Shallow Thoughts : : speaking

Like, Literally, Dude!

At our last Toastmasters meeting, I delivered a book report on a recent read that I loved: Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English by Valerie Fridland.

In case you're not familiar with Toastmasters, it's an international club for learning and practicing public speaking. One of the skills Toastmasters stresses is avoiding what we call "filler words", particularly ums and ahs. Every Toastmasters meeting has someone assigned to the role of "Ah Counter", to pay attention to each speaker's filler words and report at the end of the meeting on how everyone did. That factors in to the book review, which went like this:

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Tags: books, speaking
[ 19:16 Jun 18, 2023    More speaking | permalink to this entry | ]

R is for Recording Zoom (or other video conferencing) Talks

Giving talks has certainly changed a lot since last year. All those skills we practice in Toastmasters -- using the space, expressive gestures, projecting your voice, making eye contact with all sections of the audience? Meaningless now. In an age of quarantine and video conferencing meetings, speakers need to learn new skills.

Fortunately, there's Toastmasters for a painless, fun way to practice.

I was scheduled to give a talk on browser privacy. My local LWV has a Privacy Study Group that I'm co-chairing, and we had a meeting coming up on privacy while browsing the web. I knew I wanted to show a series of demos in multiple browsers, including additional windows like the Developer Tools window. I also wanted to record the talk so I could upload it later.

In Zoom, the process of canceling a shared window and then starting another share is slow, fumbly and error-prone. I knew this was something I needed to practice before the talk, to find a way to smooth the transitions..

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Tags: speaking, video, linux, X11
[ 16:35 Jul 20, 2020    More speaking | permalink to this entry | ]

Drawing on Slides

Years ago, I saw someone demonstrating an obscure slide presentation system, and one of the tricks it had was to let you draw on slides with the mouse. So you could underline or arrow specific points, or, more important (since underlines and arrows are easily included in slides), draw something in response to an audience question.

Neat feature, but there were other reasons I didn't want to switch to that particular slide system.

Many years later, and quite happy with my home-grown htmlpreso system for HTML-based slides, I was sitting in an astronomy panel discussion listening to someone explain black holes when it occurred to me: with HTML Canvas being a fairly mature technology, how hard could it be to add drawing to my htmlpreso setup? It would just take a javascript snippet that creates a canvas on top of the existing slide, plus some basic event handling and drawing code that surely someone else has already written.

Curled up in front of the fire last night with my laptop, it only took a couple of hours to whip up a proof of concept that seems remarkably usable. I've added it to htmlpreso.

I have to confess, I've never actually felt the need to draw on a slide during a talk. But I still love knowing that it's possible. It'll be interesting to see how often I actually use it.

To play with drawing on slides, go to my HTMLPreso self-documenting slide set (with JavaScript enabled) and, on any slide, type Shift-D. Some color swatches should appear in the upper right of the slide, and now you can scribble over the tops of slides to your heart's content.

Tags: talks, programming, web
[ 14:39 Jan 10, 2019    More speaking | permalink to this entry | ]

Moon Talk at PEEC tonight

Late notice, but Dave and I are giving a talk on the moon tonight at PEEC. It's called Moonlight Sonata, and starts at 7pm. Admission: $6/adult, $4/child (we both prefer giving free talks, but PEEC likes to charge for their Friday planetarium shows, and it all goes to support PEEC, a good cause).

We'll bring a small telescope in case anyone wants to do any actual lunar observing outside afterward, though usually planetarium audiences don't seem very interested in that.

If you're local but can't make it this time, don't worry; the moon isn't a one-time event, so I'm sure we'll give the moon show again at some point.

Tags: speaking, science, astronomy
[ 15:26 May 05, 2017    More speaking | permalink to this entry | ]

Laptop-mode interferes with remote presenter

While practicing a talk the other night on my new Asus laptop, my Logitech remote presenter, which had worked fine a few hours earlier, suddenly became flaky. When I clicked the "next slide" button, sometimes there would be a delay of up to ten seconds; sometimes it never worked at all, and I had to click it again, whereupon the slide might advance once, twice, or not at all. Obviously not useful.

Realizing that I'd been plugged into AC earlier in the day, and now was running on battery, I plugged in the AC adaptor. And sure enough, the presenter worked fine, no delays or glitches. So battery was the issue.

What's different about running on batteries? I immediately suspected laptop-mode, which sets different power profiles to help laptops save battery life when unplugged.

The presenter acts as a USB keyboard, sending key events like PAGE DOWN, and on other distros (specifically Arch Linux) I've had problems with USB keyboard devices disappearing when laptop-mode is active.

So I moved /etc/init.d/laptop-mode out of the way to disable it, and rebooted. Tried the presenter again: no improvement.

But it was laptop-mode anyway. Apparently even though /etc/init.d/laptop-mode says in its header that its purpose is to start and stop laptop-mode, apparently laptop-mode starts even without that file. The key is the configuration file /etc/laptop-mode/conf.d/usb-autosuspend.conf, where I changed the line

CONTROL_USB_AUTOSUSPEND="auto"

to

CONTROL_USB_AUTOSUSPEND=0

In theory, I should have been able to do service laptop-mode restart to test it, but I didn't trust that since I'd just established that /etc/init.d/laptop-mode didn't actually control laptop-mode. So I rebooted. And the presenter worked just fine! I was able to give my talk that afternoon without plugging in the AC cord.

Ironically, this particular talk was on giving tech talks, and one of my points was that being prepared and practicing beforehand is critical to giving a good talk. I'm sure glad I did that extra practice run with the presenter and no power cord!

Tags: linux, laptop, speaking
[ 16:13 Nov 03, 2013    More speaking | permalink to this entry | ]

Arduino Talk (with robotic shark) Wednesday night at SVLUG

I got a request from SVLUG to fill in at the last minute for a speaker with a health emergency. Fortunately, I'd been slated to give them my Arduino talk from SCALE in a few months, so I was happy to accept. I'm always glad for a chance to show off Bruce, my Arduino- and Linux-controlled 6-foot flying robotic shark.

And if anyone reading this happens to be in town for PyCon, Symantec isn't that far from Santa Clara, roughly a 10-minute drive ... and I promise there will be at least two interesting Python scripts presented.

It's free, of course, so come hear the talk! Here are the SVLUG meeting details and directions.

Tags: speaking, arduino, hardware, robots, radio control, maker
[ 19:25 Mar 06, 2012    More speaking | permalink to this entry | ]

HTML and Javascript Presentations

When I give talks that need slides, I've been using my Slide Presentations in HTML and JavaScript for many years. I uploaded it in 2007 -- then left it there, without many updates.

But meanwhile, I've been giving lots of presentations, tweaking the code, tweaking the CSS to make it display better. And every now and then I get reminded that a few other people besides me are using this stuff.

For instance, around a year ago, I gave a talk where nearly all the slides were just images. Silly to have to make a separate HTML file to go with each image. Why not just have one file, img.html, that can show different images? So I wrote some code that lets you go to a URL like img.html?pix/whizzyphoto.jpg, and it will display it properly, and the Next and Previous slide links will still work.

Of course, I tweak this software mainly when I have a talk coming up. I've been working lately on my SCALE talk, coming up on January 22: Fun with Linux and Devices (be ready for some fun Arduino demos!) Sometimes when I overload on talk preparation, I procrastinate by hacking the software instead of the content of the actual talk. So I've added some nice changes just in the past few weeks.

For instance, the speaker notes that remind me of where I am in the talk and what's coming next. I didn't have any way to add notes on image slides. But I need them on those slides, too -- so I added that.

Then I decided it was silly not to have some sort of automatic reminder of what the next slide was. Why should I have to put it in the speaker notes by hand? So that went in too.

And now I've done the less fun part -- collecting it all together and documenting the new additions. So if you're using my HTML/JS slide kit -- or if you think you might be interested in something like that as an alternative to Powerpoint or Libre Office Presenter -- check out the presentation I have explaining the package, including the new features.

You can find it here: Slide Presentations in HTML and JavaScript

Tags: speaking, javascript, html, web, programming, tech
[ 21:08 Jan 12, 2012    More speaking | permalink to this entry | ]

Adding video to an OpenOffice Impress presentation

(and how to convert MPEG video to animated GIF)

I gave an Ignite talk this week at Ignite Silicon Valley. It was a great event! Lots of entertaining talks about all sorts of topics.

I'd always wanted to do an Ignite speech. I always suspected the kicker would be format: O'Reilly's guidelines specified PowerPoint format.

Of course, as a Linux user, my only option for creating PowerPoint slides is OpenOffice. Historically, OpenOffice and I haven't gotten along very well, and this slide show was no exception. Happily, Ignite needs only 20 slides ... how hard can that be, right? Most of my slides were very simple (a few words, or one picture), with one exception: I had one simulation I wanted to show as a video. (When I give this presentation on my own machine, I run the simulation live, but that's not an option on someone else's machine.

Impress woes

First I wrestled with Open Office to create the non-animated slides. It was harder than I'd expected. I just loved having to go back and un-capitalize words that OO kept helpfully re-capitalizing for me. And the way it wouldn't let me change text format on any word that triggered the spellchecker, because it needed to show me the spellcheck context menu instead. And the guessing game clicking around trying to find a place where OO would let me drag to move the text to somewhere where it was approximately centered.

And when I finally thought I had everything, I saved as .ppt, re-loaded and discovered that it had lost all my formatting, so instead of yellow 96 point centered text I had white 14-point left-aligned, and I had to go in and select the text on each slide and change three or four properties on each one.

And I couldn't use it for an actual presentation. In slideshow mode, it only showed the first slide about one time out of six. The other times, it showed a blank slide for the first 15 seconds before auto-advancing to the second one. The auto-advance timing was off anyway (see below). Fortunately, I didn't need use OpenOffice for this presentation; I only needed it to create the PPT file. I ended up making a separate version of the slides in HTML to practice with.

Inserting a movie

But I did eventually have all my static slides ready. It was time to insert my movie, which I had converted to MPEG1 on the theory that it works everywhere. With the mpeg added, I saved one copy to OpenOffice's native format of .odp, plus the .ppt copy I would need for the actual presentation.

Then I quit and opened the .ppt -- and the video slide was blank. A bit of searching revealed that this was a long-known issue, bug 90272, but there seems to be no interest in fixing it. So I was out of luck if I wanted to attach an MPEG, unless I could find someone with a real copy of PowerPoint.

Plan B: Animated GIF

Next idea: convert my 15-second video to an animated GIF. But how to do that? Google found me quite a few web pages that claimed to give the recipe, but they all led to the same error message: ERROR: gif only handles the rgb24 pixel format. Use -pix_fmt rgb24.

So what? Just add -pix_fmt rgb24 to the commandline, right? But the trick turns out to be where to add it, since ffmpeg turns out to be highly picky about its argument order. Here's the working formula to convert a movie to animated GIF:

$ ffmpeg -i foo.mpeg -pix_fmt rgb24 foo.gif

This produced a huge file, though, and it didn't really need to be 1024x768, so I scaled it down with ImageMagick:

convert -depth 8 -scale 800x600 flock-mpeg.gif flock-mpeg-800.gif

which brought the file size from 278M down to a much more reasonable 1.9M.

Happily, OpenOffice does seem to be able to import and save animated GIFs, even to .ppt format. It has trouble displaying them -- that's bug 90272 -- so you wouldn't want to use this format for a presentation you were actually going to give in OpenOffice. But as I mentioned, OpenOffice was already out for that.

If you do this, make sure all your static slides are finished first. Once I loaded the animated GIF, OpenOffice slowed to a crawl and it was hard to do anything at all. Moving text on a slide turned into an ordeal of "hover the mouse where you think a move cursor might show up, and wait 45 seconds ... cursor change? No? Okay, move a few pixels and wait again." Nothing happened in real time. A single mouse click wouldn't register for 30 seconds or more. And this was on my fast dual-core desktop with 4G RAM; I don't even want to think what it would be like on my laptop. I don't know if OOo is running the animations continuously, or what -- but be sure you have everything else finished before you load any animations.

The moment of truth

I never found out whether my presentation worked in real Microsoft Powerpoint. As it turned out, at the real event, the display machine was a Mac running Keynote. Keynote was able to import the .ppt from OpenOffice, and to display the animation. Whew!

One curiosity about the display: the 15 seconds per slide auto-advance failed on the animated slide. The slide showed for 30 seconds rather than 15. I had written this off as another OpenOffice bug, so I wasn't prepared when Keynote did the same thing in the live presentation, and I had to extemporize for 15 seconds.

My theory, thinking about it afterward, is that the presentation programs don't start the counter until the animation has finished playing. So for an Ignite presentation, you might need to set the animation to play for exactly 15 seconds, then set that slide to advance after 0 seconds. If that's even possible.

Or just use HTML. The great irony of this whole story is that some of the other presenters used their own laptops, so I probably could have used my HTML version (which had none of these problems) had I asked. I will definitely remember that for the next Ignite! Meanwhile, I suppose it's good for me to try OO Impress every few years and remind myself why I avoid it the rest of the time.

Tags: speaking, open office, video, rant, flame
[ 16:36 Mar 05, 2010    More speaking | permalink to this entry | ]