Uncategorized – Page 2 – Dr David Parsons

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Converting a Google Doc to a Kindle Format .mobi File

Feb 26, 2015 by daveparsonsnz

I recently had a document, written using Google Docs, that I wanted to make available in Kindle format (a .mobi file.) The thing was, I didn’t want to publish it through Amazon, I just wanted to provide a file that could be copied to a Kindle by anyone who wanted to access the material in that format. It turned out to be a little more complicated than I first thought, so if anyone else wants to do the same, I’ll explain how I did it. The thing to remember is that Google and Amazon are competitors, so they’re not going to make it easy to go from one to the other are they? No indeed…

My first thought was to export my Google Doc to Microsoft Word format. The catch seems to be that the usual way of converting a Word document to Kindle format is to upload it using Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing. This wasn’t really what I wanted to do, as I had no intention of publishing the document via Amazon. I just wanted a tool that would do a local file conversion on my machine. There are some third party apps that claim to do that with a Word file but I picked one at random and it was pretty flaky.

My next approach was to use KindleGen, a command line tool provided by Amazon. This works on several input file formats, but not Microsoft Word. It does, however, convert HTML documents, which is one of the formats that you can export from Google Docs. The problem is that the default CSS styles of the HTML document that Google Docs gives you are not well suited to Kindle. The font sizes will be all over the place because Google Docs generates a style sheet that uses point values for font sizes that look really bad on a Kindle screen. I found when reading the document on my Kindle that only the largest font size setting was readable, and that was too big. The last thing you want is a Kindle doc that doesn’t look like the other books on the reader’s Kindle. For similar reasons I also chose to remove the font family settings, preferring to let the Kindle use its default fonts. However you can leave these alone if you want.

Another issue with the default HTML format is that a couple of useful meta tags are missing from the HTML. Anyway, all this is easily fixed! What does make life a bit difficult is that Google Docs generates the names of its class styles inconsistently. Yes, that’s right, every time it generates an HTML document, it randomly renames the class styles! This completely stuffs up any attempt you might make to set up a reusable style sheet. Thank you Google! (not).

Anyway, here’s the process I followed:

Google Doc to .mobi, step-by-step

1. Start with a Google Doc. Here’s a very simple one

2. Create a new working folder. I called mine ‘kindlegen’

3. Download KindleGen from the Amazon KindleGen page. It is downloaded as a zipped archive

4. Unzip the archive into your folder

4. Export your Google Doc in HTML format: File -> Download as… -> Web Page (.html, zipped)

5. Unzip the HTML page into your working folder

6. Open the HTML page in a suitable HTML editor. If you don’t have one, a text editor will do (though it makes it harder). Here’s what it looks like in Notepad. Not very human readable as there are no line feeds. You can manually put them in if you find it easier to navigate that way. With a proper HTML editor with color syntax highlighting it’s a lot easier.

7. You will see that near the beginning of the HTML source is a ‘style’ element containing a large number of internal CSS styles. I changed the font sizes of all of these as I couldn’t be bothered working out which ones were actually being used in my document. You need to replace all the ‘pt’ values for the ‘font-size’ elements with ’em’ values. I chose similar values, for example for 11pt, which is the standard paragraph font size, I used 1em. For 16pt headings I used 1.5 em, and so on. Basically, it’s more or less a divide by 10 exercise.

For example, here’s the generated entry for the paragraph (p) tag (unlike the various class styles the HTML element styles are at least consistent)

p{color:#000000;font-size:11pt;margin:0;font-family:”Arial”}

My updated version looks like this (I also removed the font-family):

p{color:#000000;font-size:1em;margin:0}

I didn’t find there was a need to replace any of the other parts of the styles. KindleGen will ignore any that don’t apply.

8. If you like, also remove all the ‘font-family’ entries (as above). The Kindle will be able to cope with the fonts used by the Google Doc if you leave them in.

7. By default, the ‘title’ element will contain the original file name, which may not actually be your preferred document title. If you need to, change the content of the ‘title’ element at the beginning of the file to the one you want

<title>My Book Title</title>

8. Near the top of the HTML source you should find the following ‘meta’ element, between the title element and the style element.

<meta content=”text/html; charset=UTF-8″ http-equiv=”content-type”>

Leave this alone, but add the following element above or beneath it:

<meta name=”author” content=”my name“>

If you don’t do this, when the document appears in your Kindle book list, there will be no author name associated with it.

If you want your document to have a cover image (a JPEG), you will also need to add the following element

<meta name=”cover” content=”mycoverfile.jpg”>

This assumes that your cover JPEG is going to be in the same folder as the HTML document when you convert it. If you have a cover image, add it to your working folder.

9. Open a command window in your working folder and run KindleGen against your HTML file:

kindlegen myhtmlfile.html

You may get some warnings, for example if you haven’t defined a cover image, or there are CSS styles that don’t apply. These won’t matter. In this example I didn’t provide a cover file, and the ‘max-width’ CSS property is being ignored.

Assuming there are no fatal errors, the tool will create a .mobi file in the same folder.

10. Connect your Kindle using a USB cable. Navigate to the ‘documents’ folder on the Kindle and copy your .mobi file into it (if you want you can put it in a subfolder, The Kindle will still pick it up.)

11. Eject the Kindle and check the book list. You should find your document has been added and is readable.

Here’s my file on my elderly Kindle.

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Confessions of a Citeaholic – one man’s battle with academic social media addiction

Dec 20, 2014 #academic social media, #citeaholic by daveparsonsnz

My name is Dave and I am a citeaholic. I had been ignoring the signs for too long. Knowing my Google Scholar citation count without having to go and look it up, checking the impact factor of the journals I’d published in, posting every publication, however trivial, to multiple different academic social media sites.

The moment of truth came when academia.edu claimed I was in the top 4% of academics (based on some kind of gullibility index I assume). They sure know how to suck you in to their murky world. They wanted me to tweet it, they even put a Twitter button right there on the page (‘go on, you know you want to…’) I have to confess I even pressed it, started writing a tweet before, thank god, I came to my senses, deleted it, and resolved to get off the hard stuff, and try to get back to reality.

It all seemed so harmless in the beginning. Joining Facebook to just, you know, try it out, an innocent looking invite to LinkedIn from someone I thought I could trust. An occasional tweet but nothing, you know, dependent. Later it started getting more risky. Met some guy at the pub who told me about academia.edu. He told me it wasn’t addictive, just soft stuff. Trouble is, you can’t stop at just one publication. It starts with conference papers, then you feel the urge to go further and upload book chapters and before you know it you’ve given them all your journal articles and they still want more. Later on it was peer pressure. A group of so-called collaborators insisted I join them on ResearchGate. Then I started getting strangers asking me to supply them with copyright material. I told them it’s illegal, but they said everyone else is doing it, that it’s a victimless crime. Eventually I started getting threats. If I didn’t give them access I wouldn’t get any more citations. In the end I was mainlining Google Scholar like there was no tomorrow and even, god forgive me, experimenting with Microsoft Academic Search.

I woke up to the horrible truth about what the Guardian recently called, in the context of the UK’s Research Excellence Framework, ‘academic narcissism’, realising I was surrounded by pushers (‘you have a new follower’, ‘someone searched for you on Google’, ‘John asked for a copy of……’)

If anyone knows a cure for this terrible addiction, please let me know. In the meantime I will publish this blog post, which will automatically get posted to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn… Aaaaarrghhhh!!!!

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Mobile Citizen Science: nQuire-it Site Launched

Dec 12, 2014 #Mobile Learning, #nQuire-it, #Science Projects, #Sense-it, #Sensors by daveparsonsnz

One of the most important aspects of using a mobile device for learning is being able to use it to interact with your environment. A major part of that is the various sensors that enable you to gather data from your learning context. That has not always been easy to do in the past, with the need to find and install various apps that would allow you to access different combinations of sensors on your device.

Thankfully, the nQuire-it citizen inquiry site has been launched to help young people to develop practical science skills, and the nQuire-it platform includes the Sense-it app, the first open application to unlock the full range of sensors on mobile devices, so that people of any age can do science projects on their phones and tablets.

Sense-it provides a useful list of the sensors available on your particular device. My ‘legacy’ Galaxy SIII doesn’t have anything like the full set of sensors available on some of the newest phones, but still has a reasonable selection, as this screen capture from Sense-it’s handy ‘show/hide sensors’ tool shows.

Each sensor has an associated tool within the app. These appear on the main screen.

Each app makes it easy to gather data from the selected sensor. Here, for example, is the light sensor being used to measure the light level in my office.

The nQuire-it site has lots of projects where you can try out these sensors, and you can also create your own projects. This should prove a great resource for science teachers and learners.

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Welcome to the Machine

Dec 7, 2014 #ASCILITE, #Intelligent Agents, #Learning Analytics by daveparsonsnz

It seems that, for learning designers, learning analytics (mostly using log and performance data gathered from learning management systems) is the new black. I recently attended the annual conference of the Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education (ASCILITE), where every fourth presentation, it seemed, had something to do with learning analytics. Much of the content of these presentations was on the ‘what’ of learning analytics, i.e. what is technically possible in gathering data about how students are learning? The following question is ‘how’; how do we use this data? Finally we have to address the ‘why’ question; why are we doing this and what is our goal?

Perhaps the most interesting observation was given by Jaclyn Broadbent, talking about the Desire2Learn Intelligent Agent tool: http://ascilite2014.otago.ac.nz/sharing-practice/#78

One of the tasks of these agents is to sent automated, customised emails to students, not only task reminders but also positive feedback on good performance. i.e. the system knows what the students are doing and knows how to send targeted emails that reflect this performance. The ‘why’, of course, is to provide positive feedback in the hope that this will sustain good performance. Apparently, these automated emails are very well received by the students, but hardly any of them realise that these messages are being generated by a machine, rather than being sent personally by the course tutors. Perhaps even more interestingly, the few who did realise that these emails were automated still liked receiving them. Perhaps this is partly because the course tutors created the message templates, so their personalities were still evident in the generated emails. I’d be interested to know if this attitude still prevails as tools like this become more and more common, and the novelty factor wears off. Once every student in higher education is receiving encouraging emails sent by the machine, will they still regard them as positive and valuable? Or will they become the next generation of annoying corporate spam? I guess in the end it depends on the content. As long as we are giving students insights they may not have gained on their own, for example their relative performance compared to their peers on a course, our cyber-motivation may still hold its value.

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The Next New Normal

Nov 15, 2014 #connectivity, #future technology by daveparsonsnz

I spent some time over the weekend throwing away old data CDs. Many of these were for courses I’d delivered on customer sites. These days the course tools are shared on a (soon to be obsolete) USB 2 stick. Others were archive disks for my digital photos. I didn’t quite get to throwing those out, but as I put them back in the cupboard I reflected that my current laptop doesn’t have a CD drive (though I have an external drive that I hardly ever use.) These days all my photos get uploaded automatically to DropBox as soon as I’m on WiFi network; no more cables, manual file copying and CD burning. No doubt, should I ever need these CDs again, I’ll have nothing left that can read them. My kids don’t respond to emails, I have to message them using social media. My colleagues judge each other on the dubious statistics generated automatically by the search algorithms in Google Scholar Citations. I video call people on the other side of the planet for free on a disposable mobile device. All of this is, of course, the new normal. Something happened over the last few years that moved our lives into the socio-mobile cloud where we gave up ownership and control for convenience and immediacy.

The question I find myself asking as I trash my old CDs is what will the next new normal be? What will happen to us in the future that will make Facebook, WiFi, smartphones and cloud storage look like clunky old museum pieces? Relentless connectivity will be the first to arrive, since it is already well on the way. The immediate casualty of that will be that the blessed sanctuary of the aeroplane will be absorbed in to the all consuming expectations of 24/7 availability. We will lose what little control we have over our means of communication as the relative privacy of corporate email gets overtaken by misguided attempts to make us more ‘social’. We will lose ownership of any and all data that we generate, as private storage becomes obsolete. We will be unable to define ourselves in any domain other than the digital; your online profiles will be more powerful than the real you. At some point, we will be required to sell the last fragments of our individuality to the needs of corporate greed and national security. If the past is anything to go by, we will do it willingly and blindly, trading our inheritance for a few trinkets.

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Re-engineering coderetreats – bringing design to the fore

Oct 16, 2014 #coderetreat, #reflective practice, #software design principles, #test driven development by daveparsonsnz

For the last year or so, one of my research activities has been exploring the design and delivery of coderetreats. Our first article on this topic Coderetreats: Reflective Practice and the Game of Life was published in IEEE Software, the first piece of academic work to be published in this area. In that article we reported on how running a standard coderetreat with our students helped develop their reflective practice. In a post late last year I mentioned the Global Day of Coderetreat. We also gathered data from that event, which raised some interesting questions about how well these activities support the use of test driven development (TDD) and learning about the four principles of simple design. The coderetreat website (coderetreat.org) says that ‘Practicing the basic principles of modular and object-oriented design, developers can improve their ability to write code that minimizes the cost of change over time.’ These principles are outlined elsewhere as the ‘XP Simplity Rules‘. However there was some evidence from our research that the usual approaches to coderetreats were not particularly effective at making these design rules explicitly understood. We also observed that many participants struggled to get started with their first unit test.

To try to address these issues, we re-engineered our most recent coderetreat so that it scaffolded the intended learning outcomes explicitly. For the first session we provided the first unit test, and suggested the second. This had a remarkable effect on how quickly the participants got into the TDD cycle. We also designed each session so that it directly addressed one of the four principles of simple design, by providing various code and test components, building on the concept of the legacy coderetreats that have been run by others. In fact the last session was very much in the legacy coderetreat style, where we provided some poorly written ‘legacy code’ without tests, which the participants had to refactor by first adding unit tests.

We have yet to analyse the data we gathered in detail, but we do believe that there is a lot of scope to take the coderetreat idea forward with new ways of ensuring that the key elements of design understanding are made explicit in the outcomes.

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Supervisor-Research Student Translation Guide

Jun 8, 2014 #academic humour, #research supervisor, #translation guide by daveparsonsnz

Recently we had an issue with one of our postgraduate students who was disappointed with the grade he received for his research report. He had been under the impression from his supervisor that his work was of a high standard, but it was assessed as being very poor. It struck me that this unfortunate circumstance may well have been a simple matter of miscommunication rather than anything else. It reminded me of a document, of uncertain provenance, that claims to be an ‘Anglo-EU translation guide’ and appears on many sites across the web. It consists of a table with the following columns: ‘what the British say’, ‘what the British mean’ and ‘what others understand’. With acknowledgements to the originators, I have put together my own version, which attempts to provide a ‘supervisor-research student translation guide’.

What the research supervisor says	What the research supervisor means	What the research student thinks has been said
You have chosen an interesting topic	The project is both boring and impossible	I am a genius
You may have missed one or two references	You have not read or understood anything	My literature review is almost complete
You may need to sharpen the focus of your conclusions	Your work has made no contribution whatsoever	My conclusions are important
I hear what you say	I disagree entirely and do not expect to see this in the thesis	I must put this in the thesis
With the greatest respect…	I think you are an idiot	They are listening to me
That’s not bad	That’s good	That’s poor
That is a very brave proposal	You are insane	They think I have courage
Quite good	A bit disappointing	Quite good
I would suggest…	Do it or you will fail	Think about the idea, but do what you like
Oh, incidentally/ by the way	The primary purpose of our discussion is…	That is not very important
I was a bit disappointed that	I am annoyed that	It really doesn’t matter
Very interesting	That is clearly nonsense	They are impressed
I’ll bear it in mind	I’ve forgotten it already	They will probably do it
I may have misunderstood, but…	You have completely missed the point	They have misunderstood
Perhaps you should write this up as a paper	If you won’t listen to me, perhaps a rejection will wake you up	They think my work is publishable
I almost agree	I don’t agree at all	They agree
I only have a few minor comments	Please re-write completely	They have found a few typos
Could we consider some other options?	I don’t like your idea	They have not yet decided
Correct me if I’m wrong	I’m right, don’t contradict me	They are wrong and need correcting
Up to a point	Not in the slightest	Partially
It’s time to start nominating your examiners	Damn, we’re running out of time	I am nearly finished
The examiners have suggested a few changes	You deserved to fail but they have generously given you six months to try to salvage the thesis	I have a doctorate, I will start applying for jobs

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Validating Hofstede? Some reflections on cultural differences

Mar 30, 2014 #cultural differences, #Hofstede, #New Zealand by daveparsonsnz

This semester, for the second year running, I tried out a small experiment with one of my classes to see if the students cultural profile matched Hofstede’s results for New Zealand:

http://geert-hofstede.com/new-zealand.html

I asked the students to fill in the VSM94 questionnaire, then put their results (anonymously) into a shared Google doc that calculated the results according to the algorithms outlined in the VSM94 manual. The sample size was only 30, so take the results with a pinch of salt, but the outcome was very interesting, and replicated the results from last year. Despite the fact that the majority of my students were not born in New Zealand, the results of our survey correlated quite closely with Hofstede’s figures, apart from masculinity:

Cultural Measure	Hofstede Result	Student Result
Power Distance	22	20
Individualism	79	72
Masculinity	58	33
Uncertainty Avoidance	49	58

Certainly wider New Zealand society has masculine traits with a strong emphasis on competing in sport, aggressive outdoor activities and terrible driving, but perhaps students have a different subculture? However it is the similarities that interest me more than the differences, suggesting that we absorb the culture around us quite quickly, given the short time that some of my students have been in New Zealand.

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Strong passwords, stronger extortionists

Feb 6, 2014 #david miranda, #extortion, #password, #security, #security services, #Syed Hussain, #USB memory stick by daveparsonsnz

I’ve posted before about passwords, specifically about the large number of extremely weak passwords revealed by the Adobe hackers. I recently saw a story on the BBC web site about a password that the security forces couldn’t crack. Here’s the article:

Man jailed for refusing to give police USB stick password

The password was $ur4ht4ub4h8, apparently a play on words relating to a chapter of the Koran. Next time some piece of software insists your password must include a mix of upper and lower case letters you can tell it to go take a hike.

If the password was so uncrackable, you may wonder, how come it’s in the article? Well as usual the security of your password is only part of the story, the authorities have many ways of extorting your passwords out of you, as this article describes:

David Miranda feels ‘invaded’ after password disclosure

The moral of the story, if there is one, might be that however secure your data is, you yourself are more easily hacked.

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Social entropy in software

Dec 8, 2013 #iPod, #Lance Armstrong, #McAfee, #Nike by daveparsonsnz

One of the less obvious aspects of software entropy is changes in its social context. I use the Nike + iPod software when I go out running. Despite a recent software upgrade, if I run further than my previous sessions I get a congratulatory message from Lance Armstrong. I don’t imagine Nike really want me to take drugs, but for whatever reason, the context of the message has changed due to reasons outside of the software itself. It started me wondering what social entropy risks might be faced by software. I wonder, for example, if McAfee has experienced any negative affects from the bizarre behaviour of its founder? I’d be interested to hear any thoughts on this subject.

Academic

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