Alex Little

Instructions for installing a Ge’ez Virtual Keyboard on Android:

1. Root your device – exactly how this is done will depend on your device and you’ll need to look up on Google how to do this – note that rooting is not the same as unlocking your phone, rooting means you get administrative privileges to update system files, such as the font files we’ll update below.
2. Download the files DroidSans.ttf and RootExplorer-v2.15.apk and copy these onto the phone’s SD card (or equivalent)
3. Install and run the RootExplorer application and go to the sdcard folder
4. In rootexplorer, find the DroidSans.ttf file and copy it
5. Go to the /system/fonts folder and push the button marked “mount R/W”, the button will the change to be marked “mount R/O”
6. Paste the DroidSans.ttf file into this folder – replacing the existing DroidSans.ttf file. Leave all the other font files as they are. It’s probably a good idea to make a backup of the original DroidSans.ttf file first, before you overwrite it. Just rename the original file to (something like) DroidSans.ttf.bak.
7. Now restart the phone and the new font will be installed
8. Now to install the keyboard, download the keyboard apk file
9. Copy this to your phones SD card and install the application
10. You should now be able to switch between the standard and Ge’ez keyboards. You may need to enable the keyboard by going to: Settings -> Language & Keyboard then select check the box to enable the new keyboard
11. To find out how to switch between keyboards, watch our video:

We have tested this installation procedure on a few different phone models, though obviously we can’t cover every possible phone type and can’t guarantee it will work for every device. If you have any problems/issues then please post a comment. We’d also be very happy to hear that it did work for you!

A couple of months ago I was asked to be a technical reviewer for a new book from Packt publishing: Moodle 2 Multimedia Cookbook. Well, now the book is available to buy in print and pdf format. It covers areas such as how to use image, video, audio, animations, maps and much more in your Moodle 2 course. As I’m currently back in Ethiopia, I’ve not yet had chance to read the final version (a copy is waiting for me at home), so will be interested to hear about any reviews. For me it was an interesting process to give my feedback and thoughts on a book yet to be published, previously I’d only reviewed already published books.

Last week we set up Digital Campus as a not-for-profit company to continue and expand the work we have been doing over the last couple of years in ICT infrastructure development, technology enhanced learning and using technology to improve public health. You can read more on the Digital Campus website. Below is a presentation to give an overview the types of services and solutions we’re providing to improve ICT infrastructure:

Next week I return to Ethiopia for a few days and will then go to present at the eLearning Africa conference in Tanzania.

I’ve been using Delicious for several years now, but have only ever really used it as a repository for my storing links, rather than with the associated social functions (such as receiving suggested links or finding who else had saved the same sites). I’ve also been quite careful about making sure I have my own copy of any data stored in the cloud – so I was backing up my saved links regularly – and am often quite wary about being dependent on a third party service.

So a few weeks ago, when I read Liam’s posting about Scuttle I was keen to give it a try.

I’ve now set up my own Scuttle installation (at http://bookmark.alexlittle.net) to save all my links to – anyone else is free [Update: see comment below] to create their own account here to try it out too. So far the only function from Delicious that I’ve missed Scuttle is the auto-suggesting of tags. With Delicious I generally clicked almost all the popular tags which others had also tagged the link with, whereas with Scuttle I need to type all the tags I want – maybe this isn’t such a bad thing.

Update (12 Oct 2011); This instructions have now been deprecated, to install the keyboard on your Android phone please visit: http://alexlittle.net/blog/2011/06/03/installing-geez-virtual-keyboard-on-android-devices/

Here is a short video of how to switch between virtual keyboards and how to use the keyboard:

Please let me know if you have any feedback/questions.

Update (12 Oct 2011): For instructions on how to install the keyboard on your phone please visit: http://alexlittle.net/blog/2011/06/03/installing-geez-virtual-keyboard-on-android-devices/

Over the past few weeks, a group of graduate students at Alcalá University have been creating a virtual keyboard for Android to allow the input of Ge’ez script. This will allow anyone using Android smartphones or tablets to input Amharic and Tigrinya in their native script. We’ll be trialling use of this keyboard in our mHealth projects.

As the script contains over 200 characters they can’t all be displayed on the keyboard, so tapping the root consonant character will allow users to cycle through the 7 consonant+vowel combinations to enter a particular character, much like using a numeric keypad to enter Latin script characters. We’re also working on a version where the possible combinations appear in a small pop-up window when the root consonant is pressed.

The installation isn’t yet as simple as we’d like because the Ge’ez font isn’t default on Android, so the devices need to be rooted and the system font installed before the keyboard will work correctly. We’re currently putting together some full instructions and video and I’ll post up a link when these are ready. If anyone wants to try it out now, please contact me, we can provide a ROM with the font and application pre-installed.

More photos of the keyboard in action.

Whilst I was in Mekelle Uni I met with a colleague from the Application Development Section. He’s looking for some experienced Ruby on Rails developers who could assist with one of their projects to create a web application, for their student management, finance, procurement and property administration system.

Please contact me for further information and I can explain more and send you contact details.

I’ve just updated the version of my Online Users Map block for Moodle 1.9 so you have the option of using OpenStreetMap for the map display. I’d already done this for the version of the block for Moodle 2, so was quite easy to retrospectively add this to the 1.9 version too.

You can see a live demo running on my Moodle installation.

Any feedback or comments welcome

Through the elearning training we are trying to encourage teachers to make more use of video and other multimedia content in their courses. This presents us with several issues, mainly because most video streaming sites are blocked by the University (to save bandwidth). This means we either don’t include the videos or we download to run them locally. So far we’ve just been uploading them into the Moodle course, which is fine for relatively low numbers of videos (or for very short videos), but is soon going to become unsustainable. Also, we’d like to suggest video content teacher may wish to use – so it wouldn’t be appropriate to have these filling up the Moodle server.

One solution is to use a multimedia management streaming server, so over the last few days I’ve been testing out Kaltura. It’s an open source video content platform and has plugins for Moodle, WordPress amongst others.

Installation was straightforward enough on my laptop, once I’d got the necessary prerequisite packages installed and settings. Couple of issues I did come across:

1) On my first attempt at installation, it installed on the root of my webserver, so I was unable to access my other web applications. This was because I specified ‘localhost’ as the domain. I tried to figure out how to move to a subdirectory (see: http://www.kaltura.org/moving-installation-new-directory) but haven’t got that one figured out yet. So I just set up a new host (http://kaltura.localhost) and used this instead. So now I can access Kaltura and my original webapps, with out switching configurations and restarting apache.

2) When the prerequisites say that you need a mail server, it really does mean that you need one! After installation, when creating publisher accounts, the login details are emailed only – so there’s no way to set the password except by following the link in the email. I assumed I’d be able to reset the passwords manually and so the mail server integration wouldn’t matter to much. Given that this is just running on my laptop, I haven’t got a mail server running, so then had to set about trying to get one configured. Fortunately I found these instructions on how to configure postfix to relay through a gmail account on Ubuntu (I’m running 10.10). I set up a clean/default postfix installation and used the settings/instructions posted in the comments by Michael M. I used a ‘disposable’ gmail account, so that if something goes wrong, I won’t get blocked from my normal gmail account, but seems to be working well so far. It’s also good now that I can have emails sent for all the webapps on my machine.

So after I had these 2 issues resolved, I was ready to start having a play. All seems to be working well, although I was hoping that people would be able to browse the uploaded content without having first logged in. I guess we’d just need to create a generic account. If anyone knows how to set this up then please let me know – or if there is a generic Kaltura content browser application that I could use?

I tried uploading a few flv and mp4 videos to embed onto a webpage, and seem to work well. A little slow on my machine, but then my netbook probably isn’t designed to be a media processing and streaming server!

My final experiment was to look at the Moodle plugin, unfortunately I had a few more issues with getting this working. When trying to register the module in Moodle, I kept getting the error that ‘Your Kaltura registration failed. Missing KS. Session not established’ when trying to enter the url, username and password for my Kaltura server. After a bit of investigation I found it was a bug with how the partnerId was(n’t) being passed. I found a hack around this, see: http://www.kaltura.org/config-moodle-mod-moodleadmin-page, but it’s not pretty!

Now I have the option to add a video resource in Moodle directly from my Kaltura server, or so I thought I had, currently whatever I seem to search for (tags, video titles, categories which I know exist in the account I have) returns no results. Next step is to try and figure out why I can’t seem to find any of the videos I have uploaded…

Online Users Map with OpenStreetMap

I’ve finally had a bit of time to work on the online users map block I wrote a while ago – the recent release of Moodle 2 being a bit of a spur. Two main changes I’ve made:

Firstly, I added the option to use either Google Maps or OpenStreetMap, with the default being OpenStreetMap, but you can easily change it in the block settings.

Secondly, I managed to get the block up and running in Moodle 2 (see it in action). It needed a few changes over the previous version to get it to work. I’m still having a few issues with getting the block to update the cron field in the mdl_blocks table – so currently you need to update the blocks table manually to enable the cron function, which automatically updates the user locations.

Any feedback welcome