Padlet walls URLs improve

It is good to see Padlet (once Wallwisher) continuing to add features. Padlet converts web pages into 'walls' where you can create and share information snippets such as links, files and photos. Today we see the ability to adopt a suitable user name and have that appear in the URL used to share your walls in your social media. So my small collection of cloud information gems can be found at:

http://padlet.com/MichaelRees/cloudgallimaufry

Padlet can generate your wall in a number of formats like PDf, Excel and CSV. Another generated format is a snapshot image:

Buffer overflows and collapses

As a keen social media citizen I have been using social sharing Buffer service free account quite happily for many months. I routed information gems to Buffer mainly from my preferred Feedly RSS aggregator and news reading service. At convenient scheduled times Buffer releases these updates to my Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ CloudScholar page. My tweets are automatically repeated on my Facebook news stream for my diminishing friends list on that service.

Suddenly last week Buffer started sending unsubtle messages:

You've completely filled the buffer for the individual plan, nice work! Upgrading to Awesome gets you more space...

So no more buffering for me as I can't possibly justify paying US$102/year for their 'awesome' service. I realise they operate a freemium business model but just terminating the free service after a fixed number of updates seems severe. I won't have started using Buffer had I known this limitation at the start.

Fortunately the currently free IFTTT service glues together much of the world's social media services. As it has done for several of my acquaintances IFTTT has provided a reasonably smooth equivalent to my lost Buffer service. Using an IFTTT recipe that repeats any of my tweets with a chosen hashtag, #cast in my case, to LinkedIn. I now have Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook covered. Feedly provides the same quick link to generate tweets as it did for Buffer so convenience is not sacrificed.

I have admit that so far IFTTT has not been able to send a tweet to my Google+ Cloudscholar page. If anyone knows how to achieve this please comment below.

Overall I am quite happy with my switch to IFTTT.

Telstra to crowdsource Wi-Fi across Australia

In a game-changer for users of the Cloud in Australia we see plans from Telstra for a nationwide and international Wi-Fi network. While not a free service, users are charged on their own broadband plan provided they opt to share part of their own Wi-Fi service in a secure way.

The Telstra service incorporates technology from Spain's Fon who offer a global Wi-Fi sharing network. It appears that Telstra will add about 8,000 new Wi-Fi hotspots in high usage locations across the country.
For Cloud users this is very good news as in principle it frees users from relying solely on mobile phone networks hotspots to access the Internet while away from home or work. Read more details in the post from GigaOM. Because of the lack of copper in the ground for my landline service I am forced to use the Telstra cable internet service. I can't wait to sign up.

Publishing in the Cloud

In October 2013 I created a short MOOC called The Cloud and You on Udemy.com. I scripted the dozen or so 3-4 minute video lectures and there are a couple of Cloud workshops in downloadable text documents. It seemed a good idea to turn these texts into my first venture into a Kindle book - another Cloud-based format. This finally came to fruition a week ago.

Those who have self-published on Amazon will know they recommend you create the text in Word and save in filtered HTML format before uploading to Amazon. Sadly initial experiments showed the filtering still left huge quantities of extraneous Word HTML and lists and images weren't treated well. I soon turned to editing in pure HTML to achieve a clean layout on Kindle.

When I therefore needed an HTML editor at this point my thoughts naturally turned to a Cloud-based text solution. The editor obviously needed to be aware of HTML and CSS syntax highlighted sensibly and provide some auto-completion to avoid mismatched tags. An HTML pretty printer would also be useful.

Having some small experience with the Cloud9 IDE I turned to it, and since it supports Github repositories this again was a natural choice. And so it was these two free Cloud services allowed me to create my first Kindle book. The HTML pretty print feature of Cloud9, triggered with a single key combination, was particularly useful in spotting tag start/end errors and keeping the whole text easy to manage as shown to the right where the generated overall structure is shown rather than the detail of the text itself.

There was a lot of fiddly but simple copy and pasting of the script text out of PowerPoint presentations into the book text then adding some HTML tags. Little of the text changed as I adopted the more casual style of the online course lecture scripts for the book itself. The versioning of every text file on Cloud9 came into its own when I suddenly noticed half the text was missing due to an Internet connection interruption. Reverting to a version of a few minutes before was very easy. However it forced me to increase the frequency of Git syncs to my Github repo which of course acts as the backup.

Even the final proof reading and the actual layout of the book the Kindle can be done from the Kindle Direct Publishing web site via a Kindle emulator running in a browser window.

It was my hope that I could actually create and publish my ebook just using my Chromebook, ie completely within a browser. As it turned out I did cheat in this regard doing most of the authoring in Cloud9 using Chrome on a Windows 8 machine to exploit the excellent text expansion capabilities of the much praised AutoHotKey app - it's so much easier to type cay[ instead of The Cloud and You! I wish we had an workable equivalent of AutoHotKey on Chrome OS. As well there is a much more comprehensive Kindle converter and emulator on Windows which allows you to see how the book will look on a wide range of Kindle devices and apps.

One downside of editing your Kindle book text directly in HTML is you miss out on the automated Table of Contents (TOC) features of Word. You need to insert <a name="..."> tags on the headings and build the TOC entries with <a href="..."> tags. In my short how-to book of only about 70 pages and a couple of dozen TOC entries the extra work is small. However in a longer volume that also requires an index this would soon become tedious.

I enjoyed putting together my first simple Kindle book and found the self-publishing learning curve relatively short and painless. Being able to do it with Cloud apps was even more satisfying.

Bond uses my Cloud and You MOOC again

For the second semester running business students at Bond taking the Information Systems in Business subject INFT11-120 have been given free access to my Cloud and You MOOC offered on the Udemy platform.

This MOOC is available to all at:
  https://www.udemy.com/the-cloud-and-you/

50 years on my Computer Science School voted #1

Great to see my alma mater University of Birmingham School of Computer Science and  IT coming #1 in the Guardian University Guide 2014.

Reading for an applied maths degree I took the first ever FORTRAN course offered in September 1963 exactly 50 years ago. Overnight this single course changed my career and I have been studying, teaching and researching computer science every since.

My GrannyBook Raspberry Pi Emerges

At the first MakerCamp on the Gold Coast we were asked to suggest a project we were working on. I suggested I would like to make a GrannyBook based on the Raspberry Pi, the $35 computer I estimated would do the job. Loosely defined, my idea is for a very cheap device, under $100, that would allow your granny to turn her old Windows XP box into something akin to a Chromebook. In other words any person with an obsolete PC that still works could throw out their old processor box and replace it with a small device that would boot straight to a browser within which all normal use of a computer could be conducted - a very cheap and easy cloud computer.

I duly purchased a $60 the Raspberry Pi kit from Steve at Gold Coast Techspace which included the Raspberry Pi board, an SD card completely configured with the OS and an HDMI cable. On eBay Australia I bought a clear acrylic case for less than $10. To use my existing monitor I had to add a $5 HDMI to DVI adapter. Finally with another eBay purchase from the shop that supplied the case I added a $10 Comfast Wi-Fi adapter rather than use the built-in Ethernet port. In total this amounted to a $85 investment.

After plugging in a USB keyboard I added a standard non-powered USB adapter to take a USB mouse and the Comfast Wi-Fi adapter. Then came the big moment of the first boot and true to form the RPi within about 15 seconds opened in the desktop having determined the monitor resolution perfectly. To my surprise and delight there were drivers present for the Comfast Wi-Fi adapter and I simply had to login to my home Wi-Fi network.

The on-board Midori browser fired up perfectly and I logged in to my Google account. Thereafter I was in the usual Google wonderland with access to email, calendar, sites, blog, and all the other goodies - in other words a good approximation to a Chromebook.

The inevitable downsides are present:

• the less than lightning speed of the boot sequence compared to a real Chromebook
• the pauses as web pages are loaded in the browser although performance overall is very adequate
• the lack of Google Chrome and associated plugins, but further investigation might solve this

Nevertheless for a very small investment and an hour of my time I am well on the way to a viable GrannyBook. More anon.