Creating a Circle Desktop shortcut icon

Short version (what I did):

1. make circles with transparent backgrounds in Powerpoint.
2. and layer one image over another in Irfanview
3. then convert with IrfanView to make a desktop icon
4. and only then learn about icoconverter.com which I know can do 3 and suspect can do 1

Long version:

Retrieve five year old (2015) posts about making desktop icons

• DIY desktop icons with IrfanView
• Sons are useful for making icons

.., find a tool I learned about then is apparently a deprecated project, so lots of relearning...

goal

I wanted to show and tell my "customised a desktop icon to my own Flickr" story but the dots are trademarked by Yahoo. I don't know if that would mean one couldn't show non-commercial images incorporating the dots - but I also don't want to spend the time checking, so I erred on the side of caution.

For illustration I contemplated other icon customisations. Say, place the ALIA starry thing in the centre of a Chrome circle for the shortcut to my ALIA PD Drive folder. But - mm no - Chrome is probs trademarked too. I might still do it to practice the technique, but won't show it :-(

I wanted to layer two side by side coloured circles over my scaredydragon and have the combination in a circle with transparent background as an .ico file.

What I did

So while I can't show you the end result, I can share videos to illustrate what I learned.  

Also note it took many rinse and repeats to select the precise portion of the picture (the dragon's face and ears) that I wanted to show in the eventual circle, into the necessary part of the intervening square. And for the memory file, that involved, in IrfanView:

• load image (open folder) browse
• (too small , resize up =Ctrl+R or Image > Resize/Resample
• I only want his face, so Shift+C Create Custom Crop Selection size 256 x 256 *
• --repeat those steps until the original resize was such that the custom crop grabbed what I wanted.
• Saved that square (can't remember how)

* because:

"Microsoft recommends using an icon with a size of at least 256×256 pixels, to ensure it is properly displayed in the Large icons view"--Digital Citizen.

Next

1. Paint's dropper tool let me grab the exact colour I wanted, to create two squares that I could copy paste into:
2. Powerpoint where (thanks to Articulate 360 I now know how to convert them to circles with transparent backgrounds.
   
   
3. While I couldn't work out how to save both together still with a transparent background in Powerpoint, Kevin Stratvert showed how to remove a background from a picture with Paint3D.
   
   

Back to IrfanView,

• Edit Insert overlay/watermark image
• ... centre,
• 0% transparency gave me the effect I wanted

Next step back to Powerpoint to get another circle, but Powerpoint won't save it as an .ico.

So I went back to IrfanView to change the png to .ico, but the conversion seems to have left a jagged edge. Still ... I am super happy I have an ico that makes my desktop shortcut icon visually meaningful.

Update: I've since found the png-ico conversion is easier with ICOconvert recommended by Maraksot78 (video: How to Create Custom Desktop Icons (It's Easier than you Think)) (although as mine was just one image png to ico convert, as asked, I used the old ICOconvert homepage).  

When I look more at ICOconvert online it seems they also offer cropping and Styling which includes circles - so I wonder if the special shape styles come with transparency?  Maybe I'll try it out soon.  No hurry because I did try their tab for "Multiple PNGs to one ICO" but it had no upload mechanism.

The most challenging thing about today was … #blogjune

Thanks sis. The contemplating caterpillar suggested I share the most challenging thing about today.

? ... ?

Challenging: testing one's abilities.

Wanted :

I wanted a way to extract data from particular cells in multiple workbooks to give me an index to the content of those books (which are named with numbers).

Solved:

I had no prior background in VBA, but with a rough question google helped me find a macro by Ron deBruin that I guessed might do something like that... then I worked out how to edit the macro, then how to run it.

This big (2000 piece) old puzzle and my job have much in common.
(The puzzle is called "The Country Town" by Tower Press. (c.1960). )

But the post title is also true, #blogjune may arguably be the most challenging: it is taking longer, has looser parameters, and its hard to know when its done.

Payback, sis:

What makes some challenges enjoyable, but others unpleasant.

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Part of my Wordpress→Blogger journey, this post copied 25/12/2020 in republication of my 10 June 2014 post at my experimental self-hosted Wordpress

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Picks of the tweets … 001

Today (or maybe everyday, this is a first so who knows) I found and enjoyed:

Philosophy

(Collin Van Uden) tweeted: @stilgherrian No, *it's* factual. "Everything" is SATISfactual. And here I thought you were a fan of good research.

While we're on a philosophy kick, how about a round of

What's 'the most important thing?'

At that moment, in that conversation it was for

(rob harris) : @marcmcgowan84 But your readers read him in your paper before they heard from him elsewhere. That's the most important thing.

CC2.0 Hartwig HKD via Compfight & Flickr

These tweets were found because I set up some librarianesque social media monitoring following examples by Andy Burkhardt.

I also found a new way to enter images by using the Compfight WordPress plugin which searches CC licensed images at Flickr and then inserts with a button.  It is not yet perfect, but it might beat what I was doing before. Nevertheless, for the record, downsides:

• the thumbnails are too small to see whether I really want that image;
• when I want to use an image both in the post and featured I have to repeat the steps;
• I haven't worked out how to get it to caption satisfactorily.

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Part of my Wordpress→Blogger journey, this post transferred Jan-Feb 2021 in republication of my 14 August 2012 post at my experimental self-hosted Wordpress.

Ubiquitous reference

Plucky! by Steampunk Family the von Hedwigs (2010) via Flickr CC-BY

I want another word for that... for the way this idea is like hunting people to serve.  I can see a comedic Monty Python skit with librarians in deerstalkers or pith helmets carrying tablets and nets, stalking tweeters in the wild to answer questions they didn't even realise they had made :-)

Target searching and responding to tweeters

For example, even though Andy Burkhardt's suggestions preceded Twitter's removal of RSS, [UPDATE: 10 July 2013 after twitter changed from APIv1.0 to 1.1 this hack no longer works] there are hacks described by Piers Dillon Scott at Sociable which boil down to:

• start with http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=
• add keyword
• precede that with %23 after the = if you want a # tag
• follow either with %20geocode:latitude%2Clongitude
  pick up a geocode from brenz.net: copy and paste the latitude and longitude and put %2C between them
• and add a radius, say %2C25km

[UPDATE: Because keyword from twitter alerts are so interesting I will be looking into the strategies Aaron Tay blogged using IFTTT & Google script and/or Zapier & Mention.]

From that (with a keyword of book) I found in my local area:

@Strauchanside grab yourself a copy of his book "Practical Ethics". Kick arse read! — Glen (@glen_muller) August 13, 2012

Now if either was a student at UB I could link to the ebook in the catalogue;

or mention that the Ballarat Library (sorry Central Highlands library) could get a copy via SWIFT. (Unfortunately no permalink through SWIFT).

Dave the Plinth by Dave McGowan (2009) Flickr CC:BY-NC-ND/2.0

Similarly UB have books on the shelf that non-students may read which could help with:

@Liznvinny Cool. Maybe I can get advice on how to get my work read? — Angelina Car (@car0car) August 12, 2012

But, if reference was my job in either place, would that be appropriate? I think it would be fantastic marketing, but if not, why not?

Target searching and responding to bloggers

A similar suggestion made back in 2006 has kept a part of my brain buzzed about ubiquitous reference ever since. Brian Mathews described [pdf] following 40 blogs of people who had identified themselves as students of his institution and searching them for specific keywords.

 article, assignment, book, group, help, journal, library, librarian, paper, project, professor, research, reserve, and test

Moyobamba butterfly hunters by Geoff Gallice (2012) on Flickr CC:BY

He gave examples of help he gave that students appreciated. An important discovery he made in the process that students objected to official "librarian" contact but welcomed responses under his name (he had librarian in his profile). Brian concluded that

such a service provides "timely, meaningful, and intuitive assistance ... creates a personal connection ... [and] allows them to see us as allies".

Target searching

Now, just so that I can finally close the tab that has been open since I was researching RSS uses; a quick synopsis of what Elyssa Kroski had to say in April about monitoring social media.

• She proposed and describes using the start page tool protopage.  (I am enjoying Google Reader, it lets stuff disappear when you've skimmed it).
• She lists how to find search feeds on a variety of tools: blogging services Google, WordPress and IceRocket; the search tools naturally Bing and Google Alerts; a few aggregators and LinkedIn and Facebook - although I think that one is already out of date.

Leave the bubble

Monitoring for public comment is one reason to search for mentions of the library - but it detects only those who are already aware of the library and service.  Searching the wider community for the keyword book or article , read or reading, or someone suggested "?" allows you to pop the bubble, even if it does risk getting wet.

Wet by H Koppdelaney (2010) via Flickr CC:BY-ND/2.0

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Part of my Wordpress→Blogger journey, this post copied January 2021 in republication of my 13 August 2012 post at my experimental self-hosted Wordpress.

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I later pinged this original post in a post Closing the Chapter
12 August 2013 at 3:29 pm

[…] a new experiment, I found out how to build an RSS feed from a Twitter search string. With such techniques I have been following Mathews’ (2006), Burkhardt’s (2010), and […]