From The Tips Box: Webcam Presentations, Faster Android Keyboards And More

Readers offer their best tips for giving presentations over webcam, speeding up your Android keyboard, and reminding yourself of your goals.

Every day we receive boatloads of great reader tips. From the Tips Box is where we round up some of our favourites. Got a tip of your own to share? Add it in the comments or send it using the contact tab on the right.

Affix a Webcam to a Lamp for Easy Online Presentations

Roy Tokeshi shares a little DIY project for those that have to work remotely:

Online Meeting tip: I rigged a desk lamp to hold a webcam over my desk to show whiteboard/paper drawings during meetings. Check out the video above to see the schematics, or check out this blog post for the part list and some photos of the final product.

Disable Letter Popups on Android for Better Keyboard Performance

Richard Milne tells us another way to speed up Android:

I recently acquired an old HTC Hero as a spare work phone. I rooted and flashed MIUI on it but was surprised to find the stock Android keyboard was really unresponsive (like about a half second delay between touching the screen and the input “registering”). It turns out, disabling the letter popup dramatically improved keyboard performance. Typing feels perfectly natural now.

This may apply to other keyboards too. Just look in the settings of your preferred keyboard and see if it has this option.

Use Your Passwords to Reinforce Goals

Art Sobczak conditions himself into achieving his goals:

Use passwords to reinforce habits/goals. This is especially useful for your work or school passwords that have to be changed periodically. For example, one of my passwords that i have to type in about 8-10 times a day changes every 90 days. If one of my 3 month goal is to lose 15 pounds (down to 190), then maybe my password would be some derivative of “Work Out” and 190 or 15. you’d have to play with the words and the numbers in order to make sure its sufficiently secure, but the point is that now I’m thinking about working out 10+ times a day. It’s a great motivator and helps to keep your eyes on the prize!

Find and Replace More than Just Text Strings in Office

MsCassLopez discovers that Find & Replace is a lot more advanced than it looks:

MS Office tip: You write out your brilliantly articulate report and then your boss comes round and tells you to change all the instances of Times New Roman 12pt Bold to Calibri 11pt italics (and there’s a lot, and they’re scattered all way through the document). After you kill your boss you realise there’s a better solution. The search and replace function can search for and replace fonts too, either globally or associated with selected text.

On the Home tab click Replace and click the More button. Click in the Find what box Down at the bottom click Format and select Font; select the font you want to change. Click in the Replace with box and do the same, this time selecting your new font style. OK your way out. Robert’s your father’s brother!

This works in LibreOffice as well, if you aren’t a Microsoft Office user.