I’ve been getting into audiobooks recently, but have been frustrated that they’ve been in MP3 format. I want them in iTunes audiobook format!* This article explained most of what I cover in the screencast below, but I’m delighted to have figured out how to use Automator on Mac OSX to make the file-renaming a whole lot less tedious…
*As I explain in the video, having them in audiobook format rather than MP3 allows you to ‘bookmark’ a chapter if you don’t finish it. With MP3s you would have to start from the beginning again or fast-forward…
Go to http://google.com. See how certain elements are revealed only when you move your mouse? That’s über-cool in my book. I wanted the same for the main part of my site - but have the coding skills of a rhino.
Fortunately, my good friend Paul Lewis (@aerotwist) is a bitlot of a coding ninja. In fact, he’ll soon be packing his bags for Sweden to work for Fi, one of the foremost web design companies in the world. He took about 3.1 seconds to knock up the relevant scripts, etc.
So now, if you go to dougbelshaw.com you’ll notice that the bullet points fade in when you move the mouse. Classy.
I’ve rewritten the README file included in the zip file below to make it more understandable by mere mortals, but you’ll still need to know your way around HTML. I’ll do my best to help if you get stuck and add a comment below, but I’m making no promises!
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a bit uneasy about Google’s de facto monopoly on, well, pretty much everything I do online. Yes, they provide everything for free, yes they’re offerings are class-leading, and yes they support Open Source. But that doesn’t make me feel any less worried about the control they have over my life online.
Advantages: Ultra-secure, out of Google’s clutches Disadvantages: Paid-for ($49.98/year for 10GB), less features
Search
Advantages: Searches Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Ask from one box Disadvantages: Still not completely rid of Google, no ‘product search’, integration with maps, etc.
Online office
Advantages: More features (e.g. Zoho Planner) Disadvantages: Familiarity, integration with email
Web Browser
Advantages: Fast, visual tabs, Bittorrent and file-sharing built-in Disadvantages: Fewer extensions/add-ons, less widely-supported
What do YOU think? Am I being paranoid? What would you consider switching to? What do you currently use?
Building on the success and interest generated by Mac OSX apps I currently use, here’s the apps currently installed on my iPhone (click to enlarge without notes):
Which iPhone apps do you use and wouldn’t like to be without?
This is what’s really going on. And I think Google’s only grudgingly pulling in Flickr and Twitter streams. They’d much rather you used Picasa and Google Chat.
I’m at the stage of my thesis where I’m having to spend a lot of time reading lots of journal articles in depth. Of course, in this day-and-age, and researching a topic such as ‘digital literacy’ we’re talking PDFs sourced via Google Scholar rather than dusty tomes.
The trouble is that all this is on top of my usual screen time. I remember reading about a guy a couple of years back – I forget who it was now – who went to the opticians and was asked how much time he spent in front of screens.
Oh, about 13 hours.
Per week?
No, per day…
I’m not quite up to those levels yet, but I can empathise.
Given this situation, I’m trying to make sure I don’t go blind in my old-age. I try to remember to take breaks, close my eyes for extended periods, and so on. I’m also using one of the best screens available for a laptop in my Macbook Pro. But it’s still not enough. I’m beginning to suffer from glare and I’m concerned about the strain I’m putting on my eyes.
That’s why I’ve started to look at e-readers. To clarify, an e-reader is “an electronic device that is designed primarily for the purpose of reading digital books and periodicals and uses e-ink technology to display content to readers” (Wikipedia). Screens using e-ink use virtually no power when ‘on’, drawing electricity only when ‘turning the page’ or navigating menu functions.
Not only does a TFT screen constantly refresh, but it has a lower pixel density (measured in Pixels Per Inch – or PPI) than a screen using e-ink. As this page on Wikipedia shows, the PPI of my 15.4″ Macbook Pro is 110, whereas e-ink screens are anywhere from 167 up to 200 PPI. A standard 1024×768 monitor could be as low as 75 PPI.
This is what that looks like in practice (courtesy of this blog post on The Reader):
So, given that all e-reader screens that use e-ink have spectacular PPIs the academic looking for the perfect e-reader is left with the following considerations:
PDF support
Large enough screen to prevent having to ‘reflow’ every article manually*
Ability to annotate/make notes
Portability
Cost
Things I (and probably most academics) don’t care about:
MP3 playback
3G access to app/ebook stores
Secondary colour screen
In the UK we don’t have the luxury of having a multitude of e-readers available to us. In fact, it pretty much comes down to a choice between ordering an Amazon Kindle from Amazon US or walking into somewhere like Waterstone’s or WH Smith and buying either a Sony Reader or an Elonex E-Reader. I did also find the iRiver Story on the Play.com and WH Smith websites. The iPad, needless to say, is a non-starter as it has a TFT screen…
It’s a difficult choice. I love Sony stuff, and iRiver things are usually very innovative. The Kindle’s had rave reviews. However, I’ve very kindly been offered the loan of an OLPC XO for a while. It should arrive soon. I shall post a follow-up when I’ve given it a try!
* “Being able to rearrange the text is called reflowing the document and permits a PDF designed for a full sized piece of paper to be easily read on a small devices.” (wiki.mobileread.com)
See that little graph thing at the bottom of this blog? It’s called a sparkline and shows the number of visitor over the last month. Here’s how to add one to your own blog, courtesy of Google Analytics and a WordPress plugin!
The only slightly tricky bit is replacing:
http://www.google.com/xxxxxxxxxx
with
http://chart.apis.google.com/xxxxxxxxxx
It shows you how to do it here, but it over-complicates things and is slightly out-of-date.
If you want to brush up on your HTML, you could do worse than this guide!
I heard about BumpTop a few months back when it was Windows-only. It’s makes your desktop 3D in an aesthetically-pleasing way. This week they launched the Mac version which I found out about via Mashable. It turns out that Mashable had 100 free ‘Pro’ upgrades to give away and I was lucky enough to be quick enough to apply to get one. This gives BumpTop extra functionality and features.
My thoughts can be found in the following quick overview:
(higher quality version at the Internet Archive – do they not do transcoding any more?)
Just to mix things up a bit, I thought I’d do this as a series of videos – it seemed appropriate to the subject matter. Learning Score is a visual planning tool for educators. And. It. Rocks.
Official promotional video
My quick overview
Planning a lesson from scratch in 10 mins
1. Official promotional video
2. My quick overview
3. Planning a lesson from scratch in 10 mins
You can get a 14-day free trial at http://www.learningscore.org/trial, but if you’re quick you can get a longer trial at http://www.learningscore.org/bett!
Over Christmas I was talking with someone about backing up data. They quite rightly pointed out something I hadn’t really considered – namely, I may have an Apple Time Capsule, but if my house burned down I’d be a bit stuck.
As a consequence, I’m in the market for an upgrade to a paid-for cloud-based backup solution. I asked a few people on Twitter and in person what they used for off-site backups. They mentioned the four below:
(too small? click on the table to enlarge!)
I tried these out. I found that all of them apart from Dropbox had something lacking:
MobileMe may provide extra features but only 20GB of storage. Also don’t like having to pay in one big chunk for a year’s service.
SugarSync is interesting and the cheapest of the options above, but I didn’t like the interface.
As I navigated to the Dropbox website to give them my credit card details, I remembered Zumodrive. I used to use it all of the time last academic year, but hadn’t looked at it for a while. I thought it could be perfect for my needs! Why?
It now has ‘folder linking’. This means changes made in a particular folder are always reflected in Zumodrive with no extra actions needed by the user. This is also the case in the other solutions outlined above, but didn’t used to be the case with Zumodrive (it used to be like an online USB flash drive).
Photos are automatically synced with either iPhoto or Picasa (I use the latter). This is particularly handy for the photos I don’t deem worthy enough to go on my Flickr account.
As with Dropbox and other solutions, you can instantly share any file with others through a link on Zumodrive.
The cheapest upgrade is only $2.99/month.
You can open files from iWork 09.
I signed up for the $6.99/month 25GB option.
However, calculating the amount of data I was going to need to backup overall it looked like I was going to have to spend $9.99/month for 50GB and then, before long, probably have to move up to the 100GB $19.99/month plan. I didn’t like the sound of that.
I tweeted about this and Mark Wagner, amongst others, replied:
Thinking about this, I realised that I’d conflated cloud-based and off-site storage. What I really need is something to sync Documents and other files of my choosing so they’re available quickly and easily (e.g. via my iPhone). And then, separately, I need an ongoing archive of all of my stuff.
I’ve signed up for Mozy. They do unlimited non-commercial storage for $4.95/month. That’s my off-site storage solution. My cloud-based storage solution is going to be a free Dropbox account. Why? Because it’s truly cross-platform, has a great iPhone app and you can gain an extra 250MB storage for every referral you make!
I need 7 more people to sign up for Dropbox to get my maximum referral bonus space (3GB). If you’re going to sign up, would you consider using one of the links to the service in this post please?
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