Welp, it's been over a month since the last 20x2 Chicago, and I have a couple of new pieces of tech for the show.
First up, a JavaScript/HTML slideshow framework to display pictures as pre-show entertainment. I was hoping to use some existing code so that I wouldn't have to maintain a new codebase, but was unable to find something that fit my needs, which were basically: display a series of photos in a somewhat random order; include animated captions as text that could fade or slide in somehow; and consist of a single folder of HTML/JS/images, so that I don't need a server to run it (so no Node.js projects).
Since most slideshow frameworks seem to be slides for a talk or presentation, I wasn't really able to find something that fit, so I started a new project. This code is called 20x2 Chicago Slideshow, and is currently on Github. A mini demo is available at 20x2chi.pics (because ".slides" isn't a TLD yet).
The software has plenty of features (and is still in development), so on the off chance that you're looking for something to display slides randomly, check it out.
I used the slideshow code at the last 20x2 Chicago show, but thanks to the projector not showing my PC screen in the correct aspect ratio, the slides were stretched. So of course I had to figure out some way to correct that. Fortunately it turns out that you can use CSS transforms on the body of an HTML page, so I threw together some additional code to allow me to scale and translate an HTML page, to make it show up properly in a mismatched projection.
This code is called parc (Projector Aspect Ratio Correction) and is also available on Github. This might be an even more niche project than the slideshow code, because if your projector is not displaying the correct aspect ratio, usually you have an AV guy who's there to help fix that for you. But if you're stuck with a bad aspect ratio, then this code might be able to help you out.
You just include it in your HTML after your declaration of the body tag (so that it has something to hook onto), and you can then control the scale and translation (offset) of the whole body. There's a sample site for that code at the Github Pages site for the project.
And the media from the most recent 20x2 Chicago show is also online. My photose are here and the video playlist is here.