reminder for speakers/product plug

Posted on by Luis Villa

I was reminded today that not everyone knows of the Kensington Wireless Presenter. If you speak or present regularly you need to get one of these, unless you’re one of those boring presenters who actually likes to stand behind the podium all the time. It works with every device on earth that supports a USB keyboard- you just whip it out of the bag, plug it in, and go. If you give talks regularly, and you like your audiences, run, don’t walk. (GUADEC should be required to have one of these for every room :)

Published by Luis Villa

12 thoughts on “reminder for speakers/product plug”

  1. Jesse Keating: I’m sorry, now I know what “summer” feels like.  – Jul 11, 2007 Tom Tromey: Another FE Test  – Jul 11, 2007 Luis Villa: reminder for speakers/product plug  – Jul 11, 2007 Thomas Vander Stichele: Europython  – Jul 11, 2007 Luis Villa: what a tease (X and OOo)  – Jul 10, 2007

  2. An an alternative, the Keyspan PR-US2 can function as a full-fledged two-button mouse, operates at 433 MHz instead of 2.4 GHz, and includes a built-in laser pointer. Its receiver doesn’t stow inside of the remote like the Kensington, though. (Cool feature.)

  4. Funny story about that, stephen.. I was doing a panel a couple years ago, and a fellow panelist offers me his kensington thingy. I politely demur, since I’m using Linux. He says ‘no, no, try it.’ I plug it in, and boom, it Just Works. No config, no nothing. I am excited; I am completely ready to digress from my topic (network security) and pimp how this Just Worked .

    At this point, of course, my laptop fails to actually speak to the projector, so instead of doing the talk with the nifty remote thingy, I do the talk completely sans slides at all. Oops. Yay Linux.

  6. Oh, so now you tell us. I have the keyspan, so that’s one room down. A trip to PC-World tonight and I’ll get the others kitted out.

  7. Sorry about that, Paul :)

    The keyspan does look nice; I generally don’t want to mouse around during my presentations so I’ve been totally happy with the Kensington, but I can see that wouldn’t fit for everybody, especially anyone who wants to do real demos and not just slideware.

  9. I’ve used a regular wireless mouse for this with some success. In magicpoint left-click goes to the next slide, and right-click goes to the previous one. I’ve switched to Evince recently, where only the left button is useful, but I don’t go back all that often.

  10. Done and doner! :)

    I picked one up today, and just tried it out. It’s a newer version of the same model you pointed to, I think. Instead of the “Play” button, it’s a laser pointer now.

    Left is PageUp, Right is PageDown, Stop is ‘b’ (blanks the screen in OO.o (and obviously PowerPoint)). Pretty straightforward, Just works. Thanks for the suggestion! :)

  11. Why buy a special device for that if you probably already have one in your pocket ?
    My GSM (Sony-E .. K800i , and previous models) has that functionality via bluetooth.

Comments are closed.