A.C. Flory's Blog, page 87

Smiling Quokka

Because sometimes, nothing but a quokka will do!

Click a picture to be taken to its ‘home’. And if you want more, just search for Quokka.

You’re welcome

Recipe – Cheese scones without butter

This is not a very accurate recipe, apologies in advance, but it is very easy and very forgiving! The only thing to remember is to be quick. This dough does not like to be over worked so rein in the perfectionist!

For non-Australian and UK residents, scones look like this:

Attribution: https://www.kidspot.com.au/kitchen/recipes/easy-pumpkin-scones-1048  The post includes a recipe for pumpkin scones.

Ingredients for Cheese Scones:

1 cup self raising flour
1 teaspoon baking powder [yes, a whole teaspoon]
pinch of salt [parmesan is salty so don’t over do the salt]
about 1/3 – 1/2 cup of parmesan – I used flaked but grated will do as well
and cream…

Method:

pre-heat the oven to fan bake 160 C [conventional oven 180 C or 350 F]
place a piece of grease proof paper onto a flat baking tray
mix all the dry-ish ingredients in a large bowl, including the parmesan
make a shallow well in the middle of the dry ingredients and add a dash of cream
using a knife, or a fork, NOT hands, start working the cream into the dry ingredients
keep adding a bit of cream until the scone mixture starts to hold together, only then go in with your hands [you want the scone dough to stay cool]
quickly mix the dough into a ball – do not over work!
place on a lightly floured board and kneed just until the dough starts to feel a bit elastic
spread out with your hands [or a rolling pin if you have one] – 1/2 to 3/4 of an inch
cut out scones and place on baking tray
gently kneed leftovers into another ball, flatten and cut out
place the scone tray in the oven and bake for 15 – 20 minutes

Cooking time will vary according to your oven and how thick you made the scones. They’re ready when they have a nice pale brown blush on top [very much like the photo of the pumpkin scones above].

To serve, spread with good butter and eat. Enough for two medium sized people as an afternoon snack or to have with a bowl of soup as a simple evening meal.

Good appetite.

Trump – as seen from Russia

I don’t often post about Donald J Trump, but I just have to reblog this brilliant article by Ends and Beginnings because the perspective is so new, and chilling.

The perspective comes from a reporter by the name of Julia Davis who reports almost exclusively about Russia. The chill comes from what the Russian media says about Trump.

I really, really recommend you read the entire article:

https://endsandbeginningsblog.wordpress.com/2018/07/26/legacy/comment-page-1/#comment-11617

Meeks

Authors – were you satisfied with the quality of IngramSpark printing [in Australia]?

In the world of self-publishing, and small press publishing, CreateSpace, KDP and Lulu all offer printed proofs at cost price. These printed proofs equate to quality control. As the author, you get to check your own work and the quality of the printer’s product before approving the book for sale.

I learned the value of printed proofs with the paperback version of Vokhtah. Onscreen, the cover looked fantastic. Once it was printed, [by Lulu and KDP] I discovered that the cover was so dark, most of the fine detail was lost.

The reason for this discrepancy is that computer screens use RGB colour mode – i.e. digital colour – while printers use CMYK, and the two are not exactly the same. Added to that, the calibration of the computer screen may be off, all of which can result in a pretty dreadful end product. But I would not have known about those problems if I had not seen real, physical, printed proofs of Vokhtah.

IngramSpark, however, does not offer printed proofs. As I discovered today, I can order printed copies at cost, but only after approving my book[s]. And guess what? After I approve a book, any changes, any changes at all, will cost me $25 AUD a pop.

To highlight the enormity of this…’policy’ by IngramSpark, Vokhtah would have cost me a minimum of $75 in review fees, just to get the cover printed properly.

Do other Indies take pot luck with IngramSpark? Or do they fork out review fees without protest? Or is this one reason why most Indies use CreateSpace, KDP and Lulu to print their books?

Having tried all three, I was hoping that IngramSpark Australia would save me a boatload of money on shipping costs. Now, I’m not sure what to do.

Should I use CreateSpace or KDP to get the covers right and then print with IngramSpark?

I could, but that would still be a gamble as there’s no guarantee the IngramSpark POD facilities produce an equivalent product.

Has anybody out there had experience with IngramSpark Australia, in terms of quality? Would you recomment them?

If you can share your experiences in the poll below, I’d really appreciate it as I hate the thought of buying something sight unseen.

Australian #Selfpublishers needed to beta test KDP how-to guide

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Apologies! I’d love to send beta copies of the paperback overseas, but the postage is a killer so this plea is for Aussies only.

So what do I want and what do you get?

I’d like 5 volunteers, anywhere in Australia, who’d be prepared to test the KDP how-to for functionality. I’ll send you a questionnaire to make things easier, but essentially, the questions I’d like answered are:

do the step-by-step instructions leave anything out that a real beginner would need?
do the examples make sense?
are the screenshots good enough?
are the page numbers in the Table of Contents accurate?
are the page numbers in the Index accurate?
if dipping into a guide is your style, do the Table of Contents and Index help you find what you’re looking for? Quickly? Easily?
is the cover too garish? Tone down the green? Pick another colour for the back cover entirely?
and of course, typos, but only if they hit you in the face. Don’t worry about combing through each page.

In return, you get to keep the proof copies I send you. No strings, no obligations. However, if you return the questionnaire, I’ll also send you a ‘first edition’ of the final, finished version. If you want it signed, I’ll do that too, but you can have it naked if you prefer. Again, no strings, no obligations.

I’m going to hit that deadline…yes!

I have until July 31 to submit ‘How to Print Your Novel with Kindle Direct Publishing’ to IngramSpark. Missing that deadline means having to pay $53 AUD for the setup fee, not something Scrouge McFlory wants to do, no, no, no…

Yesterday, I wasn’t sure if I’d make it coz the Word index was playing up. If any of you have used the Word index function, you’ll know that it creates a Continuous section break all by itself. That’s normal, but yesterday Word added a Next Page break just before the index. No, it wasn’t me. Anyway, headers and page numbers suddenly went crazy and the more I tried to fix things the worse it all became.

To cut a long story short, I bit the bullet this morning and stripped out all the section breaks, saved under a new filename [just because i was paranoid], redid all the breaks, headers and page numbers and…voila! It works.

To celebrate, I jumped on Corel and began playing with some images I’d downloaded from freeimages.com. These are what I started with:

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I wanted to indicate visually that the book referred to KDP but wasn’t an ebook. As sometimes happens, the answer was ridiculously simple. This is just the visual image I came up with:

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Now I just have to fiddle with the title and backcover stuff and it’ll be done.

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Happy Meeks

Liquid water on #Mars

Okay, the liquid water is beneath 1.5 km of solid ice at the South Pole, but it is there!

It’s also incredibly salty [one reason why it isn’t frozen], but its discovery opens up huge new areas of research because it means that Mars really was much wetter in the past. I’m no geologist or climatologist, but I can’t help wondering what happened to Mars to turn it into the barren rock it is now. If there’s any chance that our own Earth can go the same way, we need to know.

Please visit the New Atlas website to read the whole story.

And finally, from me, an apology. I’m racing a July 31 deadline so this blog, and social media in general, have taken a huge back seat. I’ll be more sociable again once I. Get.This. Job. Done!

cheers

Meeks

Retirement…slow down or speed up?

Not sure what your answer is, but mine is speed up! There are still so many stories I want to tell that another 50 years wouldn’t be enough, especially when I’m such a slow writer. And then there’s all that new tech coming online…

I’m not really a techie, you know. The true techies love all technology, whereas I’m pretty ambivalent about some of the innovations out there. Nevertheless, there are some gadgets I can hardly wait to use…like 3D printers for the home. Want that new top in your size? Not a problem, pay for the design and wait a few minutes while your 3D printer manufactures it for you. Or robots…I’ve loved the idea of robots since I first read ‘Door into Summer’ by Heinlein.

-laughs- I bet you thought Asimov was the only one who wrote about robots? Not so. You can find a description of ‘Door into Summer’ here.

Anyway, I’m saving my pennies for a household robot that will clean up after the cats, put the rubbish out, or maybe compost it on site? and mow the lawn. I’ve got a lot of lawn [image error]

But that’s not all! I haven’t had a chance to try VR yet, and it’s right up there as a ‘must do’ on my bucket list. I want to be able to travel the world from the comfort of my own home, and I want to fight monsters in glorious technicolour.

Of course, all of that depends upon how my eye-sight works with VR [I see depth via motion parallax, not stereopsis], but I’m hopeful, and this glorious track by Two Steps From Hell is how I feel at the ripe old age of 65.

#WordPress – new vs old

[image error]I’ve been blogging with WordPress since December, 2011, so I still have access to the old WP dashboard. I still prefer the old WP dashboard… because it works, but today I thought I’d give the ‘new’ interface a try.

The task: to find the shortlink [abbreviated URL] for one of my older posts.

I found the post in question [an interesting journey in its own right], and then went looking for the shortlink command:

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[Click the screenshot to see the full sized image]

It wasn’t under any of the options on the menu to the right, so where was it? I knew it had to be there somewhere and kept looking.

I finally found the shortlink feature…hidden behind this tiny, clear-as-mud icon :

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…with an even clearer context sensitive description of ‘Edit post URL’

Now, I didn’t want to edit the URL, I wanted to copy it, but for lack of a better option, I clicked the icon. A popup appeared with the option of copying the post URL. Eureka!

This is what the URL looks like when it’s pasted into the address bar of a browser:

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Not exactly short, but at least I found it… [image error]

Now, let’s compare the new version with the old. The screenshot below is from the old dashboard interface:

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As you can see, the feature I want is clearly labelled…in words, shock horror.

When I click ‘Get Shortlink’ this is what happens:

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And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a shortlink. If you use Twitter like I do, the difference between the two URLs couldn’t be more stark. The ‘new’ version is long, the ‘old’ version is short. Now, you can get a ‘short’ URL by using the online app ‘Tiny URL’, but why bother when you already have the option in WP itself?

I’m all for progress. I’m all for software interfaces being pitched to the newest of users; giving them lots of help is only fair because they’re the ones who need it the most. I even like nice, clean interfaces where there’s little clutter to distract the eye. Unfortunately, the current WordPress interface ticks only one of those boxes – the lack of clutter.

I know they say that one picture is worth a thousand words, but the WordPress GUI [graphical user interface] is not empowering new users because:

Advanced, and not-so-advanced features are hidden behind icons that have no intrinsic meaning – i.e. the icon doesn’t look like the thing it’s meant to represent.
This results in users not even knowing what is possible,
Learning to associate a random looking icon with a particular function requires a great deal of trial and error on the part of the user,
Learning by trial and error involves making mistakes,
Making mistakes takes curiosity and a great deal of courage,
Most new users are terrified of making mistakes, therefore they don’t venture past the functions that are ‘obvious’,
Obvious functions usually involve words with which new users are already familiar.

I’m not sure if this is still a buzzword amongst the young but…fail, WordPress, fail.

Teaching theory

I’ve been teaching both children and adults for a very long time, and the one thing I know for certain is that humans of all ages learn best when new material is linked to old material.

For example, if I wanted to teach someone the difference between a post and a page [on a blog], I might say that a page is like a billboard because it’s permanent, whereas a post is more like an article in a newspaper – i.e. constantly changing. The analogies don’t have to be perfect, they simply have to tap into something the user already knows. Once the similarities are established, it’s much easier to learn about the differences.

So how does this teaching theory relate to the WordPress GUI? It doesn’t, and that’s the problem. The new GUI makes one piece of new information dependent upon a second piece of new information, and that usually leads to poor learning outcomes.

I can only assume that the WordPress GUI is aimed at very young people who may already be familiar with certain symbols from their use of mobile phones. But where does that leave the older user, or those who use their blogs on pc’s and laptops rather than mobile phones? Come to think of it, does anyone actually pick out the words of a post on a mobile phone? I can’t think of anything more tedious.

Anyway, that’s my rant for the day. Now I’m off to use old fashioned words to write another how-to book.

cheers

Meeks

IngramSpark for Australian Authors

[image error]Just finished a long conversation with a very nice lady from IngramSpark Australia, and I thought I’d share what I learned with other Australian self-publishers.

First and foremost, IngramSpark have a print facility right here in Australia. That translates to massive savings on shipping costs for Australian authors.

How massive? Roughly $4.90 for 1 to 28 medium sized paperbacks if you live in Melbourne. That’s because the IngramSpark print facility is located in Melbourne. Delivery charges to other states will obviously be higher. Nonetheless, I doubt those charges would come close to the cost of shipping books in from overseas.

Secondly, IngramSpark printing costs are a bit higher than CreateSpace but lower than Lulu. They also have:

a full range of trim sizes
hardbacks if required
global distribution to countries not available through Amazon.

Amazon distribution has become a sore point with Australians as they cannot buy print books on Amazon Australia. In the past, they would have to order print books from Amazon US or UK and pay shipping costs that often doubled or tripled the cost of the book. Now that we’ve been geo-blocked from Amazon international, print books will no longer be available at all. Unless…

And this brings me to my conversation with IngramSpark today. I rang to clarify whether I could use IngramSpark to provide print books to Amazon Australia. The question was complicated by the fact that I wanted non-Australian Amazon markets to continue selling paperbacks printed via CreateSpace and KDP.

Aussie authors will be pleased to know that the answer from IngramSpark was ‘yes’.