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Emacs Basics: Using the mouse

Posted: - Modified: | emacs, emacs-basics, podcast

You can download the MP3 from archive.org.

Transcript:

I’m Sacha Chua and this is an Emacs Basics episode on using the mouse. The best way to use Emacs is to master the keyboard shortcuts, but when you’re starting out, don’t worry about them yet. You might find yourself using the mouse a whole lot more than you used to, but over time, you will learn more and more keyboard shortcuts as you get used to Emacs. So let’s say that you’re just starting out. What are some of the things that you can do right away to get the hang of using Emacs?

The Emacs tutorial is a great place to start. You can get to that by clicking on the Emacs tutorial link on the splash screen. If you’ve done the tutorial before, it will offer to let you resume at that point. If you don’t have the splash screen handy, you can also get to the tutorial from Help > Emacs tutorial. Go through this and you’ll learn a lot of the common keyboard shortcuts that will come in handy.

The toolbar and the menu will also give you quick access to a lot of common commands. If you’d like to create a new file or open an existing file, you can click on the New file icon located in the top left. You can specify the file, and if the file doesn’t exist yet, it will create it. To save the file, click on the Save icon. If you’d like to close a file, just click on the X mark. You can open the file again using the toolbar icon.

To copy and paste, use your mouse to select a region of text, then copy or cut it. Then you can paste it wherever you want. You could also search for text. Click on that search button and start typing what you’re looking for. It will highlight the search results. Press Ctrl+s to search for the next instance. Press Enter to stop searching.

The menus also offer a lot of other commands. For example, you can insert a file. You can save the current buffer with another file name. You can split your windows so you can see more than one file at the same time. If you’d like to close a window and go back to having one file across your entire screen, you just have to use File > Remove other windows. To switch between the files you have open, use the Buffers menu. Explore the menus for other options.

One of the interesting things in Emacs is that you can copy or cut multiple things and then paste them without having to keep copying or cutting each time. For example, if I copy this, then Paste will paste that. But you could also access the things that you copied or cut previously. Just click on Edit > Paste from kill menu, then select the item you want to paste.

There are lots of other tools that are available in Emacs. The availability of these tools may depend on what else you’ve installed. Again, for more information, check out the Emacs tutorial or read the Emacs manual.

Have fun!

 

Made my largest sketchnote ever! Painting the MaRS Lean Startup Day banner

Posted: - Modified: | sketchnotes

This video doesn’t cover everything – there’s a gap in the middle when we started painting. I have to figure out how to reliably do time lapses with my phone or computer. =) This was fun, though!

Nathan Monk and Jennifer Marron reached out to me with this cool idea – in addition to sketchnoting Lean Startup Day at MarsDD on Dec 3, why not sketchnote the banner as well? I told them I’d never worked on anything that big, but they were up for the experiment and I was too. They rounded up canvas and paint, booked the boardroom, and away we went.

I started by drafting possible layouts using pencil and paper. They suggested some ideas to feature on the banner, and I added quick sketchnotes: an unfinished robot for the minimum viable product, arrows for “pivot or persevere”, and so on. I copied key elements of the first draft onto a second draft, and that was good to go.

Based on the proportions of the paper, we cut the canvas to roughly 68” by 120”. Coming from years of sketchnoting on a laptop screen (and doing the occasional blackboard/easel pad), it was certainly quite a new experience! It was so tall that I had to stand on a chair to reach parts of it. Glad to see that the proportion lessons I’d taken in art class paid off, though – I found it easy to work with the large space.

We started by taping the canvas to the wall and chalking outlines. I used my measuring tape to find the center and scribe a circle around it (hooray for high school geometry!). Then I lightly chalked the outlines of the MaRS logo and the sketchnoted quotes while Nathan and Jennifer chalked in the partner logos.

After chalking the layout, we stepped back to see what it looked like. It looked great! Then the duct tape gave way (canvas is heavy!), and we unanimously decided to move it to the boardroom table for the actual painting. If it collapsed that way while painting, we’d suddenly have an abstract art piece on our hands! We spread plastic wrap all over the boardroom table and the floor, set out the paints, and got going.

While Jennifer focused on the partner logos, I painted the MaRS logo, the Lean Startup Day arrows around it, and the sketchnote-style concepts surrounding the logo. We completed the banner in around 4 hours – about 1.5 hours to design and chalk it, and 2.5 hours to fill everything in with paint and touch up with white to cover up mistakes. The materials cost less than $200 – maybe $150? – and that was with way more paint than we needed, since none of us had any idea what to work at that size. I couldn’t get a good picture of it, but once it’s up on Dec 3, I’ll be sure to.

That was fun!

Lessons learned:

  • It’s okay to not get things exactly right, so don’t worry about not having a projector or other tools.
  • Chalk lightly and with a light colour so that it’s easy to brush off mistakes!
  • Have lots of small brushes on hand for detail work.
  • A little paint goes a long way.
  • So does a sewing tape measure.
  • White (or something close to your background colour) makes a great cover-up.

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Capturing my sketchnotes with Camtasia Studio Pro; organizing the digital workflow

Posted: - Modified: | drawing

People often want to sit beside me to see how I’m drawing my sketchnotes, so I thought I’d record one session and put together a short video. Here’s how I drew yesterday’s sketchnote. In this video, I zoomed in so that you’re not distracted by all the other controls I have open. =)

Most of the sketchnote artists I know work on paper – sketchbooks, large sheets of paper, whatever. A few use iPads or Android tablets. Few people use tablet PCs, possibly because most designers like using Macs and Apple’s not keen on the tablet PC / stylus combination. I love how I can use my Lenovo X220 Tablet PC to sketchnote, and I want to share what I’ve been learning along the way.

Working on the computer, it’s easy to:

  • colour-match logos
  • paste in pictures and templates
  • draw over a light grid for alignment and spacing
  • move things around, erase things, resize things
  • draw without worrying about blurring or smudging
  • export to different resolutions
  • publish immediately after an event, which is great for following up and for catching the wave of interest on Twitter and blogs
  • capture my sketchnoting process and turn it into a speed-drawing video

I use Autodesk Sketchbook Pro. If I want to record my sketches while I’m doing them, I turn on Camtasia Studio as well. I used to use ArtRage for drawing and animation, and I’ve produced 1-minute animated sketchnotes using that, but it’s not as responsive and pen-friendly as Autodesk Sketchbook Pro is.

Working on a tablet PC is so different from working on paper or on a digitizing tablet like those small Wacom ones. On paper, you can use your peripheral vision to keep the big picture in mind as you’re working on some detail. With digital sketchnoting, I zoom in so that I can draw legible letters, so I don’t have that sense of space – but I can work at various zoom levels using very similar motions, so I can be more consistent. The ability to sketchnote an event in person without needing a special table or access to a power outlet allows me to put the spotlight on all sorts of events, while a digital workflow lets me publish things right away and spread the ideas even further.

Some organizational tips if you’re heading down this path as well:

Invest the time in developing your templates. I’ve been experimenting with different aspect ratios. Lately, I’ve been using a 7.5”x10” template at 300dpi, which means that I can print my sketchnotes on letter-sized paper, and they still look decent at 11×17”. I also have templates for a square grid and for credits so that I don’t spend time lining up my name, Twitter handle, and URL just so.

Save the colours and your favourite brushes to your palette. Make it easy to switch between colours by adding them to your palette. Experiment with the right brush widths too, and save those.

Pay attention to how you name your files and save your images. Exporting files with descriptive names saves me lots of time when it comes to filing and searching them afterwards. I sketchnoted more than a hundred 1-hour talks last year, and I often find myself using Evernote to dig up a specific sketch.

Lots of people tell me they’d love to learn how to do things like this. I want to help people improve their visual communication skills. What kinds of questions do you need answered? What would help you get started?

Emacs: Chatting with John Wiegley about the cool things he does with Emacs

Posted: - Modified: | emacs, Emacs Chat, podcast

John Wiegley – June 26, 2012 from Sacha Chua on Vimeo.

Transcript: https://sachachua.com/blog/2012/07/transcript-emacs-chat-john-wiegley/

Read more context for John Wiegley’s thoughts on the GPL. Note from Sacha: The WordPress folks seem to have figured out how to earn money with premium themes, plugins, and training, so it’s not incompatible with the GPL… =)

John Wiegley is one of my Emacs heroes. =) Check out John’s Emacs configuration and other tools on Github. John occasionally posts Emacs-related things at newartisans.com. You can find him on Twitter as @jwiegley. Enjoy!

IgniteToronto video: The Shy Presenter

Posted: - Modified: | presentation, speaking

I’m giving up on getting the organizers to update the incorrect abstract and bio on the page, but anyway, here’s the 5-minute video from my “Shy Presenter” talk at IgniteToronto:

Ignite Toronto 3: Sacha Chua – The Shy Presenter: An Introvert’s Guide to Speaking in Public from Ignite Toronto on Vimeo.

Minor miscalculation: shy or introverted presenters-to-be are not actually likely to come out to a bar with 200 people to watch an Ignite talk. Ah well. ;) Here's to fellow introverts who would rather catch the replay!

The Shy Presenter If you've ever struggled with small talk, felt overwhelmed in crowds, or wondered how to speak up at work, this talk's for you. In five minutes, you'll pick up quick tips about discovering what you have to say, how to say it, and why it's worth braving the spotlight.

Bio: Sacha Chua spent grade school to grad school hiding in computer labs and libraries. She prefers bookstores over bars, close friends instead of crowds, and silence over small talk. Blogging and public speaking turned out to be excellent ways to learn, though. Today, tens of thousands of people have viewed Sacha Chua's presentations, attended her keynotes, and read her blog (LivingAnAwesomeLife.com).

Recording of Enterprise 2.0 and Knowledge Management lecture

Posted: - Modified: | enterprise2.0, kaizen, presentation, talk

So here’s my first experiment with publishing a picture-in-picture recording of one of presentations – specifically, the presentation I did last night.

[kml_flashembed movie=”https://sachachua.com/notebook/2009/talks/200802-enterprise2.0-and-knowledge-management-3/200802-enterprise2.0-and-knowledge-management-3_controller.swf?csConfigFile=https://sachachua.com/notebook/2009/talks/200802-enterprise2.0-and-knowledge-management-3/200802-enterprise2.0-and-knowledge-management-3_config.xml” height=”355″ width=”560″ /]

Slides and class notes
Planning the talk

Lessons learned:

  • The audio from the webcam turned out to be much clearer than Camtasia Studio’s recording, because Camtasia picked up only the audio from the computer’s microphone. I need to fiddle with the settings some more to get Camtasia to listen only to the webcam. The audio was better than the audio on my voice recorder, too. That’s probably because my voice recorder was on the table behind me, and I didn’t have a lapel microphone. If I add a belt clip to my voice recorder and dig up that lapel mic I bought some time ago, that would be a good experiment.
  • I remembered to set everything up! Hooray! Voice recorder, webcam, and Camtasia recording of slides.
  • Splicing the slides and the webcam video was easy, although I kept running into weird problems – my silenced audio still kept showing up in the finished video. I deleted the Camtasia recording of my presentation and manually inserted my slides.
  • I lowered the video quality to 3 frames per second. It’s a bit jerky, but it does shave off some 20MB of disk usage. What do you think? I could also try rerecording this (or recording a different talk) with a close-up webcam video.
  • I’m hosting everything on my own site, as I haven’t found a good place to put things like this yet.
  • I spoke slower this time. Occasionally sipping water reminded me to slow down and breathe. This is good.
  • I enjoyed answering and asking questions. If I were to do this talk again, I’d probably trim this down to five or seven items and then have more of a discussion.
  • It was a good idea to get someone to promise to take notes and share them. Yay! I should build up a store of things to give away.
  • My computer was at stage left, so I could read the screen without looking back.
  • I suspect I’m right-biased in terms of eye contact, so I can make more of a conscious effort to look to the left. I did make sure to make eye contact with folks there some of the time.
  • My left mouse click is still broken (it’s software, not hardware; very strange) and my wireless mouse ran out of battery. Fortunately, I figured out how to use Microsoft Windows MouseKeys, so I could still set up everything I needed to set up before the presentation.
  • W- was there for transportation and moral support. I’m so lucky!

To make this even better next time, I can:

  • Put the webcam on stage right instead of stage left, for a more natural orientation when viewing the video and slides. This could be a challenge, because projecting stations are usually on stage left.
  • Offer other incentives for people to take notes and share them
  • Figure out better hosting for the video
  • Experiment with different video and audio settings
  • Start saving up for a digital camcorder?

Kaizen – relentless improvement! =)

There are no words to describe the geeky awesomeness of this

| geek

Update: Turns out the guy was lipsynching Moosebutter, but it’s still awesome!

(found it on Jeff Waugh‘s blog while reading his updates in the process of composing mail. Awesome ROI)