In this latest draft I have added a not quite complete chapter on
Making Shared Activities. The part that is missing is on using DBus
Tubes to remotely call methods, and it's missing because I've never
done it. I do plan to learn how to do this, come up with a decent
example program (something
I just finished writing another chapter of the book, this one on
adding Text to Speech to your Activities. I've also made various
additions and corrections to the rest of it. If you want to check out
what I have a PDF created with OBJAVI! is available here:
Aleksey,
I did consider mentioning the word tracking feature you put in your
example. However, when I tried your example with actual book text
rather than letting it speak the source code of the program it seemed
to actually skip speaking some of the words. The markup version was
more robust.
...@freudenbergs.de wrote:
On 12.01.2010, at 16:43, Jim Simmons wrote:
http://objavi.flossmanuals.net/books/ActivitiesGuideSugar-en-2010.01.11-23.05.32.pdf
Very nice, Jim!
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a Sugar activity should be
written in Python.
However, there are other means
On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 10:25 AM, Jim Simmons nices...@gmail.com wrote:
Caryl,
Not sure what you mean by a straight Fedora 12 CD. The only Fedora 12
CD I'm familiar with runs F12 as a live CD system and gives you the
option to install it to your hard disk by double-clicking an icon
Caryl,
If you do choose to use a Boot Helper CD make sure you test booting up
from it before you go. When I tried Blueberry myself I found that I
could boot off the USB itself just fine on a newer PC that supports
booting directly from USB. However, I tried using two other older
machines that
30, 2009 at 8:44 PM, Aleksey Lim alsr...@member.fsf.org wrote:
On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 05:37:49PM -0500, Wade Brainerd wrote:
On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 5:23 PM, Jim Simmons nices...@gmail.com wrote:
My guess is that we get few reviews because you need to create an
account on ASLO before you can
Wade,
My guess is that we get few reviews because you need to create an
account on ASLO before you can do it. A normal Activity user has no
other use for such an account. If you could post a review without
logging in perhaps more people would do it.
I'd love to see more reviews of my own
Sean,
Check out the Children's Library here:
http://www.archive.org/details/iacl
There are several books in Arabic, Farsi, and other languages. The
top rated Arabic books are short, well illustrated, and aimed at young
children so they might be good choices in DJVU format. Some
possibilities:
Sean,
The Internet Archive has some really beautiful children's books.
Unfortunately, their EPUB offerings are full of typos and the books in
that format look anemic in comparison to the DJVU versions. You might
consider using DJVU instead of EPUB for this reason.
Among the most beautiful books
Chris,
I agree with Gerald on either Get Books or Get IA Books (not both).
Get Books is still being worked on by Sayamindu Dasgupta but perhaps
he could get it in shape for inclusion in time. Right now it doesn't
work on .82, but I can't see that being an issue.
Get IA Books works on either but
supplement to our Blueberry press releases.
Thanks!
Caroline
On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 11:14 AM, Jim Simmons nices...@gmail.com wrote:
Caroline,
I'm unable to watch the YouTube video but if I was a teacher that
wanted to have children create their own books I might recommend using
View Slides
Caroline,
I'm unable to watch the YouTube video but if I was a teacher that
wanted to have children create their own books I might recommend using
View Slides to collect and organize image files created in other
tools. For instance, children could get images from the Internet
using Browse,
Caroline,
Read Etexts has *not* removed the book search function. However, it
only appears when you launch from the Activity ring, and NOT when you
open a book that is already in the Journal.
As for books with pictures, you can't get those with Read Etexts.
What you can use is my other book
Tomeu,
Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive already will host any book
that is in the public domain. (I think they'll take Creative Commons
stuff too). Most of the books are in English because that's the
native language of most of the volunteers, but that could change if it
needed to. I
Caryl,
I don't know what your budget is, but you can get a refurbished PC for
under $100 here:
http://www.pcsurplusonline.com/index.cfm
I have bought several computers from this place. They are sold with
no OS installed, sometimes with no hard drive, but generally they have
a CD-ROM drive, a
Caryl,
The textbooks I saw on the site were all PDF's with few illustrations,
so they should work just fine in the Read Activity, even on the XO.
James Simmons
Date: Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:40:04 -0700
From: Caryl Bigenho cbige...@hotmail.com
Subject: [IAEP] OS Internet Books for High School
This is an interesting article, but not very illuminating. Can anyone
figure out what they're doing now that they were not doing before to
make the books usable by XO users? It isn't clear from the article.
They have had books in PDF format since before the XO existed, so
what's new here?
James
but practically speaking that's all you can use on the
XO with Read.
Sounds like I'm not the only one who's confused.
James Simmons
On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 10:08 AM, Tomeu Vizoso to...@sugarlabs.org wrote:
On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 14:44, Jim Simmons nices...@gmail.com wrote:
This is an interesting
Sean,
I have had a few email exchanges with the Rural Design Collective. My
understanding of what they're doing is that they have a static website
on the stick which can be navigated using the Browse Activity. The
books will be in the DJVU format the last I heard (only a week or two
ago).
Albert,
The original question was about developing Activities for a classroom
assignment, with the idea that these Activities could be widely
distributed. With these two constraints Python is the winner by
default. If you need to write Activities for school you need good
documentation on how to
Caryl,
I would agree with the others that Python is your best choice. Most
Activities use at least some Python, and all three of mine are
entirely in Python. You might look at the source for View Slides,
Read Etexts and Get Internet Archive Books as examples of what can be
done entirely in
Caroline,
It should be pretty easy to convert documents from Word or PDF to a
format that Read Etexts can use, now that I have added support for
word wrapped text and RTF. In Word, do a Save As... from the File
menu and choose Plain Text. This option in Word 2003 gives you a
preview of what the
Tomeu,
I hadn't thought of that. I'm going to subscribe to that list and
send them the same information.
Thanks,
James Simmons
On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 2:27 AM, Tomeu Vizosoto...@sugarlabs.org wrote:
On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 23:42, Jim Simmonsnices...@gmail.com wrote:
The usual automatic
The usual automatic announcement went out to the Sugar-Devel list but
I thought it might be appropriate to mention something here too.
The latest View Slides can now extract an image from a slide show and
make a Journal entry with the correct MIME type. This was something
that someone asked for
.
Dave C.
From: Caroline Meeks carol...@solutiongrove.com
To: Jim Simmons nices...@gmail.com
Cc: David Farning dfarn...@sugarlabs.org; Dave C
davewebproducti...@yahoo.com; Bastien bastiengue...@googlemail.com; It's
An Education Project List iaep
much
easier. Adds music with guaranteed usage rights and annotations. I wonder
if we can add those things on YouTube, then download it as MP4 and upload to
dailymotion?
http://screencast.com/t/9uiIVx9ikAf
On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 10:47 AM, Jim Simmons nices...@gmail.com wrote:
Dave and David
Caroline,
The plain text version on the website will not work with Read Etexts,
because that Activity is designed to work with Gutenberg etexts which
don't require word-wrapping. However it is possible that the
Gutenberg site itself will have a version in the correct format,
because I believe
I wasn't able to get the Baen library RTF download to work with Browse
in my Sugar test environment either. You click on the link and
nothing happens.
James Simmons
On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 8:43 AM, Luke Faraonel...@faraone.cc wrote:
On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 09:15, Jim Simmons nices...@gmail.com
Caroline,
In honor of Little Brother being released as a plain text file I am
working on fixing Read Etexts so it can deal with files that need word
wrapping as well as those which do not. I've made a good start on
this but I want to do a better job of regression testing than I have
been doing
Yesterday I edited my Get IA Books--Read demo video and posted it on
the SugarLabs video site. I also removed the original ReadEtexts:The
Movie video and replaced it with a reencoded version. Because of
modifications I made to the mencoder.sh script run by Kino I no longer
have distorted text on
David Farning gave me an account on video.sugarlabs.org and I've
posted my videos there, both raw and edited.
I was looking at Kino this morning, at the DV files it creates and the
mencoder script it uses to encode them and I think I have some insight
into why the text in my edited videos is
Dennis,
Until yesterday I was one of those mere mortals myself, then David
gave me an account. If you think you could contribute something to
these videos as you are proposing then you would need an account too.
This site is for works in progress and raw footage. When something is
good enough
I was posting my videos to public_html on my shell.sugarlabs.org
account before. For work in progress it should be OK.
It seems to me that you can embed a google video in a page kept
elsewhere. That might be a way to make finished videos world
viewable. I could try embedding my movie in the
Dave and David,
Yesterday I did a screen capture of Read Etexts in action, then fired
up Kino to edit it and add title cards. The results are not awful,
but perhaps could be improved with better editing software. I have
posted the original capture in Ogg Video format, plus my finished
product
Dennis,
I think screencasting is a neat idea but the hardware most likely to
run Sugar won't have the horsepower to capture a full size screen and
in the case of the XO might not have enough disk space to do it
either. See my other emails for my experiences making videos like
this.
It may do a
Dennis,
I use gtk-recordmydesktop to do the screencasts, running Sugar at
800x600 on an IBM NetVista I bought surplus. I then use Kino to edit.
You *might* be able to get a screencast at a higher resolution with a
more powerful box, but the video would end up at 640x480 anyway so
maybe that
Dennis,
There is no audio on either video.
It looks like most of the Sugar videos are on dailymotion. I would
post mine there if I was convinced that nobody could improve on what I
did. I was hoping that Dave C or someone else could take the original
.ogv and use Final Cut Pro to make
Over the weekend I installed kino on one of my computers and I'm
trying to learn how to use it to edit my videos. There are fancier
programs for video editing on Linux but this one does what I think I
need. It can convert my .ogv files from recordmydesktop to .dv, does
simple non-destructive
David,
I may make a wiki page on what I learn from this experience. It's not
difficult to do a video like this, but there are a lot of little
details you have to work past.
James Simmons
On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 12:09 PM, David Farningdfarn...@sugarlabs.org wrote:
Thanks for pushing this
I just created another video, demoing the features of Read Etexts, and
posted it in the same place. This one has a sound track which should
come up when it demos text to speech with highlighting. I can play
this one with totem, but mplayer doesn't like it for some reason.
This one is about 70
I am in the process of uploading 60 mb of video to
shell.sugarlabs.org. This video demonstrates using Get Internet
Archive Books to find and download books, then restoring them from the
Journal to read with the Read Activity. It needs resizing and
editing, title cards, sound, you name it. It is
I just posted version 14 of Read Etexts on ASLO:
http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4035
This version has new features I refer to collectively as annotations.
This includes:
1). Multiple bookmarks, so you can navigate quickly to important content.
2). Annotations, which are
Sam,
Aleksey Lim's Library Activity supports organizing books that are
stored in the Journal. It is supposed to eventually work on .82 but
for now only works on .84. I tried it and it does what Calibre does
and more. If you need an organized Journal you can use Library, and
the Journal
Scotty,
I think there is a method where if you have a Journal entry you can
tell Sugar to open it with the default Activity for that entry. I
haven't tried to do anything like that yet. It is important to copy
the book to the Journal though. You can open a book from the stick
directly, but it
Scotty,
The Journal entry that the Activity would create would be in the
Journal proper, and would not point to or in any way require any files
on the stick. The Activity would work like this:
1). The child inserts one of your sticks. Sugar mounts it.
2). The child uses the Journal to change
Caroline,
Regrettably no. Currently you can copy images into a slide show, but
not out. The zip file that contains the slides can be opened by
etoys, but I'm not sure what you could do with it there either. I'll
have to consider adding the ability to extract individual slides to
this Activity
wrote:
Thanks for the info.
I think as part of the general philosophy of Sugar kids should be able to
get images out so they can remix them in documents, turtleart, memorize etc.
Thanks
On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 7:05 AM, Jim Simmons nices...@gmail.com wrote:
Caroline,
Regrettably
Scotty,
I've been thinking about your project and have some ideas. These may
be similar to what Sayamindu has already proposed.
You want to distribute a couple of thousand books from Internet
Archive without using the Internet.
As I have said before having over a thousand files on a USB drive
Caroline,
It may be that sharing in Image Viewer is broken. However, I have
tested sharing in View Slides and that works. What you might do is
this:
1). Have the teacher download View Slides from ASLO, which will
install it in her Journal.
2). If the pictures are already in her Journal she
Gary and Tomeu,
I did
python setup.py genpot
last night for Read Etexts and committed and pushed the results. I'm
guessing I'll have a couple more strings to add after the next
release, which should support highlighting passages in books. That
should be the end of it, I hope.
James Simmons
Tomeu,
Read Etexts is in pootle right now. Unfortunately, since I tend to
develop my project incrementally there are probably strings in my
Activity that never made it into pootle. If there is anything anyone
needs from me to get this properly translated let me know. I've been
leaving the
Edward,
I think you have an interesting idea here. It reminded me of the
scene in _2001 A Space Odyssey_ where Hal 9000 is having the higher
functions of his brain disconnected and he tries to sing Daisy while
he still has enough connected to do it. From my experience working
with espeak I'd
Sameer,
The issue of what to do with existing Power Point slides can probably
be handled by using Google Docs, which can import existing Power Point
presentations from your hard drive. Once imported you could download
them as PDF's for the Read Activity. I haven't tried importing a
presentation
Get Internet Archive Books version 2 is now available. It has a new
icon and is much more robust than version 1. It can download PDFs as
well as Deja Vu format. The screenshots at ASLO tell the story. They
finding and downloading books by L. Frank Baum, who wrote the Oz books
and many others.
David,
I just checked out Google Docs for the first time and I'm impressed.
It looks and feels very much like PowerPoint, and you can even
download your finished presentation in PDF format for the Read
activity. I think for teachers that depend on PowerPoint it's a
reasonable answer.
I haven't
Fully agreed, so what's wrong with giving Etoys a try?
- Bert -
Nothing. I wrote my own email before reading yours and it sounds like
Etoys would be great for the purpose too. I wish I had time to not
only finish my own Activities but also to try out all the other ones.
Etoys and Turtle Art
Eben and Tony:
I like your design, but if I decide to go with something like that I
think my Inkscape skills are good enough to duplicate it. I think
Tony makes some really good points though, so what I think I'll do is
go with my own (Gary Martin inspired) design with the speed lines for
now.
Attached is an icon for the Get Internet Archive Books Activity. My
original design, based on a card catalog drawer, can be seen at ASLO.
I kind of like the original, but will replace it with something else
if there is a strong preference to do so.
This icon is inspired by a suggestion by Gary C
David,
I'm not clear on which icon you are praising: mine or Frederick's?
The problem I have with books in a pile or on a shelf is that it's too
similar to Aleksey's design for Library. I think that design is very
suitable for what Aleksey is doing, because he is building a kind of
electronic
I uploaded the first version of Get Internet Archive Books to ASLO
about an hour ago, so perhaps by the time you read this it will be
available to try out there. I'm sending this email to IAEP because
I'd like some feedback from those who might use the Activity. What
this Activity does is to
Sayamindu,
On the OPDS issue with only linking to PDF the Internet Archive uses
some pretty rigid file naming conventions, so if you want a DJVU and
the URL for PDF is given it could be as simple as changing the
filename suffix from .pdf to .djvu.
I especially hope that you will have time to
, at 03:02, Jim Simmons wrote:
The problem with books on a shelf is that Aleksey is already using
that image for his Library Activity and I think it is more fitting for
that because he is creating a sort of electronic bookshelf, whereas
I'm creating a card catalog.
The 3 key items in your Activity
I am working on a new Activity that will connect to the Internet
Archive and act as a sort of electronic card catalog. It will be
similar to the offline catalog browsing feature of Read Etexts, but
will have much more information about the books, including language
and a free form description.
It looks like converting an SVG to a GIF is not as simple as I thought
it was. The GIF was no good. The SVG should be OK.
Thanks for your patience.
James Simmons
attachment: get-ia-books.svg___
IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop
Fred,
The problem with books on a shelf is that Aleksey is already using
that image for his Library Activity and I think it is more fitting for
that because he is creating a sort of electronic bookshelf, whereas
I'm creating a card catalog.
I found that when I tried to use my icon with the
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