A “do it yourself” alternative to Google Reader

rss_iconI am a huge fan of Google Reader. Well, used to be, because the service is shutting down on July 1.

There is plenty of alternatives, but I like the fact that there is a central web application that stores all your feeds (and keeps track of read/unread). It needs to be accessible and optimized for iPad also.

After a lot of testing and comparing, I went for the following solution:

  • I purchased and installed Fever (one-time fee of 30$). You have to host the application yourself (requires php-mysql-apache hosting); the license is tied to your domain name. 
  • I installed Sunstroke for iPad. Can be used on iPhone too.

The two work nicely together, but even the web interface alone is already quite usable on an iPad. I am really happy with the alternative, there are no specific functions of Google Reader that I am missing.

Update: Sunstroke is no longer available. Fiery Feeds is a valid alternative on iPad, even works much faster.

What if Captivate 6 or 7 sends zero-scores to your LMS?

Recently, we ran into an issue with a piece of Captivate 6 content in our LMS. Although the content did not contain any quizzes, the content sent a score of 0 to the LMS, messing up the reporting.

We had a look at the reporting settings in Captivate, these were the settings used:

captivate quiz

If you use these settings, the content communicates the following to your LMS:

[2013-06-16 09:15:49] LMSSetValue(“cmi.core.score.raw”, “0”)
[2013-06-16 09:15:49] LMSSetValue(“cmi.core.score.max”, “0”)
[2013-06-16 09:15:49] LMSSetValue(“cmi.core.score.min”, “0”)

Strangely enough, the solution is very simple: under Data to Report, you change the option Quiz Score to Percentage. This stops sending cmi.core.score values to the LMS. You would expect that this setting has no importance because you specified that you do not want to track the Quiz, but it does make a difference.

quiz data

I have noticed exactly the same behaviour in Captivate 7.

Microsoft Surface can’t connect to ad hoc network

I was trying to connect my Microsoft Surface to a wireless network created with my mobile (using Joikuspot), but this didn’t work.

Turns out that Windows RT cannot connect to ad hoc wireless networks. More info here. Quite disappointing, as the surface does not have 3G/4G built in.