Miscellaneous Tools
Contents of this page:
- Spectacle
- Misc
- Avatar maker
- YouTube timestamp
- Due app
- Drawing tools
- Snapdrop: “Like airdrop, but for everything”
- Phantom Buster
- Dux Soup
- Hubspot
- Google suite
- How to make Zoom record individual voices locally
- Redis
- Finding birth + death certificates
- Letterboxd - adding notes to films
- Mentimeter
- Random red panda
- Video Editing Tools
- Creating nicely formatted code snippets for slides etc
- Misc Public APIs
- Access Clipboard History
- Bulk rename utility for Windows
- Mastodon
Spectacle
-
Tool which allows keyboard shortcuts for moving windows around
-
Doesn’t run on startup
-
Click the spectacles in the menu bar at top of Mac screen to see all shortcuts – typically splat + shift + letter – eg
-
! Commands won’t work on maximised windows!
-
Alt + Splat + C (centre current window)
-
Alt + Splat + arrow (anchor current window to left or right - good for tiling / to tile)
-
Misc
- Notepad++ Macros: See separate notepad++ macro page
- Useful tag in private Evernote
- Tools tag in private Evernote
- Brew: Mac Bulk App Installer For a New Mac OS Install using HomeBrew
Avatar maker
- Personal avatar / profile image maker: Makowka
- Here’s the image I made (Feb 2021) (Make sure you credit Makowka, and images can only be used as profile pictures):
YouTube timestamp
- To add a time stamp to a YouTube video, add
?t=43s
to the end of the url (or&t=43s
if there are already query params added to the end of the url). - The time is in seconds, so if you want to go more than 60 seconds in, just calculate the total num of seconds. For instance 1:30 would be
?t=90s
- Like this: https://youtu.be/imNlIoeCjao?t=43s
- …or like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyM2Ep28ED8&t=127s
- ! Note you don’t have to do the calculation yourself.
- You can just click the Share button in YouTube, check the “Start at” checkbox and fill in the timestamp there.
Due app
Accessing deleted items
- To access deleted items in Due, go to settings => backup and email a backup to yourself. But do it quickly! Depending how often you use the app you might have less than 24 hours of backups.
- Top tips:
- If you want to access something deleted, do it asap
- Don’t delete things! Use the tick button instead, to log things done.
Drawing tools
- Free tools:
- Google drawings
- Draw.io (not the same as Google drawings but integrates with Google drive)
- Paid:
Snapdrop: “Like airdrop, but for everything”
Share files between any two devices: https://snapdrop.net/
Phantom Buster
Phantom Buster is another tool you can also to send linkedin messages - similar to Dux Soup.
Dux Soup
Dux soup is a LinkedIn marketing tool
Some simple info that might help if you’re finding Dux Soup confusing:
- It’s a browser extension - nothing to do with LinkedIn itself
- It automates LikedIn interactions by clicking through LinkedIn links on your behalf
- Whenever Dux soup visits a profile on your behalf, it stores data from that profile and can tag that stored data with a configured tag which you can later use to search with (see Dux Soup Options => Actions)
- Use Dux Soup Options => Actions to define what will happen whenever a profile is visited - including sending personal messages
- Use the “scan profile” functionality to scan headline info (basically just name and profile id) from LinkedIn search results
- Use the “download data” functionality to download scanned data - or more detailed data from visited profiles - in csv form
- Use the “revisit data” functionality to upload your own edited csvs and visit all the profiles in the csv (potentially also messaging each person)
- Visit the “skipping” and “throttling” sections in Dux soup options to define whether profiles are revisited and also how many profiles you visit per day. Thie is important - if you get it wrong you might get banned from LinkedIn!!
See marketing.md in clare-tech for more detailed notes (Accessible to Clare only).
Hubspot
(for Clare, the url is stored in chrome bookmarks, under MT Docs => podcast => marketing - this won’t work for anyone else unless you’ve also stored the url he re, sorry!)
Uploading files to Hubspot
- We use this to upload our full polished podcast transcripts
- We get these from our transcriber - we can’t proceed with this step until we have received the final transcript from the transcriber
- Menu / top strip -> marketing -> files
- Upload files (top right) - select a file
- After uploading: middle of screen: All types -> documents
- Check checkbox next to file
- Click Move at the top - move into podcast-transcripts folder
- To get url of uploaded file:
- Search for its name
- Hover over the file and click on Details
- Click on Copy URL under the url
Hubspot utm url tracker
- (for the podcast, these notes are now in Gina’s Handover Doc)
- Menu (top left) or top strip -> Reports -> analytics tools
- bottom of screen: Tracking Url builder
- Top right: Create tracking url (fill in fields)
- For MTB podcast - links to episodes:
- UTM campaign = Digital Service Delivery
- Source = Organic Social
- UTM source = Twitter or whatever
- UTM medium = social
- UTM term = Making_Tech_Better_EpisodeXxx
- UTM content = [your name]
- For MTB podcast - links to transcripts:
- UTM campaign = Digital Service Delivery
- Source = Other Campaigns
- UTM source = Made Tech Website
- UTM medium = Making Tech Better
- UTM term = Episode Xxx
- UTM content = Transcript
- For MTB podcast - links to episodes:
- To fetch the now-created url:
- The url you just created will probably now be listed at the top of the page, but if not, use “Search tracking urls” at the top to find it.
- Hover over the row
- Click “Copy short url” to get the shortened version
- Click “Actions” to get access to the long tracking url and also to the original url.
Google suite
Use keyboard to accept auto-correct suggestions
- Place cursor in mis-spelt word
- Press tab to highlight the correction
- Press Enter
Google sites
- Here: https://sites.google.com/
- To edit a page:
- Go to Pages on the right, expankd Home and select your page
- To link to your page from the home page:
- Select Home, at the top of the tree on the right under Pages
- … or
- Go to Sites home (icon top left)
- Go to Made Tech Knowledge site (Under recent sites at the bottom)
- You’ll see a top-level link to “PR, Blog and podcast”
- To create a sub-page:
- click dots on one page in page browser on right
- or drag a page in page browser and move it to be nested under another page
- To link to one page from another:
- type the name of the page in a link section, and it will get foudn for you
- To base a page on another one:
- Click the dots next to the page in page tree on right
- Select duplicate
- Your new page is now prob at the bottom of the tree
- You can drag to move it around
- To get name of page to match title
- Click the three dots in the page browser on the right, and select properties
- To add a row of link sections, like on the podcast page
- In the browser on the right, select Insert
- Select one of the layouts
- Each section will now have an image. If you don’t want this, click each of the images until the delete icon appears
- To add titles and links, just start typing and then use the popup to turn text into a heading or a link
- Now each row can be duplicated using the buttons on the left
Google Docs - Linking to sub-sections
- You can link to sections in the same doc by using
- highlight => right-click => Link => Headings and bookmarks (at the bottom).
- But if you want to link from one doc to another…
- Insert => Bookmark
- Then click the blue bookmark and right-click where it says Link, and choose “copy link address”.
Google meet - breakout rooms
- You can set up breakout rooms in advance of a meeting, as long as participants are on the invite list - just go into the meeting and set it up. Then you can close mtg down but it will be remembered
- If you set someone up as a co-host, that means they can also assign breakout rooms
Google meet - co-hosts
- If you set someone up as a co-host, that means they can also assign breakout rooms
- Here’s how to do it:
- Go into the actual meeting using the link for the relevant day
- Click “host controls” bottom right (it’s a little padlock icon)
- Click “host management”
- Under People, click the three dots next to the person you want to set up as a co-host
Emoticons / emojis in docs
- Ctrl + cmd + space to embed emojis
- Windows key +
;
on Windows
- Windows key +
- NB: In google sheets you have to be in the formula input for it to work.
Strikethrough in docs
- Alt + Shift + 5 (Google docs)
- (In Word it’s Ctrl + Alt + S)
Google sheets on iphone
- To see other sheets / tabs, get out of editing mode (click the green tick top left), and then they will appear at the bottom of the screen.
Google trends
- Find out what people are searching for!
Gmail - downloading monthly Google Play 100Gb receipt
- It’s ridiculously difficult, but here’s how:
- Three dots, top right of email => Print => Print as PDF
How to make Zoom record individual voices locally
- Settings => Recording => Local Recording => Record a separate audio file for each participant who speaks
- Then to find the recording afterwards:
- On the same computer you had the meeting on:
- Login to Zoom, and go to https://zoom.us/recording/local
Redis
- In memory key value store, at Samba was not in application
Finding birth + death certificates
- Free public service to find death certificates
- Or you can search the GRO index - which actually seems to be more accurate (my great-grandmother’s age at death was listed inaccurately on the other site) - and then order copies directly from GRO.
Letterboxd - adding notes to films
- I’ve already created a custom list “want to watch” under my profile
- To see existing notes:
-
Claresudbery Lists - Select the list
- click “List view” (icon wi horizontal lines, top right) to see notes
-
- To add a new film with note / add a note:
- It varies per platform
- The important thing is to look for the edit icon
- On desktop you only see the edit icon (little pencil) BEFORE you click through to the list itself
- On mobile you see it by clicking through to the list and THEN clicking the three dots top right and selecting edit - but you have to do this while looking at the whole list, not when looking at an individual film (then click Edit entries, then select the film you want to edit from the list that comes up)
- I suspect maybe you can’t add a note while adding a film - you have to go back and add the note afterwards?
Mentimeter
-
Search terms: poll, quiz
- Useful for quizzes, surveys, polls, Q&A, audience participation, interactive presentations
- Use mentimeter.com to create something new
- Use menti.com when sharing someting you’ve created
- !! Is a great alternative to typeform, which will draw you in with a free account
- …but Typeform is pretty useless because it’s only free for 10 responses per month, and that includes when you’re testing your own poll or quiz!
- Things I found difficult when creating a form with Menti:
- Everythign is called a presentation, whether it’s quiz or poll or whatever… and every question is called a slide.
- To allow multi-select on multiple choice questions, on the Content tab scroll down to the bottom and select “Let participants submit multiple options”
- You have to enable voting on quiz questions - click Customize
- You have to set it to “audience pace” (click Settings) or they’ll only get whichever question you’re looking at, and won’t get the next until you move to next slide
- When you click View Results it doesn’t actually show you voting statistics. To see those, go back to the slides and the results are shown next to them
- To share the quiz with people, click the Share button => Participation => Copy link
- To share results, you can do the following, but the first option works best:
-
- click Share => Presentation sharing and copy link for live results
- !! I could only get this to work for the first slide in the presentation, until I realised if you hover bottom left, you’ll get a next/prev slide button
- You can grab the urls from clicking next/prev slide to get permanent links for each page of results
- click Share => Presentation sharing and copy link for live results
-
- Click View results, click through to each slide from the bottom of the screen and note the url
- BUT these are only updated every 10 mins so not much use in a live situation
- Click View results, click through to each slide from the bottom of the screen and note the url
-
- Just share the management screen which has results next to each slide
- Doesn’t look great but does give you instant results
- Just share the management screen which has results next to each slide
-
Random red panda
Video Editing Tools
- Kinemaster (good on mobile)
- Inshot (good on mobile)
- Youtube (free if you have gmail account)
- Shotcut (free on windows desktop)
Creating nicely formatted code snippets for slides etc
- One good tool for snippets of code is carbon.now
- It can be fiddly if you want to correct mistakes (because you can’t necessarily reverse engineer back to code from rendered image)
- But it turns out you can give it a gist url](https://github.com/carbon-app/carbon#usage), which is a much better way of keeping track
Misc Public APIs
- Some interesting Public APIs
- Over 100 public APIs that can be used in your projects. It contains APIs that return data on anything from animals, food, government and weather
Access Clipboard History
- To access your full clipboard history
- On Windows:
- Use Windows key + V
- On Mac:
- Install Flycut from App store
- Use Command + Shift + V + left/right arrow keys to scroll through history
- ! Have to hold down Command + Shift + V while using arrow keys!
- ! Will have to enable in Accessibility to get it working
- When you first install it, it tells you to do this but you might find you can ‘t because it’s not actually listed there
- Just copy something into clipboard and then press Command + Shift + V
- Then you will get the same message again, and this time Flycut will be listed under Accessibility
Bulk rename utility for Windows
- search terms: bulk file renaming, bulk file naming, filenames
- The Free File Renaming Utility for Windows.
- Rename multiple files with the click of a button.
- here
- recommended by BillyBum and Duck on forum
Mastodon
- Trello card with more Mastodon advice (accessible to Clare only)
- Linking to Twitter profiles that don’t (as far as you know) have associated Mastodon accounts:
@twitterhandle@twitter.com
- Linking to other Mastodon users within a post:
@woodyzuill@mstdn.social
- Sharing your Mastodon profile:
- You’ll see people doing the same as you would do within a Mastodon post:
@claresudbery@mastodon.social
- Or you can build a normal link to your profile like this: https://mastodon.social/@claresudbery
- You’ll see people doing the same as you would do within a Mastodon post:
- Adding alt text to images: See discussion here