Change the language to English/US on all slides and boxes in PowerPoint 2007 to 2016

Changing the language of a whole presentation in MS PowerPoint can be tedious. Especially when you translate your slides. You easily end up with a mix of languages on a number of slides. You notice, then, that it is not possible to select the main one: the language button (on the bottom bar) is simply […]

Augmented Reality and the Places of Dreams

Behind the illusion In Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, Klaus Kinski with his eyes buried deep into another world stands on the shore of a river and says: Everyday life is only an illusion behind which lies the reality of dreams This is what the Jivaro Indians reportedly believe. But what Kinski’s character sees is his boat climbing […]

ScapeToad – Anamorphosis or Metamorphosis of the Base Map ?

Most 2D-maps are used to represent topographic metrics: distances and areas measured on the map (multiplied by the map scale) give traveling distances and land surfaces. In some cases, this information is irrelevant or even misleading [see an example]. As a cartographer, you may wish to use map metrics to represent other data, such as […]

TinEye – Find an Image With an Image

The TinEye search engine allows you to find images on the web based on an image-file URL.You can also upload the image to search for. Basically, the serch engine finds copies of your image scattered around the web. The algorithm has an excellent tolerance for resolutions and color variations. Here an example with one of […]

Design you color scheme

Searching for an harmonious color scheme starting with a givent color? I recomend Petr Stanícek’s “Color scheme designer“. Using a simple yet powerfull graphical interface, you can find complementary, triadic analogic and many other methods to any web color. Colors can be directly copied to your CSS. I recommend combined use with ColorZilla Firefox plugin.

Stocking machine readable data in a ‘td’ tag

To stock ‘machine readable’ information about a table cell use the abbr tag: Useful for example when you try to give jQuery a handle on specific table cells when id and class tags are already in use. The ‘abbr’ attribute is an official attribute of the td tag in HTML 4.01/XHTML 1.0 DTD in compliance […]

Force Windows trash (recycler) to empty itself

Sometimes, stuff gets stuck in Windows trash. Mouse-click trash emptying doesn’t work any more. If that happens, use the following DOS code in the command line: rd /s /q C:\RECYCLER If something’s really stuck in the recyler, you will get the following error message (or equivalent in your operationg system installation language): Problem – Le […]

Draw what you’re looking for with an image search algorithm

The written language, made of letters, words and phrases, is how we mostly do internet search. It doesn’t have be that way though. It is very possible, for example, to search a photograph by drawing its approximation. This is shown by ‘retrievr’, the graphic search engine of System One Labs. In retrievr, you can do […]