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While much of the news is focused on the presidential race, on November 8 there will be 165 propositions on the ballot that could impact over 205 million Americans in 35 states.1
When it comes to learning more about their state’s referenda in the final days of the Election, voters are increasingly turning online. That’s why we have [launched features in Google Search] to help voters learn who and what propositions are on their ballot. And people are searching!
Seventy-five percent of all searches on ballot propositions happen the month before Election Day.2 One out of five voters continue to research their on their phones as they enter the voting booth.3
Digital tools continue to have an impact on voter awareness around ballot measures and new research confirms it.
New research from comScore, in conjunction with Google and the digital campaigns of statewide ballot initiatives, shows how voters exposed to digital advertising react differently to those who were not shown the same content. For voters who saw the display and video advertising, awareness of the ballot proposition increased by 27 percentage points. Furthermore, intent to vote increase by 14 points.4
For voters who saw the display and video advertising, awareness of the ballot proposition increased by 27 percentage points.ComScore Ad Effectiveness Suite
With just one week to go, reaching voters effectively has never been more important. Digital tools offer campaigns a huge opportunity to educate voters and effectively increase awareness and intent to vote. Learn more about how campaigns are reaching voters online through digital advertising here or see Google’s GOTV toolkit here.
Want to make sure your users know what propositions are on their ballot? We have a new, embeddable ballot information and polling place lookup tool for organizations of any shape and size. All you need to do is copy and paste and you’re ready to go! More information here.
1 Ballotpedia
2 Google Internal Data
3 Google Consumer Surveys
4 ComScore Ad Effectiveness Suite
I've had something of an obsession with digital pinball for years now. That recently culminated in me buying a Virtuapin Mini.
OK, yes, it's an extravagance. There's no question. But in my defense, it is a minor extravagance relative to a real pinball machine.
The mini is much smaller than a normal pinball machine, so it's easier to move around, takes up less space, and is less expensive. Plus you can emulate every pinball machine, ever! The Virtuapin Mini is a custom $3k build centered around three screens:
Most of the magic is in those screens, and whether the pinball sim in question allows you to arrange the three screens in its advanced settings, usually by enabling a "cabinet" mode.
Let me give you an internal tour. Open the front coin door and detach the two internal nuts for the front bolts, which are finger tight. Then remove the metal lockdown bar and slide the tempered glass out.
The most uniquely pinball item in the case is right at the front. This Digital Plunger Kit connects the 8 buttons (2 on each side, 3 on the front, 1 on the bottom) and includes an analog tilt sensor and analog plunger sensor. All of which shows up as a standard game controller in Windows.
On the left front side, the audio amplifier and left buttons.
On the right front side, the digital plunger and right buttons.
The 27" playfield monitor is mounted using a clever rod assembly to the standard VESA mount panel on the back, so we can easily rotate it up to work on the inside as needed.
If you need the monitor all the way out, detach the power cord and the HDMI connector. Then you have complete access to the interior.
Notice the large down-firing subwoofer mounted in the middle of the body, as well as the ventilation holes. The PC "case" is just a back panel, and the power strip is the Smart Strip kind where it auto-powers everything based on the PC being powered on or off. (The actual power switch is on the bottom front right of the case.)
Powering it up and getting all three screens configured in the pinball sim of your choice results in … magic.
It is a thoroughly professional build, as you'd expect from a company that has been building these pinball rigs for the last decade. It uses real wood, real glass, and authentic metal pinball parts throughout.
I was truly impressed by the build quality of this machine. Paul of Virtuapin said they're on roughly version four of the machine and it shows. Due to all the wood, metal parts, and tempered glass, it's over 100 pounds fully assembled and arrives on a shipping pallet. I can only imagine how heavy the full size version would be!
That said, I do have some tweaks I recommend:
Make absolutely sure you get an IPS panel as your 27" playfield monitor. As arrived, mine had a TN panel and while it was playable if you stood directly in front of the machine, playfield visibility was pretty dire outside that narrow range. I dropped in the BenQ GW2765HT to replace the GL2760H that was in there, and I was golden. If you plan to order, I would definitely talk to Paul at VirtuaPin and specify that you want this IPS display. The 23" backglass monitor appears to be IPS already so no need to change there.
The improved display has a 1440p resolution compared to the 1080p originally shipped, so you might want to upgrade from the GeForce 750 Ti video card to the just-released 1050 Ti. This is not strictly required, as I found the 750 Ti an excellent performer even at the higher resolution, but I plan to play only fully 3D pinball sims and the 1050 Ti gets excellent reviews for $140, so I went for it.
Internally everything is exceptionally well laid out, the only very minor improvement I'd recommend is connecting the rear exhaust fan to the motherboard header so its fan speed can be dynamically controlled by the computer rather than being at full power all the time.
On the Virtuapin website order form the PC they provide sounds quite outdated, but don't sweat it: I picked the lowest options thinking I would have to replace it all, but they shipped me a Haswell based quad-core PC with 8GB RAM and a 256GB SSD, even though those options weren't even on the order form.
I realize $3k (plus palletized shipping) is a lot of money, but I estimate it would cost you at least $1500 in parts to build this machine, plus a month of personal labor. Provided you get the IPS playfield monitor, this is a solidly constructed "real" pinball machine, and if you're into digital pinball like I am, it's an absolute joy to play and a good deal for what you actually get. As Ferris Bueller once said:
If you'd like to experiment with this and don't have three grand burning a hole in your pocket, 90% of digital pinball simulation is a widescreen display in portrait mode. Rotate one of your monitors, add another monitor if you're feeling extra fancy, and give it a go.
As for software, most people talk about Visual Pinball for these machines, and it works. But the combination of janky hacked-together 2D bitmap technology used in the gameplay, and the fact that all those designs are ripoffs that pay nothing in licensing back to the original pinball manufacturers really bothers me.
I prefer Pinball Arcade in DirectX 11 mode, which is downright beautiful, easily (and legally!) obtainable via Steam and offers a stable of 60+ incredible officially licensed classic pinball tables to choose from, all meticulously recreated in high resolution 3D with excellent physics.
As for getting pinball simulations running on your three monitor setup, if you're lucky the game will have a cabinet mode you can turn on. Unfortunately, this can be weird due to … licensing issues. Apparently building a pinball sim on the computer requires entirely different licensing than placing it inside a full-blown pinball cabinet.
Pinball Arcade has a nifty camera hack someone built that lets you position three cameras as needed to get the three displays. You will also need the excellent x360ce program to dynamically map joystick events and buttons to a simulated Xbox 360 controller.
Pinball FX2 added a cabinet mode about a year ago, but turning it on requires a special code and you have to send them a picture of your cabinet (!) to get that code. I did, and the cabinet mode works great; just enable cabinet mode with your code, specify the coordinates of each screen in the settings and you are good to go. While these tables definitely have arcadey physics, I find them great fun and there are a ton to choose from.
Pro Pinball Timeshock Ultra is unique because it's originally from 1997 and was one of the first "simulation" level pinball games. The current rebooted version is still pre-rendered graphics rather than 3D, but the client downloads the necessary gigabytes of pre-rendered content at your exact screen resolution and it looks amazing.
Timeshock has explicit cabinet support in the settings and via command line tweaks. Position each window as necessary, then enable fullscreen for each one and it'll snap to the monitor you placed it on. It's "only" one table, but arguably the most classic of all pinball sims. I sincerely hope they continue to reboot the rest of the Pro Pinball series, including Big Race USA which is my favorite.
I've always loved pinball machines, even though they struggled to keep up with the arcade games of their day. In some ways I view my current project, Discourse, as an analog to classic pinball machines attempting to bridge the gap to the modern day:
The fantastic 60 minute documentary Tilt: The Battle to Save Pinball has so many parallels with what we're trying to do for forum software.
Pinball is threatened by Video Games, in the same way that Forums are threatened by Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr and Snapchat. They're considered old and archaic technology. They've stopped being sexy and interesting relative to what else is available.
Pinball was forced to reinvent itself several times throughout the years, from mechanical, to solid state, to computerized. And the defining characteristic of each "era" of pinball is that the new tables, once you played them, made all the previous pinball games seem immediately obsolete because of all the new technology.
The Pinball 2000 project was an attempt to invent the next generation of pinball machines:
It wasn't a new feature, a new hardware set, it was everything new. We have to get everything right. We thought that we had reinvented the wheel. And in many respects, we had.
This is exactly what we want to do with Discourse – build a forum experience so advanced that playing will make all previous forum software seem immediately obsolete.
Discourse aims to save forums and make them relevant and useful to a whole new generation.
So if I seem a little more nostalgic than most about pinball, perhaps a little too nostalgic at times, maybe that's why.
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Previously we have covered how boomerang for Gmail can help you schedule Gmail emails to be sent later. However, boomerang is a paid app that requires monthly subscription to schedule more than 10 emails per month and take advantage of all its other features. Many people are not ready to shell out $5-10 every month just to schedule emails in Gmail. Unfortunately, there is not even a single app available that will let you schedule unlimited Gmail emails for free.
That said, we went on a spree to look for a free solution to schedule Gmail emails to be sent later, and stumbled upon a cool Google Script that can do exactly that without any limitations; called Gmail Delay Send. Of course, this script requires prior setup and it’s not as intuitive to use as those paid apps. But I can assure you that even a novice can easily set it up and using it should not be too much of a pain. Without further ado, let’s see how to schedule Gmail emails to be sent later using Gmail Delay Send.
Note: We are going to tell you configuration options that are easiest to follow and make it a snap to start scheduling Gmail emails. If you want to configure things according to your needs, we have added few help pages at the end of the article that will help you understand what you need to do.
You first need to enable the script in your Gmail account and give it permission to access your data similar to how you give permissions to other apps. Go to Gmail Delay Send main settings page and authorize the access to attach it with your Gmail account. You should bookmark this page as you will have to access it whenever you need to configure its settings in the future.
You must configure Gmail Delay Send before writing up your first scheduled email in Gmail. In the “Gmail Delay Send” section, you need to set “Enable” to “On” to make the script work in your Gmail account. There is also an option to set time zones, you can either select a different time zone based on the email receiver’s time zone or let Google calendar use your current timezone. No need to mess with this setting if time zone isn’t a problem for you.
In the Advanced Settings section, select “Off” next to “Require label”. Gmail Delay Send is based on triggers to identify a scheduled email to be sent by searching for emails in your Gmail account. The “Trigger” option here defines total time after which Gmail Delay Send will search your email for new emails to be scheduled. By default, it is set to 5min, but you can set it to 1min if you want to increase the accuracy. However, only set it to 1min if you really need the email to be delivered on time. This puts more pressure on Google servers which is bad for all the users of Gmail Delay send.
Now click on “Save Preferences” button below to save all the changes.
After configuring the settings, go to your Gmail account and open the compose window to write up a scheduled email. For testing purpose, you should enter your own email address in the “To” section. After that, enter the subject as you like and move to the body of the email.
Now this is the important part, you need to add a tiny text string at the start of the email that will tell Gmail Delay Send that it’s a scheduled email and what’s the exact time it should be sent. By default, it uses “@” as the identifying symbol and uses date/time format that is understood by DateJS.
For example, you need to type “@november 5th 12pm” at the start of the email to schedule an email for coming 5th November at 12PM. Entering the right date/time format is the biggest problem. Fortunately, DateJS is smart enough to understand most formats. Some of the example formats include, next wednesday, sunday 6AM, october 24 2pm, 22nd 08:30 and other similar formats. To ensure that the format you are using is accepted by Gmail Delay Send, go to its “Settings” again. Here enter the format at the bottom under “Testing Resources” section and click on the “Parse Date” button. Gmail Delay Send will tell you whether the format is denied or accepted.
Now that you know how to setup the string, enter it at the start of the email and press “Enter” key to move to the next line. Make sure you press “Enter” and move to the next line as the first line is reserved for the string. After that enter your message and click on the cross button at the top to move it to the “Draft” section of Gmail. Gmail Delay Send will keep scanning this email draft and as soon as it detects that time has come, it will send it. Below is an example screenshot of how your email should look like.
Here are some Helpful resources:
Gmail Delay Send Settings Page
I found Gmail Delay Send to be very easy to setup and work with. Although entering the right date can be a little problem, but you can test it in its settings to ensure you don’t mess up. If there are any confusions or you have any questions regarding Gmail Delay Send, do let us know in the comments below.
The post How To Schedule Gmail Emails For Free appeared first on Google Tricks Blog.
LibreOffice is the free power-packed Open Source personal productivity suite for Windows, Macintosh and Linux, that gives you six feature-rich applications for all your document production and data processing needs. Writer is the word processor inside LibreOffice. Use it for everything, from dashing off a quick letter to producing an...
