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Having spent a long night calibrating Ubisense, here is a checklist to make it faster next time. This is with version 2.0.4 of the software. Many thanks to our resident surveying expert Yukang for staying very late to help me out with this.
Doublecheck offsets to apply to surveyed points. Get signs right. Remember which points were surveyed with the reflector pointing up or down, take into account the height of the totalstation.
Take into account the height of the antenna inside the tag. This may add 1-2 centimetres to the height of surveyed points.
Check that the antenna boards inside the sensors haven’t come loose. If they have you need to open the case and clip them back into place.
Check that the sensors are horizontal, roll should be zero.
Optimal pitch of the sensors is 45 degrees downwards. I seem to not point them down enough so should try to emphasise this in future.
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Ubisense is a real-time location system based on ultra-wide band. Their software has 2 parts, the server which can run on Windows or Linux, and the configuration UI which can only run on Windows. The server is provided as RPMs for installation on Suse or RedHat, but it’s possible to install it on Ubuntu. These instructions are for version 2.0.4 of the Ubisense server software.
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Uploading a recent paper to EDAS for an IEEE conference gave the warning The PDF file uses PDF version 1.4, however only 1.5, 1.6, 1.7 is allowed.
Add the line \pdfminorversion=5 at the top of the latex document and recompile. Minor versions up to 9 seem to work.
OpenOffice doesn’t currently let me include PDFs. The following command uses ghostscript to convert the first page of a PDF to a PNG image with a resolution of 300dpi.
gs -q -sDEVICE=png16m -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -dFirstPage=1 -dLastPage=1 -r300 -sOutputFile=output.png input.pdf
Thanks to a post by gosha bine.
I don’t have the experience to tell people how to give a presentation or how to organise a workshop so this is just a list of things for me to remember when it’s my turn.
Numbering slides can be helpful but don’t give any clues as to the total number of slides. I don’t like having the list of sections or subsections displayed on each slide. Text should either be visible or completely hidden, not shaded. All of this is distracting especially if the talk is boring. Unfortunately the default Beamer templates do most of this wrong in my opinion.
A microphone is not always necessary is a small room. It should be optional and the speakers should use it properly if at all. The clip-on microphones should be attached so they don’t rub against clothing and make irritating noises. If this happens the chair should politely ask the speaker to adjust the microphone.
The workshop organiser should inform participants well in advance (several weeks if possible) about details such as the format of posters, requirements for slides, whether they will be shown from a shared computer or from the participant’s laptop.
Organisers, provide something better than brown packing tape to attach posters. Participants, bring your own drawing pins, tape or blu-tac.
Chairs, check you know who’s talking and how to pronounce their names. Meet with the speakers before the session and make sure they know how to access their slides, how to use the mic and the remote control.
I thought this was obvious but apparently not. When presenting
- don’t speak to the screen,
- don’t stand between the screen and the audience,
- use a remote control so you don’t need to walk over to the keyboard to change slides, the RF ones seem to work better than the IR ones.
