Font Awesome icons as PNG and JPG image files

Font Awesome is simply awesome! Many thanks to Favid Gandy for this font.

Font Awesome gives you scalable vector icons that can instantly be customized — size, color, drop shadow, and anything that can be done with the power of CSS.

Recently I managed to enable Font Awesome on my Moodle production site. The result is that I am now able to display Font Awesome CSS fonts on any Moodle resource or Moodle activity just by installing Julian Ridden's Font Awesome filter and by following his instructions here and here.

I've created two photomosaics of your images using the Font Awesome icons. This took me almost 30% of a whole day's work. I had to figure out how to automatically convert the Font Awesome icons into PNG files using Python (the toughest part!). Then I had to batch convert 378 PNG files into JPG format (only after a tough web search). Finally, I used AndreaMosaic to create the final mosaics using a combination of 2,000 repeating JPG images of the icons (the easiest part!).

Enjoy.

A photomosaic of the original image found here.

Here's a self-potrait done for fun!

Best viewed from a distance of 3 feet away from the monitor.

If it helps anyone, I've also created a zip file that has the PNG and JPG images of all 378 Font Awesome icons. I doubt if you can find the icons in image format anywhere on the Internet. Of course, Font Awesome, as a graphical font by itself has an advantage over the image format. Anyway for what it's worth, here's the link:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17797520/moodle/Font_Awesome_In_JPG_and_PNG_formats.zip

Regards
Frankie Kam

Make your Moodle 2.x Quiz Navigation Section come to life with this useful mouseover hack

Source: http://www.businessethicsalliance.org/blog/pop-quiz-how-would-you-define-community-responsibility/

How would you like to transform your humble Quiz Navigation section into a mini Information System?

Now you can, thanks to Michael Weston and Tim Hunt, who bounced this brilliant idea around from conception to fruition. Michael asked if the Quiz Navigation question links could display the quiz question text on mouseover:

Java security warnings make it impossible to use Nanogong? Here's the solution.

Nanogong is one of the best things to happen to Moodle. The Nanogong plugin allows you to make voice recordings on your Moodle site. You can easily post recordings in Moodle forums or as a simple label activity.

But Nanogong didn't come without its own set of problems. Although Nanogong seemed to work fine on my Moodle 2.5 site, In the past I did get constant java security warnings  (Java 1.7.0_25 on my PC) - rendering it almost impossible for me to work with it.

The Beauty (Nanogong recorder for Moodle)
and the (Java) Beast

The irritating problem with java security warnings popping up everytime is a real deal-breaker when it comes to promoting the use of Nanogong. However, Nanogong is too good a plugin to not use on any Moodle site just because of some irritating and pesky pop up security warnings! So Nanogong is worth saving!
Here's the procedure to save the (your) day. Warning! Use at your own risk.

How I managed to allow input of only 1 (one) character in a Cloze input box (Moodle 2.5)

Source: http://www.urban75.org/blog/shop-is-cloze-today-brixton/

Hi. Do you use the Cloze (also known as the multianswer) question type in Moodle 2.5? I use it a lot! 

For quite some time, I was struggling with how to limit a text box, in a Cloze question, to not more than one character of input. Well, after much searching for an answer on moodle.org and almost the entire World Wide Web, I managed to do it.

INTRODUCTIONI had a quiz situation to solve. I had to create a Cloze question where the user has to type in the individual letters to complete a word. In this type of question, a box should contain at most only one letter.

I had to solve FOUR challenges/problems. 

PROBLEM ONE, each cloze input box should be small enough to look like it could only fit one letter.
PROBLEM TWO, the user should only be allowed to key in one letter inside each box. Not more than one letter. 
PROBLEM THREE, the user should be able to type continuously, the letters a, s, s, p, o, r, t and the letters should automatically be input into each successive input box.
PROBLEM FOUR, allow only letters - no spaces or punctuation symbols.

I have a nagging feeling that both problems ONE and TWO could be solved with some creative HTML/CSS and Javascript wizardary, but my desire to solve them come what may, led me to devise this core (unfortunately) code hack. Here's how I solved problems ONE and TWO: