geekery – optometric tomfoolery

Making a quick, single PDF file

Posted on November 5, 2018 by phil

Posted in academia, geekery, optometry

I now more-or-less exclusively reach for my iPad for both reviewing documents (papers, agendas, minutes etc.) and when I need to have information available at my fingertips for meetings and the like. Increasingly, I seem to receive paperwork for meetings as a single, often long, PDF which is great. This file format is, of course, is the digital lingua franca for bringing together documents which were originally generated from a range of programs.

Sometimes, though, I have the very first world problem of needing to review some work which is presented as a number of files of one or more formats. Today, for example, I was about to board a plane (a prime paper reviewing opportunity) and recalled that I had recently been asked to review a paper for Contact Lens and Anterior Eye. I pressed the various on-screen buttons to accept this invitation and was quickly able to download the five files – four Word documents and one image. To generate a single PDF for airborne review would mean converting the Word files individually in some way and then either adding the image or converting them separately. A bit tedious; and also slow when the queue was already beginning to form at Gate 206.

Some time ago, I found the easyPDF web site which allows you to drag in a bunch of files and it quickly generates a single PDF file for download. As a default, it adds the the files in alphabetical sequence so some changing of file names might be required but apart from that, it works perfectly. There is an iOS (and presumably an Android) app to act as the front end for this, also. The site allows conversion of up to five files as part of its free tier. It does other conversion magic as well although I’ve not used those other features.

I have previously struggled with methods to automate this process on my Mac (PDF creation means shoving information through a printer driver rather than a simple conversion process) so this is a much better solution which can easily be done when on the move. The system is cloud-based so may not be suitable for sensitive of confidential documents but for other bits of work, it’s a great option.

Working with old PowerPoint files

Posted on October 7, 2018 by phil

Posted in academia, geekery, lectures, optometry

Bit of a funny one, this. Over the years, I’ve bemoaned the fact that I’ve not been able to open PowerPoint files from the mid 1990s and earlier. This has never really been critical; key slides continued to migrate into newer versions of presentations (now regrettably commonly termed slide decks in US corporate vernacular) and survive to this day like a well maintained classic car.

However, I am occasionally curious about files from that era but they do not open with current (or the previous two versions) of PowerPoint on my Mac. (As an aside, PowerPoint on the Mac pre-dates its launch for Windows). I think they are older than the ‘1997-2003’ file format which will still open today.

Every year or two, I explore this again but fail – until yesterday.

I have been preparing for a talk, given today in Utrecht at the Jaarbeurs conference complex, returning to a venue I came to a few times in the mid 1990s when Dutch optometry was developing quickly and there were lots of CET meetings and speaking invitations for those of us working in the contact lens area.

I found a presentation from September 1, 1997 which I gave at the same venue and thought it would be fun to look at the talk and see what it looked like (and include the opening slide in today’s talk under the guise of ‘I’ve been coming here a long time’ sortathing).

After yet more Google searching on the topic, I fluked on some information which – remarkably – worked. It turns out it’s easy and requires the use of the Zamzar conversion site. Here is the recipe:

Duplicate the file (for safety) and edit the suffix to .pps
Go to zamzar.com and upload file.
Choose PPT (1997-2003) as the desired file format.
Wait for e-mail from zamzar.com
Download new file

Warning: this reveals the garish state of slide design in the 1990s when we were excited by colours on slides; or maybe that was just me. I’m also not sure that the kerning is correct but I might not have the correct fonts any longer.

Proviso: this worked on a couple of files. I didn’t check not changing the suffix so variants on this approach might work.

Note 1: I have not used PowerPoint routinely for many years as I am a convert to Apple Keynote.

Note 2: AV guys at conference centres remain sniffy about Keynote files.

Note 3: Keynote export to PowerPoint is now excellent and almost perfect with the exception that start/end times of movie clips are not respected so you can always fall back on this as I had to today (see Note 2).

Note 4: Always have a PDF back up on a USB memory stick of a conference talk just in case.

Note 5: I still give a variant of Dk – don’t know? today.

When you get asked for comments on a document….

Posted on January 10, 2016 by phil

Posted in academia, geekery

I presume that everyone in academia, the corporate world and in many other walks of life regularly receives e-mails like this; a request to comment on an attached file which is commonly a Microsoft Word document but could be a PDF, a Pages document or indeed anything else.

As I receive this sort of request daily, I became frustrated with the processing needed on such a file. It needs moving from the e-mail into somewhere sensible like the Desktop, probably having some sort of personalisation (e.g. adding initials and perhaps a date to the file name), before opening and editing. (Admittedly, this is very much a First World Problem).

On a Mac, it’s easy to prepare a small application to process this request for you. If you open Automator on your Mac from the Applications folder and opt to create an Application when asked, you can simply pull in three steps into the workflow like this:

In the middle step, you can add your initials (as I have done) or the date, or various other terms, to the file name.

This workflow can be saved as an Application with a name of our choice onto your hard drive and then I suggest you place it as a permanent icon in your Dock – it needs to be somewhere which is easily accessible. Then, when you get a please review e-mail, just drag the attachment icon onto this new application. Almost immediately, a copy with your initials (date, whatever) will be saved onto the Desktop and then opened in the appropriate program for you to edit. Thereafter, your edits and comments will be saved to this new file on the Desktop, ready to go back to your colleague.

If this sounds a bit geeky, I’ve recorded a short video here to outline how this is done step-by-step in Automator.

Why we need 2FA in our lives

Posted on December 28, 2015 by phil

Posted in academia, geekery 4 Comments

Something that may not be immediately apparent about accessing the various cloud-type services which have proliferated in recent years is that they can be equally accessed from any Internet-capable computer, phone or tablet in the world (and not just yours). As there are now more mobile phones than people on the planet, this means that (allowing a little poetic licence), everyone has potentially ready access into your Dropbox, Google, Evernote, Facebook, Twitter et al. accounts. This includes all manner of ne’er-do-wells.

In the olden days (i.e. pre-2010), I recall that many services required you to select a username as well as a password. This was an inherently more secure approach than the current norm which is to use an e-mail address in lieu of a username because now, the bad guys only need to work out one mystery term rather than two.

The bad news here is that by their very nature, e-mail addresses are somewhat publicly available and easy to find. We put them on websites, on articles, in our Facebook accounts. Pick a university department anywhere in the world and you could probably find out the e-mail address of the Head of Department within a few minutes. That HoD probably has a Dropbox account with his/her e-mail address as its ‘username’. You could go to the standard Dropbox web site, input that e-mail address and you are a password away from full access into potentially juicy morsels.

(As an aside here, Dropbox seems especially vulnerable to me because there is something of a need to use your best known e-mail address as your username because others want to share folders with you and they will automatically assume you use your ‘official’ e-mail account.)

The point here is that bad stuff can be done to your accounts from any computer or phone in the world.

Early in 2015, all this was beginning to trouble me and I decided to enable Two Factor Authentication (‘2FA’) for all my web accounts offering this service. Essentially, this reduces the number of devices which can get into my accounts from perhaps 10 billion to a handful. After switching this on, the first time I visited Dropbox, Evernote and all the rest, the ‘system’ sent me a numeric code to my phone via SMS which needed to be entered into the site before access was allowed. The sites then ‘remember’ the device (presumably via its MAC address or somesuch) and future access is allowed unhindered.

The text message in this example is the second factor in 2FA, the first being the usual username/password combo. Other approaches can and are used. Google will call you up on the phone. Other systems use USB dongles and the like. For this WordPress site, I use a fancy app on my iPhone. But the SMS message is the most commonly used approach.

Like most people, 99% of the time I am accessing my sites via one of a couple of devices; in my case, all my computing is done on a MacBook Air and I am a heavy iPhone user too. Because 2FA is usually a once-only process, I don’t need any of the SMS set-up business on a day-to-day basis.

Of course, setting this up in the comfort of your own office is easy. The challenge is always the later situation when you find yourself in unfamiliar surroundings and you need access to your stuff, now (e.g. you’re at a conference and you need that presentation in your Dropbox folder and you are at at someone else’s laptop). Here’s a recent example of how this worked for me.

Earlier this month, I attended an excellent course on MatLab hosted by our IT Research group. I took along my laptop and phone but the course required use of one of the PCs in the lab where it was hosted. I wanted to record relevant notes, links, files and images in my Evernote account and the easiest method was to use Evernote’s web-based access on the lab computer. After entering my username and password into the site, I was immediately sent to a further page where I needed to enter the numeric code which was sent to my phone. This arrived in seconds and I was up and running. Of course, this process adds a little extra inconvenience on the rare occasion when I am using a device for the first time, but I am greatly reassured that my own little working world is more secure that it might be.

When might this fall down? I think the only realistic situation is if you find yourself without signal to your mobile phone, and if you are in such a place, you are probably not in work mode in any case. Most of the services also provide a final level of access by issuing recovery codes which you can save offline (e.g. somewhere safe on your phone) so you have a get-out even then. In practice, I find that the numeric codes arrive almost immediately and it works internationally.

All-in-all, it’s a big win. Give it a go.

Site-specific instructions:

Geek win

Posted on January 11, 2015 by phil

Posted in geekery

For ages, I’ve had an account with the ‘If this, then that’ web service. Usually written as IFTTT and apparently pronounced to rhyme with ‘gift’, it’s a site which offers an insight into the Internet of Things world which is just around the corner. IFTTT allows you to access your accounts across more than 100 web services and and prepare short commands or recipes which sit and wait for something to happen in your web service X and when this is detected, something will change in web service Y.

All rather theoretical.

Well, suppose you have a Twitter and Facebook account. After allowing IFTTT access into those accounts, you could set up a recipe such that when you change your profile photograph in Twitter, it changes the equivalent image on Facebook. Or, you can patch into your Google Drive account and set up a recipe such that you maintain a list of your tweets in a Google Drive spreadsheet. I have a recipe which means that if I save a tweet from my Twitter feed to the read-later service Pocket, it automatically creates a new note for me in my Evernote account, so I can review this information as part of my daily Evernote workflow. This works well for me. With over 100 channels and dozens of recipes per channel, the potential for this sort of service is approaching the limitless.

However, this is all rather geeky, so I am pleased to report a real-world example which really helped me recently. Just before Christmas, we awoke to find that no water was coming into the house and a quick search on Twitter and our village page on Facebook found that others were reporting the same. Quite soon, there was a page on the site of our water supplier, United Utilities, which acknowledged the problem and that it was under investigation. It became apparent that this was quite a major fault and it was not going to be resolved quickly.

The duration of the fault has ramifications for family life that day. If it was not fixed by the evening, this might mean going elsewhere for a shower, perhaps eating out etc., and it was going to be important to keep track of progress. The normal method would be to keep an eye on the United Utilities site, but as it was clear that there was quite a bit of Twitter activity referring to the problem by our postcode area (BL6), I could see a use for IFTTT.

I fired up the site and set myself up with the SMS channel. Once a test SMS had been sent to my phone for verification, I prepared a recipe which said that whenever a tweet appeared on Twitter with the terms ‘BL6’ and ‘water’, then the tweet should be sent via SMS to my phone. Of course, I could have kept an eye on Twitter through the day, but I preferred this new active rather than passive approach. It worked incredibly well. I received about 10 messages through the day (both United Utilities reporting on progress and residents reporting their water supply still not working or having been reinstated) and it was clear that all would be sorted by the evening and the kids could have Dad’s spag bol for the millionth time and we could all go to bed clean. It was an excellent solution to a mundane problem and something which sets the scene for more exotic systems in the future which will no doubt see the kettle automatically switched on when we are detected getting off the commuter train home, or the car engine is started when the morning shower is finished.

Small victory with Twitter

Posted on January 11, 2015 by phil

Posted in geekery

I had an interesting experience through Twitter this week where my train-related complaint apparently reached the Secretary of State for Transport thanks to my MP. I wrote this up showing all the tweets, so it’s over at my account on Storify.

Sorting out e-mail

Posted on September 17, 2013 by phil

Posted in academia, geekery

Like millions of people, I receive millions of e-mails. Actually, this is getting to be almost literally true. My e-mail folders contain more than 275,000 messages. Like everyone, keeping on top of this is a priority in my daily workflow.

In essence, I try to maintain a Inbox Zero approach to managing this daily beating around the head. I don’t quite make it usually, but I generally have fewer than 15 messages in my Inbox by the time I go to bed.

An important change I made in my daily routine some years ago was to abandon the rigmarole of pulling each e-mail message into an appropriate folder after dealing with it, on the basis that I could go back and find it later on. At some stage, the search power of my mail client (Apple Mail) became so good, that it was possible to very quickly and accurately find that message from six months ago from that person. That was all well-and-good, but the other big piece of the jigsaw was to reduce the mouse usage required to put each dealt-with message into my shiny new, all encompassing, Archive folder.

I think minimisation of mouse usage is key to an efficient daily workflow for keyboard warriors such as myself which is why I think launcher applications (such as the brilliant Launchbar) are critical. So, I needed to be able to get my selected e-mail message(s) into my Archive folder using the keyboard only. This is simply done with an add-on program for Apple Mail, Mail Act-On.

This extends the versatility of Mail’s rules system and means that selected messages can be routed into an Archive folder (or indeed, many other actions) can be achieved with a selected keystroke; in my case this is control-A. I must use this more than a hundred times each day to the point where it is now an involuntary action for carefully storing old e-mails. It’s great.

iPads and vivas

Posted on March 23, 2013 by phil

Posted in academia, geekery, optometry

Leaving aside that the term viva is a bit of a funny one (the important bit of viva voce is missed out; I’m sure it should be pronounced v-eee-va and not v-eye-va; there was a now-considered-hilarious 1970s car of the same name) this oral examination is a key part of the postgraduate research assessment process. In the UK at least, it remains essentially the only way in which the work of a PGR student is examined.

To head off on a brief tangent, this is not the case in Australia or the United States. In the former, at least in my direct experience, three external examiners receive copies of the final thesis and provide detailed written comments which go to a panel which gathers all the opinions and comes to a final verdict.

Students in the US defend their work but this part of the process can be something of a formality and it’s perhaps not quite the same as the traditional see-the-whites-of-their-eyes all-or-nothing high adrenaline British method.

Anyway, the approach I have used myself over the years as an examiner is to read through the weighty tome and make various comments in a separate word processing file and perhaps add various Post-It notes into the thesis to keep track of the key pages. This method comes with a large administrative overhead. For example, you are obliged to type something like ‘Change the term ‘staining of the corneal epithelium’ to ‘corneal epithelial staining’…’ in your list of recommend amendments. Repeat. Many times. It’s burdensome and it does my head in, as the kids say.

Last week I had the opportunity to run the whole process on my iPad. Theses are now routinely provided to examiners as PDF files, and so it was a simple process of using a PDF annotation app (I’m currently using iAnnotate but there are lots available) to work through the report, making edits, adding comments and so on. It was a breeze to work through these during the viva because the program has a button which allows you to advance sequentially through the edits. Extra thoughts and ideas were noted as we discussed the work and it all ended up added into the PDF.

At the conclusion of the process, the student needs to see the examiner comments and again, it was trivial to email a copy of the comments and edits. In fact, the automated email included the annotated PDF and a separate list of each change. This is much better for the examiners, but also an improved situation for the student who receives a more informative list of changes more rapidly.

Like getting through to Noel Edmonds

Posted on March 10, 2013 by phil

Posted in geekery

I’m not a huge podcast listener. I find that they can be rather hit and miss; ones which I initially enjoy can quickly become irritating for reasons I can’t quite work out. ‘In our time’ went that way, so I’m looking at you, Melvyn Bragg. What should be a good listen ended up irking me. Something about its overly cheery, bumbling Londonness wound me up in the end.

My podcast subscriptions are down to four and there are only two to which I listen immediately after release: The Tuesday Club in which Alan Davies and his mates go on about Arsenal for an hour each week or so, and Mac Power Users where two American lawyers explain their use of their Macs and iOS devices in excruciating and fascinating detail. As a 20+ year full time Mac user, I thought I knew quite a bit of stuff, but I’ve learned a lot from these two presenters.

So, I was excited like a kid getting through to Noel Edmonds on Swap Shop when I received e-mails from both of them this week. Given their password management methods (leaving everything do a password management program called 1Password) it occurred to me that you can’t actually leave everything to this one program. You need to remember the password for 1Password for example. So, in the feedback bit of their website I enquired about this and they each took the trouble to write to me (or ‘write me’ as they routinely say it on the podcast).

They seem to think that you need to actually remember the password for 1Password, for Dropbox (if you use it to sync your passwords) and your Apple ID. I reckon you need to remember your e-mail password too.

Remember: 01 811 8055.

Dropbox

Posted on March 9, 2013 by phil

Posted in geekery

The honour of the first post goes to Dropbox. This first widely-used cloud service is now a must-install on all newly configured computers, tablets and phones (surely).

It evidently has a powerful API given the number of services which piggyback on its fast syncing capabilities. 1Password comes to mind, amongst others.

So, raise a geeky glass to Dropbox. King of the Cloud.