Surveillance and Culture

In my Human Relations class we’re discussing corporate surveillance. In one of my responses I brought up my concern about how companies, tracking their employees, are then responsible for securing that data. In response, one of my classmates shared this video with me that’s quite relevant. As he described it, it’s a 20-minute Socratic exploration into data security and social surveillance. Some very interesting discourse, for me at least. Powerful questions to ask as technology’s ability to track our every move grows daily.

Free and Useful Tech Tools for Students

This week I started my coursework for my new career: full-stack web developer (for more about that decision, head here). In the few days since courses launched (online, as we’re still practicing social distancing), I discovered/reinforced the importance of several tech tools.

1.Grammarly

I started experimenting with this about a week ago. I’d seen ads for the free app, and, well, haven’t been too interested. I think I’m a solid writer. But I finally wore down and decided to try it. I’m actually quite pleased. And, as the syllabi that I’ve read the past few days state pointedly, grammar, spelling and syntax in the online posts are a part of our grades. So, that much more valuable. Though less delightful, but important, I’ve seen I’m not so perfect a writer. Having these, shall we say “nudges” helps make me that much better. So, I recommend it.

2. Evernote

This tool is one I’ve been using for at least 10 years. It’s my journal, and main note-taking tool. Articles I’ve read, want to read, brainstorming sessions, projects I’m working on, travel info, checklists…all of this an more are dumped into this tool. The searchability is great! And the ability to customize your organization system is excellent, too. Whether you prefer to have custom “notebooks” or you prefer to “tag” notes, you’re covered by Evernote. I also appreciate that there’s geocoded information in the notes, and also a number of third-party tools to explore.

I’ll post other ones as I discover them. Do you know of any I should explore? Leave a comment and let me know.

4/16: Editted as WordPress converted my manually typed numbers into a <ol> list.

Why I’m starting a new career into Web Development

Just over a month ago, I learned I was being let go from my current role. I’ve wandered this path before, so I, initially, wasn’t terribly concerned. However, the more I thought about it, the more concerned I became. Mainly, I’d been laid off twice in less than a year. Thinking further, since 2009, I’d been laid off 4 times. I’m a bit tired of that. Yeah, even being a tech-savvy executive assistant/project coordinator, that work is too easy to outsource. Plus, with digital assistant growth, the lessening of friction for scheduling, the ease at which most folks can book their own travel, and you see the recipe for a dying career. I’m ready to be, shall we say, more essential.

Pretty much all of my life I’ve had a fascination with technology. As a young boy, my love of robots and radios (I had a particular fascination with shortwave radios), evolved into space and aviation, then into computers. Early PC games and BBSs then morphed into a vocational certificate in Information Processing (mainly databases and spreadsheets). Looking back, my biggest contribution to most of my past roles has been digitally based. Whether it’s my ability to fix a copier, 90% of PC issues, set up and manage a network, use things like Photoshop and AutoCAD, or build a website, those were the things that added the most value to the world around me.

I believe that the web holds our future. We will interact with most systems and data with web tools. SaaS models are already driving there…in the fast lane. Web development is a fast-growing path (projected 27% growth over the next 10 years), with decent salaries to boot.

So, it looks like fun, and there’s a need, which seems like a great combination. Thus, off I go.

Exploring Canva Premium

I’ve fiddled with Canva for the past few months, mostly for editing images on my Samsung S9, but have mostly been an adherent to Photoshop for anything serious. I have some free time (good ol’ Covid19), so decided to experiment with the premium version. I have a 30 day free trial, and it looks easy enough to cancel it if I don’t want to keep it.

I like it a lot for mobile editing. I think it creates fine images, especially for posting to Instagram or Facebook. Most of what I’ve done is put some of my haiku on some photos I’ve taken. I also have created some images for a real estate agent friend’s Instagram and Facebook pages. I’ll see what I like and don’t, then go from there. Right now, I do like the tool, the way the UX works, and the final products. But we’ll see as I try to be more deliberate with it and, perhaps, have a production sort of mindset.

If you’re interested in trying Canva out yourself, check it out here. Full disclosure: this is a rewards link. It gives me some Canva credits if you download and use the app. This page explains it more.

 

New To Zoom? Check Out This Great Intro Video

With coronavirus forcing us to transform education and interpersonal communication, the folks at Zoom now find their tool becoming the defacto standard, education and beyond. Plenty of organizations (churches, businesses, non-profits) are utilizing Zoom (why Zoom and not Google Hangouts? Skype? I’m not entirely sure at this point, but think it was because the reached out first…I should explore this at some point).

I’ve been a fan of Steve Dotto for years, and highly recommend his videos for guidance about things tech. Steve created this video (below) as a tutorial for many of the basic features. So, if you haven’t used Zoom, or haven’t used it extensively, I highly recommend Steve’s video. My wife (a teacher), who’s used Zoom quite a bit the past few weeks picked up some great tips. It’s highly worth your time.

 

 

Need To Reduce A Video’s Size? VLC’s Got You!

I’ve used VLCfor years, since it’s a powerful video player (has most every codec out there…can play pretty much anything), but wasn’t aware I could use it to change formats or compress files. As I had some huge videos to upload to a WordPress site (which limits me to 500 MB…even after editing the php.ini file), I explored ways to shrink the files. Of course, I came up with a bunch of pay options. But, buried below the fold (fortunately on page 1 of SERP) was this video. And, boom, problem solved! I loved VLC before, and an am even bigger fan now.

Google Tip: Deleting Old Google Sign-In Accounts

As many of you know, I just left a job. Part of my process for that is clearing out any data I’ve captured. One thing I always need to do is clear out any of the old Google accounts I’ve used. Like what you see in this view: 

 

The first step to getting rid of the other screens is to sign out of everything:

Next, go to the login screen, which will now look like this:

Click on “Remove an account”, and you’ll be able to choose the account(s) to remove from the screen. And, boom, it’ll be nice and clean for the next log-in.

Animated PNGs

Yesterday, it took me ages to figure out how to convert a .mov to an animated PNG. One of our services can’t use gifs at all, only pngs. (Here’s more insight into the format.) I remembered that there were such things, but damn, I’d never created one before. It looks like browsers don’t support then that well, so that Adobe doesn’t support their creation natively. I saw in several forums that you can download a plug-in to do that, but no one linked to one. I found EZGif.com, a free website that let me do the conversion. It’s not the most elegant process. It works fine if I open it in a browser, but not if I try to open it in Windows. My, what a pain!