Info Tech for Non-Profits

Create your own clickable Zoom meeting link

Let's say you were invited to a Zoom meeting, but you only have the ID and the password. What do you do?

You plug it into this handy template:

zoommtg://zoom.us/join?confno=XXX&pwd=YYY&uname=ZZZ

confno (XXX in the example above) is the meeting ID number (numbers only; no spaces).

pwd (YYY) is the password.

uname (ZZZ) is optional. It overrides your default display name. This is handy if you want to drop your last name, change from the corporate account name to your personal name, add a phone number, or add preferred pronouns.

Replace any spaces you want to include in your display name with %20 (which is the encoded version of the space character). Or you can use a URL encoder to do it for you automatically.

Sadly, Google Calendar will not make this clickable, so you will have to copy/paste/go in a new browser tab.

Use Airalo to purchase a mobile phone data plan eSIM before your international trip

Many modern phones support eSIMs, which makes getting your phone onto a network in another country super easy (barely an inconvenience).

I used Airalo to buy a data plan for my recent trip to the UK. $10 for 3 GB of data (discounted to $7 with a coupon code).

The only trick to getting it to work: I had to turn ‘roaming’ on for the new data plan once I set it up. It's counterintuitive since the whole reason I wanted the in-country plan was to avoid roaming fees. Regardless, I simply disabled my primary USA SIM, and everything worked fine.

Get eSIM mobile plan from Airalo