Category Archives: Toastmasters

The October 2025 Toastmasters Pathways Update

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When Toastmasters introduced Pathways, I created a reference set of tables to make it easy to understand what was in each level. After all, club officers needed to know about all the paths not just their own. The 2025 update changes things enough that it was time to do that again.

As a preview, below shows the projects and their requirements. My full deck is on speakerdeck and shows more details like the required project names for each path and the names of the successful club series, better speaker series, and leadership excellence series options.

There are two versions:

  1. For presentation purposes – includes some UI changes before the reference slides. (I could just barely deliver this in 7 minutes)
  2. Just the reference slides

Day 13 of BlueSky; thoughts so far

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I signed up for Bluesky on November 2nd. Why then you ask? I had “try Bluesky or Threads” on my to do list for a long time. I was waiting until I had time to do it. Which meant finishing Java OCP 21 Certified Professional Study Guide and submitting all Word document drafts of Real-World Java: Helping You Navigate the Java Ecosystem. After that I started catching up on the many things I want to do. It was easy to decide between the two platforms. I remembered a number of Brazilian users had started using Bluesky when X temporarily banned their country. And by November 2nd, tech twitter had started moving over as well.

I do use Mastodon but it doesn’t fulfill the same need for me. For example, plain text search is something I use on Twitter/X and Bluesky that Mastodon does not have. So now I check three social media sites periodically. Some duplication; some differences in perspective.

Here is where I am right now. I’m sure this will change over time, but at just under two weeks, it is enough to feel comfortable.

Security

The only option for two factor is to receive an email with the two factor code, such as 5HAGF-MBYB1, and type it in. (I could copy paste in the browser, but not always in apps). Kinda annoying, but I’m set up now.

Youc an also set up application passwords instead of giving a third party application your real password which is nice.

Starter pack

Starter packs are groups of people you can follow with “follow all” to quickly get started. I followed the Java Champions starter pack. I also had some accounts I had stored in my to do list of people who gave their handles when they left Twitter/X that I was following. After I joined, Sharat created Java Community Starter Packs One and Two.

You can see all starter packs here and search/filter for what you are interested in.

Lists

In addition to my following feed, I subscribed to two lists. One on Cyber Security and one on US Politics. Both are things I want to check periodically but don’t need in my main feed. I expect to add more lists over time.

iPhone client

The official Bluesky Social app works great on the phone.

Mac client

While you can use the official Bluesky app, it is vey clearly an iPhone app. It’s the size of an iPhone which is very much not what I want on my computer. However, I was happy with the browser tab on a computer. I just didn’t want it in my main browser window with all the other stuff I aspire to look at :).

I asked on BlueSky and Josh Long had a great idea. On Safari on Mac, you can choose File > Add to Dock to get a shortcut for just that browser tab. Opening it is like a full screen app. Perfect. Oddly I can’t upload images to my posts so I use the main browser when I want to do that but the docked tab for read/write in general.

iPad client

While you can use the official Bluesky app, it is vey clearly an iPhone app. It’s the size of an iPhone and making it bigger just makes the font huge rather than being reactive. Also, I couldn’t type on the dummy iPhone keyboard. I abandoned that approach almost immediately.

I also tried Graysky. I couldn’t get it to let me log in with two factor and gave up on that too.

iPad has a similar approach to Mac for storing a browser link. However, it opened as a tab my main browser which is what I wanted to avoid! Additionally, I want to see notifications on my Ipad which a browser doesn’t do.

Then I tried the Skeets app which is working great for me. There’s a free and paid version. So far, the free version does everything I want.

converting a PDF to a PowerPoint file on Mac

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I was given a PDF of a presentation and asked to give a presentation on it. I’d like to use what is there and edit it a bit. I’d also like to not be presenting out of a PDF and use proper presentation software. I prefer PowerPoint to Keynote because someone else will give this presentation after me and I’d like them not to have the same problem of “here’s a file you can’t use”.

Didn’t work: Google Docs

Gmail offered to open the PDF in Google docs. The images got completely messed up. The ones that converted were in the wrong place compared to the words in the presentation and each other. Then after a number of pages, Google gave up on converting images.

Didn’t work: Drag from Mac preview to Keynote

Yes, I know I said I preferred PowerPoint for this task. However, it’s easy to export from Keynote to PowerPoint so it would have been fine as an intermediary. However, there were three problems

  1. You have to drag one slide at a time and there are 55 slides
  2. After dragging, it is just an image that isn’t even the same slze as the slide
  3. The slide is an image so I have to recreate any I want to edit.

What worked: Convert to KeyNote

CleverPDF has a PDF converter that lets you convert to a variety of formats. One is PowerPoint. (They also have Keynote). They make their money through a mix of ads and paid products. I didn’t look how secure your data is as this is essentially a public presentation (and not for my job)

I’m impressed with Clever PDF. The transformed file looks the same and is editable. And free.