Tag: student

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How to copy text from McGraw Hill Connect

McGraw-Hill’s Copy Prevention

Copying text from McGraw-Hill’s online accounting textbooks has long been prohibited, creating difficulties for students, including myself. Not only does this prevent offline reading, but it hampers studying and taking digital notes on practice problems as well.

While disabling website copy blocking through changing browser settings dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled to true was thought to be one workaround, McGraw-Hill employs JavaScript to achieve their copy protection. Fortunately, I have finally found a solution that does not require circumventing their copy prevention.

Introducing NormCap

I discovered NordCap, an OCR-powered screenshot tool, entirely by accident while browsing the featured category in the Gnome software store on my Linux system (Vanilla OS). Curious, I installed it to try it out.

NordCap allows users to copy text from a wide range of sources, not just images. It enables extracting text from online resources like McGraw Hill Connect as well as videos, photos, GIFs, and essentially any content displayed on the screen.

Instead of capturing images, NordCap is able to detect and extract the text. As shown in the GIF below.

NormCap Demonstration GIF

Step-By-Step Guide

  1. You will need to download and install NormCap via https://dynobo.github.io/normcap/
  2. Start NormCap, a pink border will appear after the permissions have been given by the user
  3. Select the region of text you wish to copy, the text is now copied
  4. Paste the text anywhere or press Ctrl+V to paste from clipboard
  5. Done!

Note: Settings can be accessed by starting NormCap or pressing Capture in the tray icon while NormCap is running, Settings will be located in the top right of the screen as of v0.4.1

NormCap Usage

NormCap provides a free and open source tool for students to capture notes and problem sets. Once NormCap is installed and configured, it enables students to easily copy down assignments and materials to review and study. NormCap offers this functionality without any ads, allowing students to focus on their coursework.

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Useful Links for Any Student

Bypass Paywalls – Bypasses Article Paywalls

Website

  • Bypass Paywalls is a web browser extension to help bypass paywalls for selected sites.

Note: A full list of sites can be found at the link provided above. Firefox is recommended.

ChatGPT – A Better Siri

Website

  • ChatGPT is a powerful, open-source language model developed by OpenAI that is specifically designed for generating human-like text in response to user input. It is built on the GPT-3 architecture, which allows it to generate high-quality text in a variety of styles and formats. Unlike many other language models, ChatGPT is designed to be highly interactive, making it suitable for use in chatbots, dialogue systems, and other applications that require real-time, natural language generation. Additionally, ChatGPT has been trained on a massive amount of diverse data, allowing it to generate text that is both fluent and relevant to a wide range of topics. (This description was generated by it.)

LanguageTool – Checks Your Writing

Website

  • LanguageTool’s multilingual grammar, style, and spell checker supports Libreoffice, Apache OpenOffice, Microsoft Word, Ulysses, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome.
  • Also, available as a standalone application. Supports about 20 languages (on different levels) and allows customization.

Mybib – Citation Generator

Website

  • Automatically create bibliographies, references, and citations in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and over 8,000 more styles with a totally free and no-ads citation generator.
  • MyBib is a free bibliography and citation generator that makes accurate citations for you to copy straight into your academic assignments and papers.
  • There are tools that already do this, but they’ve stagnated, become infested with ads, and charge you for features that should be free (especially for students).
  • If you’re a student, academic, or teacher, and you’re tired of the poor bibliography and citation tools out there, then you’re going to love MyBib. MyBib’s auto citations are the best and most accurate one out there, so you can create accurate citations automatically for books, journals, websites, and videos just by searching for a title or identifier (like a URL or ISBN).
  • You can also download your formatted bibliography in multiple different formats, or export it to be added in several other managers like Zotero or Mendeley.

Extra’s That Can’t Be Linked, But Are Very Useful (Ranked Best – Worst)

  • z-library (Note: The only official z-library domain is the tor & i2p one)
  • Libgen
  • Annas-archive
  • OceanofPDF
  • PDFDrive
  • Lbryworm