The Distant Librarian

Three Second Distraction = Fail!

Another nail in my coffin of realizing how easy it is to lose one's focus, Michigan State University is reporting that even a 3-second distraction is likely to do you in.

Your full citation:

Momentary Interruptions Can Derail the Train of Thought.

Altmann, Erik M.; Trafton, J. Gregory; Hambrick, David Z.

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Jan 7 , 2013, No Pagination Specified. doi: 10.1037/a0030986

 

 

A Day Made of Glass

Apparently this series of videos has been around for quite some time (the first released on YouTube in Feb 2011), but I hadn't seen them before a colleague forwarded a link yesterday. Some really interesting glimpses into the future of displays as envisioned by Corning Glass. The second and third videos simply expand upon the first, with the third giving some hints as to what's actually possible now, and what some of the speed bumps are for the technologies that aren't yet ready for prime time.

 

 

 

Lifehacker's best screencasting and screen capture apps

Over the past several weeks, Lifehacker has listed what they believe to be the best screencasting and screen capture tools for both Windows and Mac. In each post they cover the tool's Features, Where it excels, Where it falls short, and The Competition. Here they are:

• Best Screen capture tool for Windows (I had never heard of the winner, PicPick)
• Best Screen capture tool for Mac OSX (I love Skitch, but wish it had just a few more presets and callouts) For some strange reason the Skitch website says the iOS version is "coming soon", but you can (and should) grab it for the iPad already.
• Best Screencast tool for Windows (No surprise there - remember your educational pricing!)
• Best Screencast tool for Mac OSX (also a solid win, though I was surprised Camtasia:Mac didn't even show up under the alternatives...)

Introducing the Top Ten Most Influential Bloggers | E-Learning Council

via www.elearningcouncil.com

I actually don't follow any of these folks, but if you're looking to pick up some new feeds, this might be a good place to start! (none of them appear to be librarians)

Oh, and I'm trying to close browser tabs by the end of the year, so a few more posts to follow!

ScreenConnect - another remote-assistance tool

A year ago I blogged about an article I had read that looked at different tools that could be used to either create screencasts, or allow screen sharing, in support of virtual reference transactions.

Six months ago a representative from ScreenConnect sent me an email suggesting that tool would be a good addition to the list from that post. I finally got around to taking a look (can you say "swamped"), and have to agree. A full cross-platform remote-control product, ScreenConnect is a self-hosted solution, which may be a turn off for some libraries, as so many services appear to be cloud-hosted, but I guess that's how they keep the price down. 

Lots of good documentation on the site, including this page describing how ScreenConnect fits in amongst its competitors. I also like the "Charlie Brown Teacher" component of their screencast. I must admit I didn't actually use the product, but you can download a fully-functioning 30-day free trial if it looks like something you want to explore. Oh, and there's an app for that too.

Making Safari more like Firefox with Glims (OSX)

Ahhhhh, that's so much better. I'm not sure exactly when it happened, but Firefox, my old standby, has slowly become, well, slow. It's no longer my default browser, but it's always had a couple of features I've missed. The biggest one was Firefox's ability to search through the text of a page w/o having to invoke the ctrl-F command (if you're not currently using this goodness, it's a setting under the Advanced Tab, General, - "Search for text when I start typing")

But Safari on the Mac wouldn't help me with this time-saving feature. That is, until I found Glims! It does way more than I need it to, but here's a list of the current features. I've highlighted the ones I've found particularly useful:

• Adds thumbnails to Google.com search results
• Adds thumbnails to Yahoo.com search results
• Adds search engines to the default Google search tab
• Adds full-screen browsing capability
• Adds Favicons to tab labels
• Adds keyword search from address bar
• Undo "Close Tab" (cmd-z)
• Re-opens last session when Safari starts
• Auto-Closes download window
• Adds new tab position option (right/left/leftmost/rightmost)
• Adds tab closing using middle mouse button
• Focus last selected tab
• Always open links in a new tab
• Type-ahead support (auto cmd-f)
• Sets the focus on the search field when opening a new window
• Adds Amazon's information banner on Google.com search results
• Adds Amazon's information banner on Yahoo.com search results
• Adds a "Max Window Size" menu item to resize the Safari window
• Forms autocomplete always on
• Autocomplete search phrase
• Adds bookmark separator
• Adds bookmark actions
• Dated download folders

I've only been using it for a week, so it's likely I just haven't run across some of the other features in my daily use yet. 

It did take me a few minutes of searching to find the preferences pane for this program though, so here's your tip - it's not an add-on, so you'll find it in the general preferences pane for Safari:

Hope someone else out there finds it as useful as I have been!

 

How to add stamps to Snagit for Mac

Techsmith, makers of Camtasia Studio and SnagIt, recently started using GetSatisfaction to interact with their customers. I thought I'd give it a try to see if I got a response to a question I had posed on Twitter (and gotten no response)- is it possible to add stamps to SnagIt for the Mac?

Officially, the answer is no. But Chris, a Techsmith employee, put together a quick screencast to show a perfectly acceptable workaround (along with an explanation of why it doesn't just work the same as the Windows version):

Works like a charm!

Google knows what time it is where you are - Random Tech Tip Tuesday

This is likely very old news, but it's new to me so I thought I'd share.  I just noticed that within Gmail, Google will tell you what time it currently is where the sender of an email is:

A little thing, but pretty cool and potentially very useful!

OK, I did my homework - Google turned this on in Gmail Labs in April, 2009. Always on the ball I am for you! ;-)

Readability brings one of Safari's best features to Firefox

I've been using the Readability Firefox extension since shortly after the feature was baked in to Safari 5 a couple of months ago.  Just love it, and it's pretty much taken away my need for previously-mentioned tool Aardvark.  Check it out:
 

David Lee King on Microphones

David's got a couple of posts that are relevant for screencasters: 5 Mic Tips for Presenters and Three Nice Microphones.  I use the Samson myself.

Oooh, shiny! Google background images

If you use the Google.com (not a country-specific) page to search, you can now customize a background image if you're logged in.  As you hover over the page you'll see a new link in the lower left, which will allow you pick from some standard pix, or upload one of your own:

 

I think I'm going to use one of D'Arcy's pictures because they're so good, and because it will piss him off ;-) (love ya buddy!)

 

BarTab - my new #1 Firefox extension

Chrome still doesn't have a couple of what I consider are my vital extensions, so I still use Firefox whenever I can.  Problem is, with all the extensions I use on it, plus the fact that I usually have something like 20-30 tabs open across several windows, Firefox has kind of become a bloated beast, consuming an awful lot of system resources :-(  No more!!!!  Thanks to an episode of Tekzilla I discovered BarTab, which keeps all the background tabs unloaded, only actually connecting when you click the tab to view.  Where it comes in even handier is when FF is starting up, say after a crash or update, when BarTab will do the same thing with all the tabs I had open.  Instead of fully loading them all, really slowing the startup process, it only fully loads the main tab, leaving the rest grayed out until you actually need to revisit one of those tabs.  I've noticed a significant increase in performance since installing it a couple of days ago - try it out!

Dropbox - Random Tech Tip Thursday

I searched my archives and was surprised to learn I hadn't ever recommended Dropbox before.  I was reminded when I received an email from them letting me know they had a new video from CommonCraft (the xxx in Plain English folks) explaining how it all works.  In a nutshell, Dropbox is a cross-platform folder synchronization service.  After installing, you'll have a new folder on your Mac, Linux, and/or Windows machine (and iPhone) which syncs through the cloud, so if you pop a file into that folder on your PC, you can access it from your Mac or the web.  I use it daily - almost never use my USB key anymore.

The free service gives you 2GB of space, and you can upgrade to 50 or 100GB if you really need to.  I've been just fine with the 2GB.  If you decide to sign up, you can use my referral link and I'll get an extra 250MB, but you can sign up directly if you don't like that sort of thing :-)  Do sign up though, it's a great service!

Using Google Analytics to track screencast usage

Paul Betty of Regis University offered the following link on the OFFCAMP listserve earlier today.  Using Google Analytics to track screencast usage.  In his screencast he covers how to embed a javascript call in Adobe Captivate, Qarbon ViewletBuilder, and Camtasia Studio, which will then allow Google Analytics to track pretty much whatever you might want within a Flash-based screencast.

This is a really excellent piece of information - one of the shortcomings I've always had with screencasts has been the difficulty of tracking usage.  If you can copy and paste, you can implement this.

You can also read the paper Paul delivered earlier this year in the most recent issue 48(3/4) of the Journal of Library Administration: Creation, Management, and Assessment of Library Screencasts: The Regis Libraries Animated Tutorials Project Page Range: 295 - 315 DOI: 10.1080/01930820802289342

Thanks Paul!

JSTOR - PDF Incompatibility with Mac Preview

JSTOR reports "We are glad to report that we have located and fixed a problem that caused an incompatibility between JSTOR PDF files and older versions of Mac Preview. This problem caused only part of the article to be viewable in Preview. The fix released today means that JSTOR PDF files should now be viewable in their entirety in Preview 3.0.9 (the current version integrated with Mac OS 10.4) as well as newer versions integrated with Mac OS 10.5. Users of Preview 3.0.9 should note, however, that the page images of articles are usually highly compressed to save file size, and may be slow to open on this version of Preview. It is believed that this is a limitation of Preview that Apple corrected in the version of Preview shipped with Mac OS 10.5."

I've had one patron report this problem, and thought I'd post the official word from JSTOR for wider discoverability:

We have recently become aware that certain versions of Mac Preview are incompatible with the newest generation of JSTOR PDFs. For some users, this means that only the cover page is displaying. Other users have reported that the downloaded article appears to be missing the first portion of the article—it begins somewhere after the first 10 pages of the article. The article is in fact intact and complete, but some pages are not displayed properly. We are working to fix this and plan to continue to support the use of Preview with JSTOR PDFs. We apologize for the problems that this is causing for Mac users.

For now, the quickest workaround is to download the latest free copy of Adobe Reader, available on the Adobe web site:

http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2_allversions.html

Once Adobe Reader is downloaded, please check to make sure that the default PDF viewer is set to Adobe Reader rather than the original PDF viewer installed on your Mac.

The default viewer for PDF documents in Mac OS X is Preview. To change the file association for PDF files:

* Select any PDF file and choose File > Get Info.
* Choose the application that you want to open PDF files from the Open With menu.
* Click Change All, and then click Continue.

You will also want to make sure that the popup blocker is turned off for the JSTOR site. The new PDF files are set to open in a new window and popup blockers may affect this.

jstor, pdf, preview, acrobat