Miscellaneous tips and topics

Most of these pages began as notes for myself. I realized a few years back that if I made notes on my web pages, others might find them useful, too. So here they are. I hope you find them of some value. -- Rick Matthews.

Major topics

• Computers and the Web
• Electronics and electricity
• Physics and society (mostly health-related topics)
• Teaching
• Photo editing, digital imaging, and graphics
• Anything else

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Computers and the Web

Web authoring

• Wordpress
  • Tips on creating a personal website on sites.wfu.edu
  • How to insert responsive images in Wordpress TablePress tables
  • Responsive graphical headers in Wordpress Twenty Thirteen theme
  • Wordpress photo galleries from Google Photos albums
  • My favorite plug-ins
• Migrating your static html site to Wake Sites
• Responsive web design: quick tips. A few small tweaks to make your static html sites mobile-friendly.
• Free Flash Video Format Conversion Tools
• Handy online tools for web developers
• Embedding Google Docs in a web page.
• Tips on making your first Web page at Wake Forest (obsolete).
• Getting started in Dreamweaver
• How to put hit counters on your web page.
• See also "Graphics and digital images" below.

Google Apps

• GMail tips for managing your mail more efficiently
• Two accounts, one inbox. Manage two Google Mail accounts from a single inbox.

Windows and Office

• What happened to my personal templates in Powerpoint 2016?
• Creating tables of contents (and getting page numbering right) in Microsoft Word.
• Wrapping text in Excel cells.
• Excel displays formula rather than result
• Turn off junk mail filtering in Outlook 2003.
• Typing onto PDFs.
• Web cam not detected? How to repair a corrupt devenum.dll driver.
• Making your mouse pointer more visible.

UNIX systems

• Fortran compiler options on the Osiris cluster
• Linux tips

Wake Forest - specific

• The Google Mail and Calendar Pilot
• Tips on class scheduling in Banner
• Tutorial on Digital Measures online faculty information form.

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Electronics and Electricity

• A cheap, efficient, easy TV antenna
• How to wire multiple light switches
• How to wire 10baseT connectors

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Physics and Society

• Powerlines, cell phones, and cancer
• Potassium Iodide and radiation protection

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Teaching

• WebEx for snow day classes: getting started
• Comparison of streaming server options for lecture videos
• Programming Excel to assign letter grades
• Computer enhanced learning in the WFU Physics Department
• Making animated tutorials with Paint Shop Pro
• See more on my teaching page.

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Graphics and digital images

Taking photographs

• Getting started in digital photography
• Why are so many of my photos taken just a bit too late?

Editing photos

• Enhancing photographic images with Paint Shop Pro (principles also apply to Photoshop and GIMP)
  • Enhancing portraits
  • Enhancing landscape images
• Panoramas
  • Creating panoramas
  • Installing panorama viewers on web pages with Photovista
• Using Variations and other plugins in Paint Shop Pro
• Protecting the lens of the Olympus C2020Z.
• Effect of PPI or DPI settings on web images.

Image formats: JPG, TIFF, GIF, etc:

• Image file formats (JPG, TIFF, GIF, etc.) explained. Lossy vs. lossless compression is also discussed.
• Choosing between JPG, GIF, and PNG for web images
• How bad is JPG? (Large file)
• Chroma subsampling in JPG images
• Adobe JPG compression vs. Paint Shop Pro JPG compression
• Should you use JPG or a lossless format for archiving images? (Large file.)
• Is high resolution/high JPG compression better or worse than low resolution/low compression?
• Chroma subsampling in JPG

Other science

• Aliasing and Moire patterns in images

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Anything else

• Ten principles of an effective organization.
• Rick's Google Mail tips
• Video tutorial: Keyboard shortcuts in Google Mail.
• Program your smart thermostat for time-of-day rates

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• Rick Matthews home page
• Department of Physics
• Wake Forest University