The Distant Librarian

Google's RSS-embedding tool

Here's a quick screencast I created to look at Google's (new?) tool that allows ordinary folks to embed RSS feeds on a website:

Pretty nifty!

Random Tuesday Tech Tip #5 - Aardvark Firefox Extension

The other day I came across a Firefox extension called Aardvark that makes it really easy to clean up websites to print, or even to read online w/o lots of advertisements and fluff around the text.  Here's a quick demo of it in action:

Random Tuesday Tech Tip #4 - Google Reader Keyboard Shortcuts

I've been using Google Reader for quite some time now - really like it.  I used to use a desktop aggregator because it was a lot more flexible and customizable, but being tied to a single machine eventually did that one it for me.  I've found Google Reader to be very reliable, and it gets nice new features from time to time.  A couple of weeks ago they added a nifty way to view their keyboard shortcuts, something I haven't been taking advantage of.  While using Google Reader, simply hit the "?" key, and you'll get a nice overlay showing all the keyboard shortcuts (perhaps ironically, users of aggregators may have to click through to see the following brief screencast): (oh, you may want to bump down your volume a bit before hitting play, I seem to have inadvertently pumped up the volume)

Random Tuesday Tech Tip #3: Keep it Clean

If you use any kind of electric toothbrush - make sure you turn it off before you take it out of your mouth, or you're going to spray the toothpaste all over the mirror, which is a  pain to clean, and if you're already wearing your work clothes, you may get them messy too.  Don't say I didn't warn you.

Random Tuesday Tech Tip #2 - No more bleeps while adjusting audio

Here's one for the Mac users, and I'm surprised more people don't seem to know about it considering the "bloops" I hear as people adjust their volume during podcasts.  As I don't use a desktop, I can only vouch for this on the Apple laptops, where the volume is adjusted using function keys.  Quite a useful feature is that in addition to a visual representation of how loud your volume is during the adjustment, you get a "bloop" sound at the appropriate volume.  But if you'd rather adjust the volume using only the visual cue and don't want to hear the "bloop", just hold the shift key as you're adjusting with the function keys.  Here's what it sounds and looks like first as a default, and then as I press the shift key: 

(Aggregator users may  need to click through to see video)

Random Tuesday Tech Tip #1 - Auto-generate text in MS Word

The other day I learned a neat Word trick that has nothing to do with libraries, but since part of the reason I keep this blog is to annotate things that are interesting to ME I thought I'd throw it up here in hopes that it's also of interest to you.  I've got a few other ones so thought I'd stretch it out as some sort of semi-regular series. 

Say for some reason you need to generate a large amount of random (or at least random-looking) text.  Maybe you need to fill up a website or Word document to see how the formatting looks over several paragraphs or pages.  Here's how to do it in word.  Simply type in the following formula and hit enter:

=rand(x,y) where x=the number of paragraphs you want, and y=the number of sentences. You can read more about it at the MS Knowledgebase.

Click through to see it in action if viewing in an aggregator:

Work in Word 2004 on the Mac too :-)


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