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Two years later and I'm *so* close to finishing my #MSc.

Tomorrow I have my penultimate meeting with my supervisor to discuss my dissertation.

In two weeks, we'll go through the final *final* draft (v1.final.final.docx)

A month from today I had it in.

Then, at some point in January, I do the viva.

And then done?? Finally done???

My #MSc meeting went well! I've got a few tweaks to make and have to reduce the wordcount.

Then it is all the lovely formatting. I currently use Google Docs for ease of editing on multiple machines, but I'm thinking of moving to #Markdown & #PanDoc to produce the final product.

Less than a month to do go until the deadline. I should probably stop mucking about on Mastodon!

Looks like the easiest* way of formatting my MSc #Dissertation will be exporting it from Google Docs as ePub.
Then unzipping it.
Extracting the HTML.
Tidying it up.
Then formatting it into Markdown (for storing in Git), ePub (for distribution), and PDF (for weirdos).

* Well, I like a good challenge!

Notes were pretty positive. A few typos and formatting issues. One section needs an extra bit of analysis, one needs a few more details.
Hopefully have this #MSc submitted next week!

Final meeting with my #MSc supervisor and…

Really positive! Direct quote "any other changes I suggest would just be nitpicks."

So, this weekend, formatting this bad boy into PDF () and submitting to the evils of #TurnItIn.

Got bored of reading my #MSc dissertation back to myself so…

I've finally made use of my AWS credits and am forcing a robot to read it aloud to me.

Thanks Polly!

I know it is an old hack, but using #TTS to listen back to what you've written is a *great* way to find typos, grammar mistakes, and weird phrasing.

I swear, every time I export my #MSc dissertation, I find another formatting error.

Still, 10,901 words DONE! Will be submitted this weekend come hell or highwater.

OK! Today's task, reformat my #MSc into Markdown.

Then export to HTML, ePub, PDF, TTS, etc.

Going to sleep on it and submit tomorrow.

@jamesravey cheers. I have a general presentation at the end of January - but that relates more to the apprenticeship side of my degree.

@cda I wrote this very angry screed about them
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/09/opting-out-of-turnitin/

@Edent Oh so they're even more stand-up than I thought! I don't see what issue you could possibly have with them.

In all seriousness, you can imagine how many false positives I encountered while submitting translations of existing research to use in my essays. Luckily, my professors were usually smart enough to ignore TurnItIn's assessment and some just let you email them directly.

@analyst42 I'll give it a go. I'm finding pandoc a bit of a pain.

@Edent I think they're closely related, but Quarto seems to have very few rough edges to get caught on.

I was sceptical when it was released, but have become a convert in the last couple of weeks. I edit in RStudio, but I think there are options for VScode, etc too

@analyst42 @Edent I've heard good things about the documentation for #Quarto which can only be a good thing!

@analyst42 @Edent also we discovered in an #NHSRconf2022 workshop that if you use RStudio in Visual mode and copy across something like Wikipedia with links it automatically converts to markdown in both #Quarto and #RMarkdown incl hyperlink formats.

@sellorm @analyst42 Yup - I'm using Codium.
Thanks for the tip.

@chrisbeeley you've got me (again)! It's the "Body of Knowledge" site which I'm setting up for our divisional analysts on internal gitlab. Org charts, systems, access requests, domain info and context that analysts need, onboarding todos, etc. A work in progress that should never be complete...

I'm planning for it to be a low barrier of entry for people to start gaining confidence with git too (only 2 of 5 of us can use git right now).

@analyst42 cool! @Letxuga007 built something similar for us in bookdown. It's a great approach which I must remember to export when we go

@chrisbeeley @analyst42 I got Chris to create a template as I like having blank sites to work from

@Letxuga007 @analyst42 Hugo is my favouritest but looks like Quarto can be good to be quick and simple

@Edent oop, looks like I already recommended this before

@agoose77 haha! I'm going for GFM because that's what I know best. My dissertation doesn't have any code or "complex" sections - other than tables.

@judi thank you!
And well done on capturing those incredible titipounamu photos.

@Edent thanks! was an epic encounter for sure