80000hours.org. I only just signed up a couple of weeks ago on the recommendation of a respected advisor, and so far it looks really great. Sign up for their weekly email series to get it pushed to your inbox in bite-sized chunks. You can also just read the articles and watch the videos on the site. And if you want the content in book form, they have that too (it's only $4 for the eBook).
I always tried to use the space bar to play and pause YouTube videos, but if the focus isn't in the video player itself, it always scrolls the page down. Well no more! I now use the k key to play/pause, and j to jump back 10 seconds. l also jumps forward 10 seconds, but I rarely need that (unless you overshoot jumping back).
There are also others, like shift n and shift p to go to the next or previous video in a playlist. > (shift .) increases playback speed and < (shift ,) decreases it.
Wow, this is huge. For the longest time I thought the only way to get a movie to play in PowerPoint using just a presentation remote was to change the Play setting to Automatically. The default value is On Click, but that never worked; a click would just take you to the next slide. But there is a way to get it to work, and it requires adding an animation to your movie.
Select the embedded movie, then click the Animations tab. If your window is wide enough, you will see options for Play (this is the one we care about), Pause, Stop as well as Fill Color and Grow/Shrink. Otherwise these are buried under a menu button with a yellow star icon called Emphasis Effects.
However you get to it, click the Play button and it will add an “animation” to the slide that will play the movie on click. With this set, during your presentation you can now click the remote once to bring up the slide with the movie on it, and then click a second time to start the movie playing.
If you want it to play automatically, you can set Start for this animation to with previous.
I previously blogged about Google’s site: search operator (which also works in othersearchengines). You can create shortcuts for commonly-used sites in Chrome using the Search Engines setting. It helps if you have a bit of knowledge about how URL parameters work, but even if you don’t, just follow the instructions.
Open Chrome Preferences/Settings and then click Search Engines. There is a table of entries, each one with 3 properties: name (just a display name for you), keyword (the text you type to invoke the shortcut, usually 1–3 letters), and the URL.
Here's how to create a shortcut that searches this particular blog:
Open Preferences > Search Engines (if you aren’t already there)
In the Other Search Engines section, click the Add button (on the right)
So the URL is the tricky bit. What I did was go to Google and enter a site search for my blog on a particular keyword, like PowerPoint. This is what then appears in the URL bar:
In the URL, I replace they search term—which in this case was PowerPoint—with the token %s
What Google will do is take the search term and put it in the URL wherever the %s appears:
https://www.google.com/search?q=%s+site:it4np.com
To test it out, click in the URL bar, type it and a space. Notice the URL bar now says SearchIT for Non-Profits? Now type a search term —let's use CSS this time—and press return. Google will now take you to:
You can also do it to get directly to the search results of a particular site, bypassing Google altogether. I have a YouTube search engine shortcut set up, and this is the URL:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s
This is such a time saver for me, and one of the many reasons I so prefer using a laptop to a tablet or mobile phone. I have so many keyboard shortcuts set up that working without them takes me at least twice as long to accomplish any of them.
It’s surprising that this still isn’t fixed. But yes—when you save a Word doc to PDF or try to print to PDF—it completely removes all of the hyperlinks. It’s insidious because it leaves the blue underlined text styling in place. But that’s all it is: styled text.
This does work on Windows, so if you have access to a Windows machine that has Microsoft Office, you can use that. Otherwise, use one of the many, many converters online such as Convertio. Also once you have your PDF, don't forget to run it through a compressor / optimizer. My test document was originally 19kb in Word, converted to a 203kb PDF, and then compressed down to 52kb.
This is actually a simple yet brilliant idea. Since the first line of defense of any tech problem with the network is the reboot the modem and router, why not do it preemptively to prevent the problems from happening in the first place?
This outlet timer is designed specifically for that. There are two outlets that switch off and back on daily at a time and interval you decide. I tried doing this with a cheaper analog timer designed for lamps, and I switched to this one because:
It is digital, so it is silent
It can be programmed to only switch off for a short period (the lamp timer's shortest interval is 30 minutes)
It has 2 outlets to handle both the modem and router simultaneously
It’s a common scenario: you need to send some sensitive information to a colleague or friend, and you know that email is not the way to do it. Instant messaging isn’t any more secure. You could use chat: Skype, WhatsApp, or best of all Signal. But that requires that you already be connected.
Google Drive, Dropbox, or other document sharing services are options as well, but once again it requires that you both have accounts linked to your email addresses, so someone might have to create one.
A simple solution is PrivNote. You can create a note that can only be accessed once, so you know that once the recipient views the text, no one else can get it. And if they cannot view it, you know someone else has and can take appropriate action.
Google Alerts is my go-to utility for keeping up on the latest news about a particular topic. It allows you to search not only news sources but also the whole web in general. It's great for obscure topics that don’t get mainstream coverage. And you can use search operators to create even more targeted results. I use the minus operator and the OR operator most often in mine.
Most people know about Cmd Tab keyboard shortcut on the Mac (Alt Tab on Windows) which lets you switch among open apps without touching the mouse. Back in my early days as a UX designer, I extended this concept to the key right above Tab—the tilde (technically grave accent, but tilde is easier to say)—to switch between windows in Microsoft Internet Mail and News and Internet Explorer, and eventually to Entourage and the rest of the Mac Office apps.
Someone at Apple liked the idea and baked it into macOS. So now in any app on the Mac, you can use Cmd Tilde and Cmd Shift Tilde to switch among open windows.
For our events, we have slide show presentations. But we also want content on the screen during the breaks before, after and between talks. There are 3 viable options:
Show a static image, such as a logo, event graphic or just a boring black screen
Show an ordered slide show
Show an random slide show
(It hopefully goes without saying, but showing a computer desktop is not at all professional, especially if you can see the powerpoint UI.)
Show a static image
This one is pretty straightforward. Just make sure to plug into the projector ahead of time, ensure the Mac uses it as a second display (not mirroring), and set the desktop background to the image you want to use. Make sure the resolution of the image is the same as the projector for optimal display (e.g. 1920✕1080 for standard HD). There are also some settings you'll want to change to get rid of the menu bar. See these instructions for more details.
PowerPoint can't easily do random order slide shows. But thankfully there is an easier way.
Once you have you slide show in PowerPoint, click File > Export… then choose JPEG or PNG as the file type. This will net you a folder full of images, one for each slide.
Now go to the screen saver preferences and use this folder as the source. More detailed instructions are in my post on Prepping a MacBook for Presenting.
I was working on a campaign page that has an embedded donate form in it. When I first set up the thank you page, it loaded within the form. This created essentially a page within a page, and it didn't look very professional.
However I found that by simply replacing that thank you page with this simple script, (and creating a separate static thank you page to point to) it would do what I wanted.
A partner of ours just had a web site outage and didn't notice until I reported it to them. This was a particularly insidious one as the site was showing a page (so it was technically "up"), but the page was completely blank.
These sorts of things have happened to us as well. The site is down or in maintenance mode and we don't discover until a staff member or donor notices.
That's why I just signed up for Down Notifier. One thing I liked about them is they let you look for missing content, so it will detect cases such as the domain in maintenance mode, or pointing to a parked domain page. I'm not sure how well it works, so you may wish to explore some other options.
There are a few things I am particularly proud of doing. One is moving to an Extended Validation certificate that encrypts our entire web site. When I did this 2½ years ago, pretty much none of the big wildlife conservation orgs had certificates on their main website content. (Of course they all did on their Donate page.) Even today, there are way more sites than I would expect that still are running unencrypted. In fact we are the only one of the Charity Navigator Perfect 100 animal charities to be fully encrypted.
The Extended Validation is a nice touch; it guarantees we are the non-profit organization that we say we are. It costs a couple hundred dollars per year, so probably not in the budget for a lot of smaller orgs.
But that's not as important as simply having a basic security certificate. These days there is no reason not to have one. Let’s Encrypt will issue one to you for free.
As our org has grown, the demands on our internet usage have also grown. We started out using consumer-grade routers, moved up to high-end gaming routers with QoS, and finally we got big enough that we had to move to real enterprise-level networking.
I did the research and decided to go with Meraki based on other recommendations, ease of use, a single cloud-based console for managing all networking gear, and maybe most importantly: traffic shaping.
Traffic shaping on our MX65 router allows me to give VoIP data the highest priority, video conferencing data high priority, leave most other traffic at normal levels, and lower the priority of file sharing and downloads.
We've had the system for a couple of months now and it has been a huge improvement over the previous. For small offices, you might be able to get away with just a Z1.
If you attend one of their many marketing webinars, they will send you a free wireless access point with a 3 year license.
The biggest downside to Meraki is you are forced to go through a reseller in order to buy them. You can't buy directly from places like Amazon or even direct from Meraki. And I found a lot of resellers don't want to deal with small orgs. CDW has a division for non-profits and I have been working with Reed Carroll there (reedcar at CDW). Prices are negotiable—especially when you buy in volume—so don't pay full retail.
I was trying to solve this problem with just CSS, but I'm pretty convinced it isn't possible. That's too bad, since it means I cannot use it in email messages. But it will work in web pages.
The solution is based on Jon’s great answer on this StackOverflow question. I added Randall’s mod to hide the dots rather than removing them to prevent re-layout bugs. And I added a similar string at the beginning of each line to make sure the lines were visually centered (this part can be removed—or at least the content can be set to null—if you want to left align). And finally, I switched to checking the left offset rather than the top offset to deal with it not working in Firefox.
I recently had to create new thank you and receipt emails for our donation system. Creating an email from scratch is not recommended as there are so many different email clients out there. Most notably there is Outlook that has extreme limitations on what works and what doesn't. Couple that with the need to look good on mobile (aka responsive design), and you'll see why it's best to leverage a solid template that takes all of these things into account.
I ended up going with Zurb's Foundation templates. There is a lot of CSS and nested tables in them. But once you get over all the crazy amounts of structural HTML required, it's pretty easy to just pop your content into rows and cells and have it turn out well.
Even though these templates should take care of everything, I highly recommend testing using Email on Acid or a similar service. It is so easy to have typo in your HTML completely break things.
Speaking of that, it's always a good idea to run your code through the W3C HTML validator service. You will get a few errors simply because the templates are using some seriously old-school markup. But it has helped me catch and fix some dumb errors (like using a parenthesis rather than a curly bracket in my CSS or forgetting an close tag).
You absolutely need a good plain text editor to do any sort of basic text file manipulations. I love TextWrangler. Unfortunately the app has been discontinued. But they do have a pro-level text editor app called BBEdit. You can use it in unlicensed form, and it will probably do everything you need. I'm personally going to stick with TextWrangler for now since I already know it's interface and features pretty well.
It does code syntax highlighting, has powerful search and replace (with a grep option), and probably my favorite feature: compare text files.
Our current payment platform system has a lot of custom CSS for the donate pages and inlined HTML for the email messages. Any change—no matter how small—needs to be tested and debugged so it works in all the various browsers or email apps. Since there is no source control, we create a cloned sandbox environment for development and testing. When it's verified good and ready to check in, I use TextWrangler to compare my proposed change with what is currently on the site. This ensures I only check in the complete changes essential for the fix and nothing else.
I previously blogged about running a Windows VM on your Mac to do IE and Edge browser testing. But if you want something even more lightweight, Microsoft has a page where you can enter a link to your site and it will come back with screen grabs of the site rendered in various browsers on various versions of Windows.
But it's also useful for testing DNS issues. Let's say you made a change to DNS and want to see if it's working not only for your computer but other random computers out there. Plug it into this page and you will see if it comes up or if you get an error.
I was trying to set opacity on the background of an HTML container (DIV) element. But if I used opacity:.5 style, it also sets the opacity of children elements inside. And this cannot be overridden by setting opacity:1 on those children elements.
The workaround is to set the opacity as a part of the background color itself using RGBA values (red, green, blue, alpha). For example:
Yes, it's annoying you can’t apply an alpha channel to a hex color value. But you can use a color picker utility to convert hex to RGB, then add the alpha you want. (Note: the RGB values are in the range 0–255; the alpha value is in the range 0–1 where 0 is completely transparent and 1 is completely opaque.)
Finally, if you don’t want a background at all, you can set it to transparent:
DIV.see-thru {background-color:transparent;}
The special color value transparent works anywhere you might specify a color: borders, background, foreground/text…
HTML email messages are fragile things. One possibility you have to be prepared for is how it looks if the images do not load. Maybe the image host is down, maybe the device is offline, or maybe the viewer’s email client is blocking images for security or bandwidth issues.
My first recommendation is to encode the image directly into the message. IMG tags can accept a text-encoded data stream as their SRC parameter, and that will essentially guarantee the image will show. However it does increase the size of the message, so I only recommend it for small images, icons and logos. But I especially recommend it for logos. From a branding perspective, it makes sense to ensure your logo is always showing.
Barring that, you need to be sure the ALT text and styles on your image will look good even if the image doesn't load. For my organization, our logo initials are set in an uppercase serif font (Trajan Pro to be specific), so I set the ALT text to mirror that as best as I can. And for the banner/hero image, I use our tag line as the ALT text. It reads better than a description of the image.
We also include images of signatures in our emails. This can be simulated using ALT text of the person’s name in a blue, cursive font. Here is the font stack I am using:
There’s one more clever thing you can do: use an emoji character as the ALT text. We use a portrait of our Executive Director in our email. A reasonable ALT emoji character for that: Unicode Hex 👤 for Bust in Silhouette:
