Category: All Things Geek

Geeks are looking to the future by their very nature

New To Zoom? Check Out This Great Intro Video

Carl Setzer

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!

Carl Setzer

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

Carl Setzer

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

Carl Setzer
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!

New Music By A Friend Scalar Theorem

Carl Setzer

I’ve known Scalar Theorem for several years and do find his bass rich perfect for focus. Techno styled music (electronic, dub step, and the like) speaks to me. Plus, as he’s a friend, I delight to watch him succeed. He’s a regular at Burning Man!

Anyway, please go check out his new album, give it a like, and think about other ways to support his music. (If you’d rather listen on Bandcamp, here’s the link to him there).

The Matrix 4? Some Thoughts From A Geek

Carl Setzer

Ok, so in geek circles, this is one of the biggest bits of news in ages. Perhaps only dwarfed by Spiderman getting removed from the MCU. Perhaps I’ll touch on that later.

Anyway, there are several things I want to unpack. However, if you’re not up-to-date on this turn, give Looper’s look at this 4 minutes of your time.

So, that being said, and with a dearth of plot details, here’s what I have to say.

First, as Neo and Trinity both die in Matrix: Revolutions and there is a solid messianic theme to the series, I wonder if they we’ll take on the Christian concept of resurrection. I’m not too sure how else to handle this. I have seen (and it’s mentioned in Looper’s video) that there’s some talk of a younger actor playing Morpheus. I don’t see how they’d play that out with the contemporarily aged Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss. I guess we could play out some time-travel thing, but that could be too much of a stretch.

Personally, I’d like to see some deeper exploration of the Merovingian and Persephone, the Key Maker, and the residents of Zion. But especially the Merovingian and Persephone. There’s so much laden within there. Persephone, kidnapped daughter of Demeter, harbinger of spring. Merovingian, the name of a ruling family of 5th to 7th century Franks. And, for characters like this, the name meaning tells us a great deal.

So, what do you hope/wish this movie will cover? Or do you wish the whole thing would be done? Let me know!

Google’s Tea Uglow Featured On This Week’s Design Matters

Carl Setzer

I’m sad to say that I’ve never heard of Tea Uglow until this evening when I was able to listen to the most recent Design Matters podcast (if you haven’t subscribed, you need to change that). Tea is the Creative Director of Google’s Creative Lab in Sydney, which sounds like an invigorating role.

Tea comes to tech with a delightfully unique mindset. Not from the computer science world, but art and design. A mindset that’s critically important right now, at this point in tech history. I deeply believe that design thinking is the future of tech. And, really, the now of tech. She’s done some other videoed talks, which I’ll explore later. It’s awfully late today.

This talk covers a lot of ground, from sexuality and gender identity to diversity and inclusion in tech. Such broad wandering inspires and engages me.

Give it a listen. It’s well worth your time.