Capturing your inspirational moments

My creative and inspirational moments typically happen when I’m falling asleep or when I’m in the shower.

But wherever, whenever and however your inspiration comes, you need to capture those little ‘Aha!’ moments. Pen and notepaper work very well; you might just be able to keep those thoughts going if you can decipher your midnight scribblings done in the dark first thing next morning! But pen and paper don’t work so well in the shower… Or do they?

Jonathan Follett, in his A Practical Guide to Capturing Creativity for UX published by UX Matters covers various low-tech methods of capturing your inspirational moments, such as pen and paper, note books, sketch books, and even waterproof paper for the shower! Then he moves into the more high-tech stuff like converting paper scribblings to digital, recording your voice, creating an electronic scrapbook of ideas, taking digital photos and videos.

[Links last checked October 2009]

Pre-populating email links

A client wanted to have an email link, which would open Outlook and populate some of the email with boilerplate text. This was for an intranet, so email address security wasn’t an issue — I knew I could use a simple mailto link. Easy.

Except that I wanted some line breaks between parts of the message body. A bit of Googling and I found a solution that works! Here’s the syntax…

• Link to email address: mailto:name@company.com (where you substitute ‘name@company.com’ with the real email address)
• Subject line: ?subject=Subject line (substitute ‘Subject line’ with the real subject)
• Message: &body=Message (substitute ‘Message’ with the real message)
• Line breaks in the message body: %0A (that’s a zero, not an ‘O for orange’); use %0A%0A for two line breaks, %0A%0A%0A for three line breaks etc.)

Here’s an example:

Mailto syntax example

And here’s how it looks in Outlook:

How it looks in Outlook

Please note: You can only have one ? in the string, so if you need to pre-populate the CC field, the Subject field, and the message body then do it like this:

mailto:name@company.com?cc=another.name@company.com&subject=Subject line&body=Message

Has this tip helped you? saved you time? saved your skin? You can thank me by clicking on the cup and buying me a coffee. (An E-Junkie shopping cart page will open where you can pay for my coffee via PayPal.)

Quick currency conversions using Google

I’ve used http://www.xe.com for a long time to convert Australian dollars to and from US dollars, and it’s a great little website.

I must’ve been hiding under a rock ‘cos I only recently discovered that Google search does currency conversions on the fly from the Google search box. It’s probably been around for ages, but it was new to me!

Here’s what to do:

In the Google search box, enter the value and currency code you want to convert from (e.g. 39.95 USD), followed by the word ‘in‘ and the currency code you want to convert to (e.g. in AUD). Press Enter to see the result. Done. No need to go to another website to find it out.

[Links last checked August 2009]

Internet connection issues?

In a previous post I talked about using commands like ping and tracert to test your internet connection and its speed.

Here are some more things you can use — SpeedTest and DownForJustMe.

SpeedTest

SpeedTest (http://www.speedtest.net/)  lets you test your connection speed and shows you the results compared to your ISP’s average and compared to other places in your state, country and the world.

Snapshot of my results

Australia compared to other countries

You can also view and download a CSV file of your results over time if you need to ‘prove’ that your connection is doing strange things (the screen shot below shows my results over a few hours — the red box is the slowest speed and the green box the fastest).

Results over time

Down for everyone or just me?

Another tool for checking a slow or non-responsive connection to a website is the Down For Everyone or Just Me? website (http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/).

You enter the URL you’re having trouble with, then press Enter or click the link.

Enter the URL in the box

After a very short time (less than one second?), you’ll get your answer:

Looks like there's nothing wrong -- it must be at my end

If there is something wrong, they’ll tell you that too. You don’t get a lot of information, but you get enough to ‘prove’ that it’s not something at your end. (In the example below I entered a fake URL just to see what the response would be.)

And if it's not working, you get this

[Links last checked August 2009]

The illustrated guide to color contrast

Brad Colbow is a web designer, illustrator and cartoonist. He does some great geeky-type cartoons, some of which I’ll be featuring in this blog over the next few weeks.

I first came across him when I read an RSS feed that pointed me to this article on color contrast: The Brads — Learning about contrast in design.

Brad has captured the essence of explaining the concept of color contrast simply, by using cartoon panels featuring himself and Hector the Pig. Here’s a taste:

[Links last checked July 2009]

Change the keyboard shortcut for an application

My HP laptop has an application on it called HP Health Check — it’s a diagnostic thing. How do I know this? Because whenever I tried to copy formatting in Word using Ctrl+Shift+C the formatting wouldn’t copy and HP Health Check opened!

At first I thought HP Health Check was scheduled to open, then I realized that Ctrl+Shift+C was opening it. No wonder I couldn’t copy formatting!

To add, change or remove a keyboard shortcut from an application:

1. Right-click on the application’s name, then select Properties.
2. Go to the Shortcut tab.
3. In the Shortcut key field, you can:
   • Enter a new key combination if one isn’t associated with this application
   • Change the existing key combination to something that doesn’t conflict with your existing commands
   • Delete the existing key combination (it will then display as None).
4. Click OK.

Add, edit or delete a keyboard shortcut for an application

BTW, I put in a call to HP Support before finding this solution. Their answer? “You must have assigned this keyboard combination in Word” (no, it’s a default!), and here’s how to disable the Word keyboard shortcut (but I don’t WANT to do that — it’s a shortcut I use ALL the time as I mentioned in my support call!). How arrogant of them — most other programs do not have a keyboard shortcut assigned to them, let alone one that’s a standard in an Office program.

All 100K+ Unicode characters and more…

You’re writing a document and you need a symbol for, say, two-fifths (2/5). If you’re in Word, you can go to the Symbol map (Insert > Symbol in Word 2003) and scroll through the list. When you don’t find it, you might try changing the Font to another one and/or changing the Subset. But you still may not find it.

So now, if you have the patience (and know it exists!), you might try the Character Map in Windows (Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Character Map in Windows XP). But you may still need to change the font, and you can’t do any kind of search for a character. Five minutes of scrolling and peering and you give up!

However, the 2/5 symbol does exist*. It’s a Unicode character. But there are some 100,000-plus Unicode characters and the Windows Character Map only lists about 40,000 of them. Not being able to search for what you want is a big negative. Most people will give up and just enter ‘2/5′ and hope for the best.

There is a solution: BabelMap.

BabelMap is a free downloadable EXE (just under 4 MB) you can stick on a thumb drive or on your desktop. It contains all 100,000-plus Unicode characters AND it is searchable. It’s available from: http://babelstone.co.uk/Software/BabelMap.html

With BabelMap, you can’t search for ‘2/5′ but you can search for ‘fraction’ (1) — keep clicking Search (2) until you get the fraction you want — it’s highlighted in red (3). Once you’ve found it, the Unicode number is shown (4).

BabelMap

Once you have the Unicode number, you can enter it in Word to get the character displayed — type 2156 followed immediately by Alt+x.

2/5 in Word

You can check if there is an HTML entity for the character by selecting each of the NCR options (there isn’t one for 2/5, but if you wanted 3/4, the HTML entity [NCR (dec)] would be & # 190; [without the spaces] giving you ¾.)

Another cool thing about this little utility is that you can see the full set of characters for each of your installed fonts at a glance:

1. If you’re lost somewhere in the Unicode maze, enter 0000 in the Go to Code Point field then click Go.
2. Select Fonts > Font Analysis Utility from the menu and you’ll get all your installed fonts listed on the right.
3. Click on each font to view it; you can also change the font size.

Font Analysis Utility

And if, for some reason, you need a list of all the fonts on your computer, click Copy on the Font Analysis window, then paste into a document.

Copy Font Coverage copies all the characters for the selected block (in this example, Basic Latin); when you paste it into a document it looks something like this:

List of characters in a block for a specific font

I’m sure there are a lot of other very useful things you can do with this software, but unfortunately I couldn’t plumb the depths as I got a ‘Failed to launch Help’ error message when I tried to click Help. I emailed the developer and he kindly replied with this:

There was a help file, but it now severely out of date. BabelMap is only a hobby project, and as I have a fulltime job and family, and various other commitments, I have had very little time to work on BabelMap recently, which has meant that I have not been able to update the help file.

However, I am planning to release a new version of BabelMap with a fully functioning help system within the next few months (probably late October).

(* Two-fifths *is* in the Word Symbol map — change the Font to Arial Unicode MS and the Subset to Number Forms.)

[Links last checked July 2009; thanks to Geoffrey Marnell for his article Entering Uncommon Characters -- The Power of Unicode in 'Southern Communicator' (June 2009), which mentioned BabelMap.]

Editing: Terms and citations in long documents

Do you have a long document to edit online? Perhaps an academic thesis, a scientific report, a government document — one with long lists of terms and references, as well as citations throughout the document for those references.

One of the difficulties in checking terms and citations against their respective lists in long documents is the painful process of moving around the document — you’re forever flipping from one end of the document to the other, then trying to get back to where you were up to in the editing process. Yes, there are techniques to minimize this, but they aren’t entirely satisfactory.

One method is to use Word’s ‘highlighter pen’ to mark up all the terms and citations as you’re editing, then come back and check them with another pass (or two) over the document. But this takes quite a bit of time, especially on a large document. And you’re forever grabbing the highlighter tool to add highlighting, then to remove it after you’ve checked the term/citation. (See Add/remove highlighting with the keyboard for a quicker way than the toolbar icon.)

If you use the method I describe below, you can speed up the process and do the checks as you edit the document.

NOTE: This method is most effective if you have two or more monitors or one very wide monitor.

Create your supplementary documents

1. Open the large Word document.
2. Find the list of terms and copy it.
3. Paste the list of terms into a new document (e.g. terms.doc).
4. Highlight all the terms in the terms.doc document and save the document. Do not close it — move it to the other monitor.
5. Go back to the main document, find the list of references, copy it, then paste it into another new document (e.g. refs.doc). Again, highlight the entire list of references in the refs.doc document, then move this document to the other monitor too.

You should now have three Word documents open — the main (long) document, and two much shorter documents (terms.doc and refs.doc). The two small documents should be fully highlighted.

What you’re going to do as you’re editing is remove the highlighting for any term or citation you find that matches one in the relevant list.

Check off the found terms and citations

1. Start editing the document as you normally would.
2. As you come to a term (abbreviation, acronym etc.) in the main document, check if it’s in the terms.doc list.
3. If it is, remove the highlight from that term. At this stage you ARE NOT checking the correctness of the definition — just whether the term is listed in the terms list or not. (See below for tips to deal with terms that aren’t in the list.)
   

   Remove highlight from found terms

4. Do the same for any citations you come across — check that the item is in the refs.doc and remove the highlight if it is.
   

   Remove highlight from found references

5. By the end of editing the main document, you should have few, if any, highlighted terms or references left in their respective documents.
6. If you have no highlights, you’re now ready to check the two smaller documents for their accuracy (i.e. check all definitions are correct, check all references are formatted according to house style, etc.)
7. Once you’ve completed step 6, copy and paste the two lists back into the main document, overwriting the existing lists. And you’re done!

Things that can go awry

• Term in main document is not in the terms list:  Add it to terms.doc and perhaps highlight it in another color if you think you won’t pick it up later (unlikely as you will go through the terms list verifying the definitions later anyway). You may need to add the definition (if you have it), or alert the author that the definition is missing.
• Citation in main document is not in reference list: Alert author to it; it’s their responsibility to make sure the reference is included, or to delete the citation if it’s no longer applicable.
• Term is still highlighted in terms.doc:  Do a Find (Ctrl+F) just in case you missed it. If it’s really not there, alert author to it for possible deletion from terms list.
• Reference is still highlighted in refs.doc:  Do a Find (Ctrl+F) just in case you missed it. If it’s really not there, alert author to it for possible deletion from reference list, or as a reminder that they may have forgotten to add a citation.

[Links last checked October 2009]

Presentation: Author-it Tips and Tricks

This presentation was a collaborative one with the other inaugural Author-it Certified Consultant, Char James-Tanny. We jointly delivered this presentation at the 51st STC Annual Conference in Baltimore in 2004. Be aware that Author-it software has been updated several times since 2004 so some of the techniques shown in this presentation, which applied to v4.x, may not be relevant now.

All accompanying handouts are available from the CyberText website.

[Links last checked April 2009]

Graph paper generator

Do you need graph paper for a project, or your kid’s homework? Can’t find what you want at the store? Or it’s midnight and the stores aren’t open?

Then try this free service where you select the type of graph paper you want, select the paper size, the dimensions, the color etc. and get a PDF generated of what you want, ready for you to print out and use:
http://incompetech.com/graphpaper/

Pretty cool!

[Link last checked May 2009]