dougbelshaw.com/blog

Welcome back!
#uppingyourgame: an educator's guide to productivity is now up to v0.4!
(I'm looking for people to translate it into other languages when finished - if you're interested get in touch!)

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…

Posted: March 9th, 2010
Categories: Technology
Tags: audiobooks, Automator, guide, howto, iTunes, MP3, OSX
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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It shows you how to do it here, but it over-complicates things and is slightly out-of-date.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!

Posted: February 2nd, 2010
Categories: Technology
Tags: chart, Google Analytics, guide, howto, HTML, infographics, plugin, sparklines, Wordpress
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Image CC BY derrickkwa @ Flickr

I tried to do something very simple yesterday. Surprisingly, it caused me a bit of a headache. What was it? I just wanted to subscribe to some blogs via email.

Why would I want to subscribe to blogs via email? Well, for all I love Feedly, I have to go to a different location to access this. This involves a physical and conceptual shift. Making blog posts (or links to them) appear in my email inbox means I can’t really ignore them. In other words, I’m more likely to keep up-to-date.

However, when I went to subscribe to some blogs the option to subscribe by email wasn’t available to me (necessitating the use of xFruits) or seemed to be available but then didn’t work.

It’s trivial (and free!) to enable readers to subscribe via email to your blog. Here’s how:

1. Go to Feedburner and login using your Google account.

2. ‘Burn’ (i.e. add) your feed to Feedburner (you can find your feed URL by clicking on the RSS icon to the right in your address bar when you visit your blog):

3. Within Feedburner, click on the ‘Publicize’ tab and then on ‘Email subscriptions’ on the left-hand side:

4. Follow the (clear) instructions as to how to proceed. It shows you how you can add the option to subscribe via email to your blog’s sidebar.

5. Click on the ‘Optimize’ tab within Feedburner and then ‘BrowserFriendly’ on the left-hand side:

6. Follow the instructions, enabling the BrowserFriendly service.

7. Make sure all the links to your RSS feed on your blog point towards the new Feedburner feed. If you’ve got a self-hosted Wordpress-powered blog, the easiest way to do this is to download the relevant plugin to do this for you!

The result, if you follow these steps, will be that if users click on your RSS they should see something like this:

If you need any extra help or have some tips please use the comments section below!

Posted: October 25th, 2009
Categories: Technology
Tags: blog, feed, Feedburner, Google, guide, howto, RSS, Wordpress
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File this one under ‘geeky’ and ’stuff that took me a while to find out so I’m sharing it with others’.

Image CC BY-SA Kevin Severud @ Flickr

During the couple of days I’ve been off work ill this week I’ve transferred teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk from a UK-based webhost to Bluehost (which hosts this, among other sites). It was about time my former blog (active 2005-2007) had some TLC as it was becoming progressively broken.

I had a 42MB MySQL database backup – the file that contains all of the blog’s important information (post and comment text, etc.) – but every time I tried to import this into a new database at Bluehost I kept getting timeout errors. It was then that I remembered I’d had this problem before and I’d managed to solve it with some sort of script that breaks the file up into smaller chunks to feed to the database incrementally.

After a while searching, I came across it again. It’s called BigDump and the process, if you’re familiar with installing WordPress manually, is fairly straightforward:

1. Go into phpMyAdmin and execute DROP_TABLES on your target database.
2. Download bigdump.zip from http://www.ozerov.de/bigdump.php and extract the zip file.
3. Open bigdump.php using Notepad, TextEdit, or similar. Edit the relevant lines to point towards your database, username and password.
4. Create a folder called dump on your web server and upload both bigdump.php and your MySQL database into that folder.
5. CHMOD the folder recursively to 777 (i.e. give read/write permissions when accessed via the web)
6. Access the script via (e.g.) http://yourdomain.com/dump/bigdump.php
7. Follow the instructions!

This should lead to your database backup being successfully inserted into your new database. You can then use the data in whatever web app (i.e. Wordpress) that you want!

Posted: October 20th, 2009
Categories: Technology
Tags: bigdump, blog, Bluehost, databases, guide, howto, migration, MySQL, teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk, web hosts
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I pushed out a new video to all staff at the Academy today. It’s 6 minutes long and demonstrates how to use Google Calendar in conjunction with Google Docs for lesson timetables and meetings. Although there’s unfortunately no RSS feed for it, you can catch these kinds of videos and general E-Learning stuff I produce over at NCEA E-Learning Updates.

This can be seen as an update to the following posts I wrote a few years ago:

• The wonders of Google Calendar for teachers
• How to use Google Calendar as a tool for lesson planning

Posted: September 11th, 2009
Categories: Education, Technology
Tags: Academy, Camtasia, Google Calendar, Google Docs, guide, howto, Jing, screencast, video
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Introduction

I mentioned in an earlier blog post my favourable early impressions of the ‘cool new operating system’ Jolicloud on my Acer Aspire One. One thing that I wanted to be able to do with it is to ‘tether’ my iPhone to it for 3G internet access. This was easily done under almost any operating system when I’d ‘jailbroken’ my iPhone (through PDAnet) However, it’s not so easy with an iPhone running the standard firmware and a netbook running Jolicloud. This is for two reasons:

• An unjailbroken iPhone can only tether by USB or Bluetooth, not wi-fi.
• Jolicloud does not come with access to Synaptic Package Manager, trading this for ease-of-use.

Tethering an unjailbroken iPhone to Jolicloud is still possible, however, if you’re prepared to copy-and-paste some lines into the Terminal. Here’s what to do…

How to tether your iPhone under Jolicloud

1. Activate tethering on your iPhone. You should really go through your contract provider for this, but if you’re naughty – or feel overcharged as it is – then try emailing to your iPhone and then running the relevant .mobileconfig file found at http://www.benm.at/help/tethering.php

2. Install ‘jolicloud-netbook-config’. To be honest, I’m not actually certain this step is necessary. But it can’t hurt! On your netbook, open up the Terminal (found under the ‘Accessories’ menu in Jolicloud). Copy-and-paste this: sudo apt-get update (then press ‘Enter’) followed by sudo apt-get install jolicloud-netbook-config (Enter). You may get errors. Ignore them.

3. Install Blueman. Whilst still in the Terminal, copy-and-paste this: sudo sh -c "echo 'deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/blueman/ubuntu $(lsb_release -sc) main' >/etc/apt/sources.list.d/blueman.list" and then hit Enter. Follow this typing sudo apt-get update (Enter) and then sudo apt-get install blueman (Enter). You’ll get errors, but don’t worry!

4. Configure Bluetooth Manager. Make sure you have Bluetooth turned on your netbook and both Bluetooth and Tethering on your iPhone. The ‘tethering’ option is found withing Settings / General / Network on your iPhone. On your netbook, go to the Preferences menu and then click on Bluetooth Manager:

4. Connect to your iPhone. Click on Search within Bluetooth Manager. Your iPhone should be listed. Click on it, then Bond. You’ll have to do the usual thing of setting a passcode to be entered on both devices, etc.

5. Set up your iPhone for ‘tethering’. Within Bluetooth Manager click on the Trust button to save time in future. Then click on Setup and keep pressing Forward until your iPhone is ‘tethered’ (i.e. set up for 3G internet access with your netbook).

Your iPhone should now have a blue bar at the top that says Internet tethering (see image at top of this post). Open up a browser and surf away!

Finally…

To reconnect on subsequent occasions, make sure that Bluetooth and Tethering is active on your iPhone. Then go back into Bluetooth Manager on your netbook, right-click on your iPhone and select the option to re-establish a Bluetooth connection. An icon should pop-up indicating you’re connected and, of course, the blue ‘Internet Tethering’ ribbon should appear to the top of your iPhone!

Many thanks to the author of this blog post (which has some additional steps you may want to try which forces Ubuntu Netbook Remix – on which Jolicloud is based – to configure the connection as an ‘official’ Mobile Broadband connection)

Posted: August 8th, 2009
Categories: Technology
Tags: Acer Aspire One, bluetooth, Flickr, guide, howto, iPhone, Jolicloud, Netbook, Terminal, Tethering, Ubuntu Netbook Remix
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As promised in HOWTO: Present using Cooliris (the basics…) this post outlines more advanced options when using Cooliris as a presentation tool. It covers the following:

1. Using a Nintendo Wiimote to control your presentation
2. Customising the HTML page
3. Adding titles to slides
4. Linking to websites from slides
5. Adding a ‘branding image’

1. Using a Nintendo Wiimote to control your presentation

The Nintendo Wiimote is a wonderful thing. It (potentially) connects via Bluetooth to any suitably-equipped computer. I use a Macbook Pro and a program called Darwiin Remote (free) and it couldn’t be easier to both use the buttons on the Wiimote as well as the motion-sensing element to control the cursor. If, however, you’re using Windows you’ll need Wiin Remote (free) but good luck getting your ‘Bluetooth stack’ working (try BlueSoleil – or better still, buy a Mac!) Linux users need WiiLi.

If you have no joy with the above, simply invest in something like the Kensington Si600 Wireless Presenter which will do the job – albeit in a less cool way…

2. Customising the HTML page

PicLens Publisher does all the hard work for you in terms of creating the HTML page, thumbnails and RSS feed you need to present using Cooliris. However, if you want to customise your presentation to look a bit more like mine, then you’ll need to edit the HTML page produced by the program.

In keeping with my love of all things free and Open Source, I’d recommend the cross-platform program KompoZer for this. It’s got a WYSIWYG editor and is very straightforward to use! If you look at my presentations, I add the following:

• my avatar
• title of my presentation
• details about me
• link to HTML version of presentation
• details about the presentation method (feel free to link to my posts!)
• Creative Commons license information (at bottom)

3. Adding titles to slides

This is the bit that involves delving into code. Don’t worry though, as it’s very straightforward. You need to find the file entitled photos.rss and open it with a text editor. You should see something like this:

The part of the RSS feed that I’ve highlighted (between the <title> tags) is the title of each slide. This is what you need to change in order to alter the title of the slide. They’re in the order you specified when you made the presentation.

Result:

4. Linking to websites from slides

This is very much like the above process of adding titles to slides, except you edit a different part of the RSS feed:

The highlighted section above (between the <link> tags) is where you need to put the link to the webpage you wish to display when the relevant icon is clicked during your presentation:

5. Adding a ‘branding image’

This is perhaps the least useful of the advanced tweaks – yet in some ways the most satisfying as it gives you ‘ownership’ of your presentation.

The branding image needs to have a transparent background (I used a PNG file but I suppose you could use a GIF) and no more than 26 pixels high. There’s no real limit to its width. You can add anything in there – as you can see I put the shortened link to the presentation for people to go back to. Need an image editor? Try the GIMP!

Put the image you have generated into the images sub-folder of your presentation folder. You then need to add the following to the bottom of the photos.rss file:

I’ve highlighted the section you need to add – although of course you’ll need to change name_of_your_file.png to whatever you decided to call your branding image!

Conclusion

I think Cooliris is a great presentation tool. It’s engaging, free to create and access, and enables people to re-use parts of your presentation (if you CC-license it!)

I’d like to thank Alan Levine for pioneering this method. The blog posts he wrote that guided me are below:

• Tricking out Cooliris as a Presentation Tool
• Shining up Cooliris for ED-MEDIA

Posted: July 15th, 2009
Categories: Technology
Tags: BlueSoleil, Cooliris, Creative Commons, Creative Commons licenses, customization, Firefox, guide, howto, link, Open Source, PicLens Publisher, RSS feed, title
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Regular readers of this blog and followers of my tweets will be aware that I’ve recently come across (via Alan Levine 1, 2) a great way to present to an audience using a plugin for the Open Source, cross-platform web browser Firefox.* Cooliris makes your presentations look like an interactive version of this:

(examples available in the Presentations section)

Why use Cooliris as a presentation method?

• It looks extremely cool and engages your audience
• It generates HTML pages for your images so you can quickly and easily put your presentation slides online
• It’s free (if you use something like OpenOffice.org to create your images)
• It can be controlled using a Nintendo Wiimote (I use Darwiin Remote with my Macbook Pro)

The purpose of this post is to show how to create a basic presentation with Cooliris, and then how to enable the more advanced features.

Cooliris: the basics

The basic steps are: export your slides as images, import them into PicLens Publisher, and then upload generated folder to web server (optional, as you can run it locally from your hard disk)

1. Export your slides as images

Keynote (click to enlarge):

Powerpoint (click to enlarge):

OpenOffice.org (click to enlarge):

As far as I’m aware, although the options would suggest otherwise, there’s no obvious way to export all you slides to images in OpenOffice.org. Instead, we can generate them by creating an HTML version of the presentation which will also create images. As a bonus, this can be uploaded alongside the Cooliris version of the slides for those without the plugin.

2. Use PicLens Publisher

Cooliris used to be known as ‘PicLens’ – hence the name of PicLens Publisher, a Mac/Windows program that does everything you need to convert your images ready for an interactive Cooliris-powered presentation!

Simply follow the instructions given to you in the program:

Once you’ve finished, go to the folder that you exported your files to and open gallery.html in Firefox (with the Cooliris add-on). You should see an interactive presentation like the ones I produced!

3. Upload your files to a web server (optional)

If you want your presentation to be online, do the following:

1. Rename the folder containing your PicLens Publisher-created files to something without spaces (e.g. preso)
2. Rename gallery.html within the preso folder to index.html
3. Connect to your web server and navigate to where you want the preso folder uploaded to
4. Upload the preso folder generated by PicLens Publisher to your web server

That’s it! You’ve created your first Cooliris-powered, interactive presentation. Details on how link to websites from your slides, name them, customize the icon at the top, and use a Wiimote to present will feature in a follow up post.

* Cooliris is also available for Internet Explorer and Safari, but I’m not entirely sure why you’d want to use those…

Posted: July 7th, 2009
Categories: Technology
Tags: Cooliris, Firefox, guide, howto, Keynote, Open Source, OpenOffice.org, PicLens Publisher, Powerpoint, presentation
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I don’t know about you, but I’m never sure where to link to when I want people to know a bit more about me. For example, when emailing someone who might like to know who I am and where I’m coming from, do I link here, to my blog? To my Twitter stream? To my FriendFeed? Sometimes I just pick the one I think most appropriate, sometimes I hedge my bets and link to all of them!

Thankfully, I no longer have that problem. Why? I just link to my Google Profile! It’s very easy to do – simply visit http://www.google.com/profiles/ Here’s what mine looks like:

You should probably claim your preferred username (e.g. ‘dajbelshaw’) ASAP  in case someone else claims it. Once you’ve got it, you can use your favourite URL-shortening site to make it even easier to remember and add wherever you wish – e.g.

http://bit.ly/dajbelshaw

I’ve already been contacted a couple of times via my Google Profile and really like the way it brings my accounts together into one, easily accessible place. I don’t think it will be long before typing ‘Doug Belshaw’ into Google will result in landing at my Google Profile. And, I reckon, that’s no bad thing…

Posted: April 27th, 2009
Categories: Technology
Tags: FriendFeed, Google, howto, profile, Search Engines, Twitter
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Powerpoint is dead. Well, at least if you want to impress people. Over at elearnr.org I’ve done a quick overview for ways in which you can present using different methods. One of these is the wonderful Prezi.

For an example of what Prezi looks like in practice, check out a sample one I used in a lesson here: http://prezi.com/5619/

As part of an interview I’ve got this week I need to do a presentation. I’m using a large image and zooming in on various parts of it during the presentation; Prezi is perfect for this!

Whilst I could use my iPhone and AirMouse to do this, it depends upon a laptop and the iPhone being on the same wi-fi network. I can’t guarantee that there will be wi-fi, so need something else. I began wondering whether I could use the Apple Remote I’ve got with my Macbook Pro. I found the answer tucked away at the bottom of this thread, but whilst it’s not hard, it’s not immediately straightforward.

Here’s what to do….

5 steps to presenting full-screen using Prezi and an Apple Remote

1. Download your Prezi presentation:

2. Download and install iRed Lite, a free program that remaps your Apple Remote to allow you to use it in the same way as a mouse.

3. Open iRed Lite and choose the option ‘Mouse Control’ in the drop-down menu to the bottom-left of the window:

4. Hold down the Menu button on your Apple Remote until the iRed Lite OSD comes up. Click the centre Play/Pause button and your should be able to start using your Apple Remote to control the cursor!

5. Unzip and open the Prezi presentation you downloaded* and press Apple-F to go fullscreen (it’s also on the View menu). Place the cursor over the ‘next’ button in Prezi using the trackpad or mouse, as the speed of movement with the Apple Remote is rather small. Clicking the Play/Pause button on the Apple Remote should now enable you to move forward through your presentation.

* If you want to present directly from the Prezi website, you’ll need a full-screen web browser. Plainview is a good, free option for this task.

Posted: March 21st, 2009
Categories: Technology
Tags: Apple Remote, Guide iRed Lite, howto, presentation, Prezi
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