Fun 'n' Games

Android FAQ Sheet

2011-09-09T19:56:00.001-04:00

Can I use OverDrive?
Yes! There is an OverDrive app for the Android operating system.

Do I need a separate computer to use OverDrive?
No. You will only need to install the OverDrive app. In most cases you will not need to install Adobe Digital Editions (it's already installed), but you will still need to enter an Adobe ID and register the device.

How many books will it hold?
Most Android tablets have a slot for an SD or microSD card, so the number of books it can hold will vary considerably, depending on how much built-in memory is available for user content, and how much memory is on the SD card. For example, The Help, by Kathryn Stockett, is 453KB in the EPUB format, so an Android tablet could hold about 2,207 copies of The Help in 1GB of memory.

How long does the battery last?
Most Android tablets will run for several hours on a single charge, in constant use, depending on what features are in use. Turning off the WiFi and setting the display timeout to one minute instead of one hour will conserve the charge, for example.

Can I read the screen in sunlight?
The LED backlit display gives an effect that is more like a computer monitor than a page in a book, and can be hard to read in strong daylight. However, there are anti-glare screen protectors that can be purchased separately, and the brightness of the display itself can be adjusted from within the reader applications. The background can be changed from white to a pale sepia.

Screen resolution?
Varies. The 10" Acer Iconia A500 pictured here has a screen resolution of 1280x800 pixels.

Size? Weight?
Varies. Right now there are two screen sizes that predominate: 7” and 10”, as measured diagonally. The weight varies as well, but the 10” Android tablets are about as heavy as the iPad (1.3 lbs), and most are heavier.

How large / how many sizes can I make the words display?
There is a choice of seven (7) font sizes in the OverDrive app, as well as font styles and color and brightness settings.

How do you turn the page?
Touch or swipe the screen from right to left to turn to the next page, or from left to right to go to the previous page.

Does it remember my place?
Yes, when you reopen a book you were reading, it opens at the last page you were reading. You can also set bookmarks and go to the beginning of any chapter.

How much does it cost?
Varies. A new 7” tablet from a lesser known brand can be bought for as little as $150, but won’t have access to the full range of Android applications (apps) and won’t have the latest version of the Android operating system. A new 10” tablet such as the Motorola XOOM, WiFi-only, starts at $499, but has the latest Android o/s release, uses the full range of Android features, and is upgradable to the next Android release. The 10" Acer Iconia, pictured here, currently sells for $399 with 16GB of permanent storage and the Android 3.0 o/s.

Do I have to subscribe to a service?
Your choice. The WiFi model works with any wireless network. The WiFi+3G model works with both wireless and with the 3G cellphone network, but you’ll need a contract with a cellphone carrier.

Are the batteries self-replaceable or does it need to be sent in when they die?
The batteries are generally not user-replaceable. If the batteries stop holding a charge, you’ll have to get a factory replacement or discard it and purchase a new tablet.

Can I use it with multiple formats?
Yes. You name it, the Android tablet probably supports it: TXT, PDF, Audible (Audible Enhanced (AA, AAX)), MP3, unprotected MOBI, PRC, HTML, DOC, JPEG, GIF, PNG.

Can it connect to the Internet?
Yes, the Android o/s includes a browser, and there are other browsers available for download.

Can I use it to watch video?
Yes. You can watch YouTube and, depending on the Android version and the manufacturer, you can watch Netflix and Amazon streaming video.

What else does it do?
Almost anything a general purpose notebook computer can do: email, text messaging, web browsing, display maps. If the tablet hardware supports it, and if you subscribe to a 3G service, it can also serve as a GPS. There are apps for the Nook, Sony Reader, and the Kindle, so you can purchase e-books from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Sony’s ebookstore. You can also purchase e-books from a number of other sites like Fictionwise.com. There is an Audible app, to purchase and listen to e-books from Audible.com. You can also borrow and play audiobooks from OverDrive. There are apps to read and create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations that are compatible with Microsoft Office Suite. Articles from our EBSCO subscription databases can be read, whether they are in PDF or HTML format. Some tablets have a true multi-touch screen and the web browser display can be zoomed in and out easily by “pinching” the display with two fingers.

Conclusion?
Excellent general purpose computer, in addition to offering a good reading experience.

If you're looking for a general purpose computer, as opposed to a single-purpose e-reader, the choice really comes down to the iPad or an Android tablet. If you've always been a Mac fan, you'll buy an iPad. If you like the iPad but don't want to spend that much, or if you'd like to have the capability to view Flash video, you'll buy an Android tablet.

Where can I get more information?
http://www.tigerdirect.com/
http://www.buy.com/
http://www.newegg.com/
http://www.bestbuy.com/
and
manufacturers’ websites: Motorola, Samsung, Acer, Asus, etc.

Nook Color FAQ Sheet

2011-09-09T19:38:00.001-04:00

Can I use OverDrive?
Yes!

Do I need a separate computer to use OverDrive?
Books in the “Always Available” collection can be downloaded directly to the Nook Color. Other EPUB books require a separate computer running the OverDrive Media Console program and Adobe Digital Editions. Books are downloaded to the computer and then transferred to the Nook Color. A separate computer is also needed to delete expired books from the Nook Color.

How many books will it hold?
The Nook Color comes with 8GB of memory (expandable to up to 32GB with a microSD™ memory card). Approximately 5GB are available to store content, of which up to 4GB may be reserved for content purchased from the Barnes & Noble NOOK Store, which leaves 1GB free for your own content. The Help, by Kathryn Stockett, is 453KB in the EPUB format, so the Nook Color could hold about 2,207 copies of The Help in that 1GB if you only borrowed them from OverDrive. If you purchased a copy from Barnes & Noble, it could hold about 4 times that many copies.

How long does the battery last?
Read for up to 8 hours without recharging with wireless off.

Can I read the screen in sunlight?
The LED backlit display gives an effect that is more like a computer monitor than a page in a book, and can be hard to read in strong daylight. However, there are anti-glare screen protectors that can be purchased separately, and the brightness of the display itself can be adjusted from within the reader application. The background can be changed from white to a pale sepia.

Screen resolution?
1024 x 600 at 169 pixels per inch (PPI)

Size? Weight?
Height: 8.1 inches, Width: 5.0 inches, Depth: 0.48 inches; 15.8 ounces

How large / how many sizes can I make the words display?
There are 6 text sizes, with selectable font styles, background colors, line and margin spacing.

How do you turn the page?
Touch or swipe the screen from right to left to turn to the next page, or from left to right to go to the previous page.

Does it remember my place?
Yes, when you reopen a book you were reading, it opens at the last page you were reading. You can also set bookmarks and go to the beginning of any chapter.

How much does it cost?
The Nook Color with WiFi currently lists for $249.

Do I have to subscribe to a service?
No. The Nook Color comes with built-in WiFi. There is no 3G option.

Are the batteries self-replaceable or does it need to be sent in when they die?
The batteries are not self-replaceable. The Nook Color must be returned to the factory for a battery replacement.

Can I use it with multiple formats?
The Nook Color supports these formats for eBooks, graphics, audio, and other file types, transferred from your computer using the USB cable, or from a microSD card, or downloaded from the Web: EPUB (including Non- or Adobe DRM); PDF; Other documents: XLS, DOC, PPT, PPS, TXT, DOCM, XLSM, PPTM, PPSX, PPSM, DOCX, XLX, PPTX; Graphics: JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP; Audio: MP3, MP4, AAC; Video: MP4, Adobe® Flash®; Not Supported: LIT, AMZ (Amazon), LRZ/LRX (Sony). The Color Nook works with our subscription EBSCO database, which includes many popular full-text magazine titles in PDF and HTML format.

Can it connect to the Internet?
Yes, there is a web browser built-in. Books can be purchased from Barnes & Noble and downloaded immediately anywhere there is a WiFi signal.

Can I use it to watch video?
You can play videos at YouTube. Amazon streaming video also works, but it’s not really full screen.

What else does it do?
Pre-loaded apps include Email, Pandora® Internet radio, Chess, Crossword, Sudoku, Media Gallery, and NOOK Friends™. You can loan purchased books to your friends who have a Nook Color. The Nook Color will store and display your photos, music, and videos in the supported formats, either downloaded from the Web or transferred via USB cable. Because of the large format and the screen resolution, the Nook Color works comfortably with many websites without having to resort to a special mobile app. It has a true multi-touch screen and the web browser display can be zoomed in and out easily by “pinching” the display with two fingers, but I found the response to be sluggish at times. It’s better than typing on a 12-key phone keypad, but I wouldn’t want to use the on-screen keyboard for typing anything lengthy. More games can be purchased online from the Nook store.

Conclusion
A good value as an eReader, with many of the additional features that you’d expect from a WiFi-enabled device. In a completely informal, not anywhere near random survey I conducted at a techie workshop I went to in March, the predominant large format device was the iPad, followed closely by the Nook Color.

Sony eReader FAQ Sheet

2011-09-09T19:27:00.000-04:00

Can I use OverDrive?
Yes!

Do I need a separate computer to use OverDrive?
Yes, a PC or a Mac with the Sony Reader software, OverDrive, and Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) installed is required for most Sony Readers. Books are transferred from your computer to the Reader using Adobe Digital Editions, and a copy also stays on your computer. The Daily Edition has built-in WiFi and 3G capablility and can download books directly from the Sony store and from other online vendors.

Where else can I get books besides OverDrive and the Sony store?
Any vendor that sells ebooks in the EPUB and PDF formats.

How many books will it hold?
The Reader Touch Edition and the Reader Daily Edition can be expanded up to 32GB, with an SD card, so the number of books it can hold will vary. For example, The Help, by Kathryn Stockett, is 453KB in the EPUB format, so the Sony Reader could hold about 2,207 copies of The Help in 1GB of memory. The Reader Pocket Edition has 2GB of onboard memory (not all of which is available for user content) and is not expandable; it holds approximately 1,200 books.

How long does the battery last?
Up to 14 days on the two models without WiFi; from 11 days to 22 days on the model with WiFi.

Can I read the screen in sunlight?
Yes, the Sony Readers uses the E Ink® Pearl technology.

Screen resolution?
Not stated, but is probably the same as other 6” E-Ink screens such as the Kindle: 600 x 800 pixel resolution at 167 ppi (pixels per inch)

Size? Weight?
Three models: measured diagonally, the screens are 5”, 6”, and 7”; they weigh from 5.47 to 9.6 ounces.

How large / how many sizes can I make the words display?
There is a choice of seven (7) font sizes in the OverDrive app, as well as font styles and color and brightness settings.

How do you turn the page?
Touch Edition: touch or swipe the screen from right to left to turn to the next page, or from left to right to go to the previous page. Pocket Edition and Daily Edition (and older models): buttons on the front of the reader.

Does it remember my place?
Yes, when you reopen a book you were reading, it opens at the last page you were reading. You can also set bookmarks and go to the beginning of any chapter.

How much does it cost?
The Reader Pocket Edition is currently selling for $179 at the Sony website. Also at the Sony website, a refurbished Daily Edition sells for $239, and a refurbished Pocket Edition for $153. The Reader Touch is out of stock on the Sony site, but can be found at other online retailers, both new and refurbished, for between $199 and $300. Older editions of the Sony in the PRS-500 series can be found online both new and used.

Do I have to subscribe to a service?
No. The Daily Edition is both WiFi and 3G-capable, and the 3G access is free.

Are the batteries self-replaceable or does it need to be sent in when they die?
The batteries are not user-replaceable. If the batteries stop holding a charge, you’ll have to get a factory replacement.

Can I use it with multiple formats?
Yes. The Sony readers support two important standards for e-books: Adobe® PDF, and EPUB. They also support Microsoft® Word and other text file formats, as well as ACS4 for audiobooks.

Can it connect to the Internet?
Daily Edition connects to the Internet to get the latest edition of newspapers, magazines, and other periodicals you may subscribe to.

Can I use it to watch video?
No.

What else does it do?
Bookmark + Highlight; Freehand notes with stylus; Intelligent zoom; Periodical navigation options; 10 translation dictionaries

Conclusion?
The Reader Pocket Edition is a good dedicated reader for the passionate reader, constant traveler, or daily commuter. The small controls, and the need for a separate computer, may be issues for some people.

Where can I get more information?
http://ebookstore.sony.com/reader/

Comparison Chart:
http://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ContentDisplayView?cmsId=reader_kindle_comparison

iPad FAQ Sheet

2011-08-30T10:54:00.000-04:00

Can I use OverDrive?
Yes!

Do I need a separate computer to use OverDrive?
No, with the OverDrive application for the iPad, you can select, checkout, download, read, and return books directly on the iPad.

How many books will it hold?
The iPad is available with 16GB, 32 GB, or 64GB of memory. The Help, by Kathryn Stockett, is 453KB in the EPUB format, so a 16GB iPad could hold about 35,320 copies of The Help. Of course, not all 16GB is available for storing books; the operating system occupies some of that memory.

How long does the battery last?
* Built-in 25-watt-hour rechargeable lithium-polymer battery
* Up to 10 hours of surfing the web on Wi-Fi, watching video, or listening to music
* Charging via power adapter or USB to computer system

Can I read the screen in sunlight?
The LED backlit display gives an effect that is more like a computer monitor than a page in a book, and can be hard to read in strong daylight. However, there are anti-glare screen protectors that can be purchased separately, and the brightness of the display itself can be adjusted from within the reader applications. The background can be changed from white to a pale sepia.

Screen resolution?
1024-by-768-pixel resolution at 132 pixels per inch (ppi)

Size? Weight?
Height, 9.50 inches (241.2 mm); Width, 7.31 inches (185.7 mm); Depth: 0.34 inch (8.8 mm); about 1.33 pounds (601 g)

How large / how many sizes can I make the words display?
The font size is adjustable from within the OverDrive reader app in nine (9) steps, from 64 lines per page (very small) to 23 lines per page (very large) in portrait mode. The font size, as well as the font face, can be similarly adjusted from within the other reading apps.

How do you turn the page?
Touch or swipe the screen from right to left to turn to the next page, or from left to right to go to the previous page.

Does it remember my place?
Yes, when you reopen a book you were reading, it opens at the last page you were reading. You can also set bookmarks and go to the beginning of any chapter.

How much does it cost?
A new iPad 2 starts at $499 for the WiFi-only model with 16GB of storage, and runs all the way up to $829 for WiFi + 3G with 64GB of storage. My Library bought a refurbished iPad 1 with 16GB and WiFi for $349.

Do I have to subscribe to a service?
The WiFi model works with any wireless network. The WiFi+3G model works with both wireless and with the 3G cellphone network. The 3G service can be turned on and off as needed in a pay-as-you-go system; no contract commitment is required.

Are the batteries self-replaceable or does it need to be sent in when they die?
The batteries are not replaceable. When the battery is no longer holding a charge, you can send your iPad to Apple and receive a replacement iPad for a $99 service fee. (Free, if it’s a new iPad still in the warranty period.)

Can I use it with multiple formats?
Yes. In addition to the OverDrive app for borrowing books, there is a Kobo app, a Barnes & Noble Nook app, all of which offer books in the EPUB format. There is an Amazon Kindle app, supporting Amazon’s proprietary amz format. There is also Apple’s own iBooks app, which lets you purchase and read books from the iBookstore. There are apps to read and create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations that are compatible with Microsoft Office Suite. Articles from our EBSCO subscription databases can be read, whether they are in PDF or HTML format.

Can it connect to the Internet?
Yes. With a web browser (Safari is already installed) you can visit any website. The only limitation is that the iPad does not support Adobe Flash, so a few sites will not display properly.

Can I use it to watch video?
You can play videos at YouTube. You can watch streaming video from Netflix using the Netflix app for iPad, but you can’t watch streaming video from Amazon.

What else does it do?
The iPad can send and receive email, surf the Web, store your photos, music, and videos, keep your calendar and your notes, and display maps. The iPad with WiFi+3G gives you real-time navigation instructions using GPS. Because of the large format and the screen resolution, the iPad works comfortably with most websites without having to resort to a special mobile app. It has a true multi-touch screen and the web browser display can be zoomed in and out easily by “pinching” the display with two fingers.

Conclusion?
Excellent general purpose computer, in addition to offering a great reading experience. I would recommend the iPad to anyone who wants basic functions such as access to email, the Web, photos, music, e-books, shopping online, etc., but who has never used a traditional computer with a keyboard and mouse. It's also a fine device for experienced computer users who travel or frequently attend offsite meetings and conferences.

Where can I get more information?
http://www.apple.com/ipad/

UPDATE: For the best searching and browsing experience in OverDrive, you'll want to use the iPad's web browser to select and check out your e-book, and then sign into your OverDrive account from the iPad to download the books to your iPad. Or you can select a book to borrow using a more traditional desktop or laptop computer. The app isn't quite there yet, and won't, for example, let you specify "show me all ePUBs that are available to borrow right now," like the OverDrive website will. Soon, though!

Kindle FAQ Sheet

2011-08-30T10:28:00.001-04:00

Can I use OverDrive?
Not yet, but stay tuned for news later this year. Amazon and Overdrive have announced that they will have an agreement that will serve Kindle users.

Do I need a separate computer to use OverDrive?
We don’t know yet, but since the Kindle is WiFi-enabled, I think it will probably be able to access Overdrive without using a separate computer.

How many books will it hold?
With 4GB of internal storage (approximately 3GB available for user content), the newest Kindle holds up to 3,500 books.

How long does the battery last?
A single charge lasts up to two months with wireless off based upon a half-hour of daily reading time. If you read for one hour a day, you will get battery life of up to one month. Keep wireless always on and it lasts for up to 3 weeks. Battery life will vary based on wireless usage, such as shopping the Kindle Store, web browsing, and downloading content. Fully charges in approximately 4.5 hours via the included U.S. power adapter. Also supports charging from your computer via the included USB 2.0 cable.

Can I read the screen in sunlight?
Yes. The Kindle’s E -nk Pearl screen reflects light like ordinary paper and uses no backlighting, eliminating the glare associated with other electronic displays.

Screen resolution?
600 x 800 pixel resolution at 167 ppi (pixels per inch), 16-level gray scale

Size? Weight?
Two sizes: 7.5" x 4.8" x 0.335", 6” display (measured diagonally), 8.5 ounces; and the Kindle DX, 10.4" x 7.2" x 0.38”, 9.7” display, 18.9 ounces.

How large / how many sizes can I make the words display?
There are eight (8) adjustable font sizes and three (3) choices of fonts.

How do you turn the page?
There are buttons on each side of the Kindle for moving to the next page and the previous page, so it’s easy to turn the page no matter which hand you are holding it with.

Does it remember my place?
Yes, when you reopen a book you were reading, it opens at the last page you were reading. You can also set bookmarks and go to the beginning of any chapter.

How much does it cost?
Four models range from $114 (6”, WiFi, new) to $379 (9.7”, WiFi + 3G, new).

Do I have to subscribe to a service?
No. The WiFi model works with any wireless network. The WiFi+3G model works with both wireless and with the 3G cellphone network. The Kindle’s 3G connectivity is paid for by Amazon. There are no additional fees charged to the Kindle user.

Are the batteries self-replaceable or does it need to be sent in when they die?
The batteries are not replaceable. When the battery is no longer holding a charge, you will have to send your Kindle back to Amazon for service. The replacement is covered by the one-year warranty. A two-year warranty is available at extra cost.

Can I use it with multiple formats?
Yes. Kindle (AZW), TXT, PDF, Audible (Audible Enhanced (AA, AAX)), MP3, unprotected MOBI, PRC natively; HTML, DOC, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP through conversion.

Can it connect to the Internet?
Yes, it uses a browser based on WebKit, but it is still considered experimental.

Can I use it to watch video?
No.

What else does it do?
It can read some books and periodicals to you using text-to-speech. Some books can be loaned for 14 days to a friend with another Kindle. The first chapters of most Kindle books can be read for free. Over 1.8 million free, out-of-copyright, pre-1923 books are available to read on Kindle, including titles such as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Pride and Prejudice, and Treasure Island. Built-in dictionary. Built-in access to Wikipedia. Highlight and annotate your books. Search function. Full QWERTY keyboard. Manually rotate screen between portrait and landscape orientation. In addition to getting books from Amazon, the Kindle can also receive digital magazine and newspaper subscriptions.

Conclusion?
The small controls still make the Kindle difficult to use for persons with vision impairments, and while the font can be controlled for the books themselves, the displays for the table of contents, the Amazon store, and other screens cannot be changed. But once the book has been opened and the font size and style selected, all the user has to do is turn the pages and turn the Kindle off when they’re done. (Or let it go into sleep mode.) The E-Ink technology is much easier on the eyes for extended reading than an LCD display. The Read-to-Me feature is a big plus for books and also for periodicals. Overall, the Kindle is an excellent choice for a reader who travels and doesn’t want to carry a heavy pile of books, or who wants the instant delivery of the latest bestsellers, or who can’t always get the book they want in large print, or who just likes the light weight of the Kindle compared to the latest Ken Follett tome.

Where can I get more information?
http://www.amazon.com/

Barnes & Noble Nook 1st Edition FAQ Sheet

2011-08-13T14:33:00.001-04:00

Nook 1st Edition

Can I use OverDrive?
Yes!

Do I need a separate computer to use OverDrive?
Yes. While the Nook does support Web browsing wherever there is a wireless connection available, downloading ebooks directly to the nook is not [yet] supported. E-books must first be downloaded to a computer with Overdrive Media Console and Adobe Digital Editions, then transferred to the Nook via its USB cable.

How many books will it hold?
The Nook 1st Edition comes with 2GB of memory that can store up to 1,500 books and periodicals, and is expandable up to 16GB additional memory with a microSD™ memory card. (Some of that capacity may be reserved for content purchased from the Barnes & Noble NOOK Store.) The Help, by Kathryn Stockett, is 453KB in the EPUB format, so the Nook could hold at least 2,207 copies of The Help if you only borrowed them from OverDrive.

Where else besides OverDrive and Barnes & Noble can I get books?
Any online vendor that offers the EPUB, PDB, or PDF formats.

How long does the battery last?
Up to 10 days with the wireless off.

Can I read the screen in sunlight?
Yes, the reading area of the Nook 1st Edition uses glare-free E-Ink technology and reads just like paper in sunlight.

Screen resolution?
No data on the Nook website, but the screen is 6”, measured diagonally, and appears to be the same resolution as the 6” Kindle: 600 x 800 pixel resolution at 167 ppi (pixels per inch)

Size? Weight?
7.7 inches by 4.9 inches by 0.5 inches; 12.1 ounces (NOOK 3G+Wi-Fi); 11.6 ounces (NOOK Wi-Fi)

How large / how many sizes can I make the words display?
There are 6 font sizes with 3 font styles.

How do you turn the page?
Buttons on each side of the reading area are used to move back and forward a page at a time.

Does it remember my place?
Yes, when you reopen a book you were reading, it opens at the last page you were reading. You can also set bookmarks and go to the beginning of any chapter.

How much does it cost?
The Nook 1st Edition with WiFi currently lists for $119, and with WiFi + 3G (AT&T) for $169, if purchased directly from Barnes & Noble. Refurbished Nook 1st editions may be found at some online dealers.

Do I have to subscribe to a service?
No, there are no monthly fees for the 3G access.

Are the batteries self-replaceable or does it need to be sent in when they die?
The battery is self-replaceable, and a replacement battery can be purchased from a number of online vendors.

Can I use it with multiple formats?
The Nook 1st edition supports these formats for eBooks, graphics, audio, and other file types, transferred from your computer using the USB cable, or from the microSD card: EPUB (including Non or Adobe DRM); PDB; PDF; Graphics: JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP; Audio: MP3. Our EBSCO subscription database includes many popular full-text magazine titles in PDF; these files can be downloaded to your computer and transferred to the Nook 1st Edition for later reading. (Not Supported: DOC, LIT, TXT, AMZ (Amazon), LRZ/LRX (Sony))

Can it connect to the Internet?
Yes, there is a web browser built-in. Web browsing is possible, but awkward and limited because of having to switch focus from the touch screen-- which gives only a keyhole sized view of any webpage--to the E-Ink reading area and back again.

Can I use it to watch video?
No, there is no supported video format.

What else does it do?
Find a particular word or passage, add highlights and notes, look up a word in the built-in dictionary. Play music while reading. Loan purchased books to your friends who have a Nook or the Nook app. Download a free sample of any B&N e-book before buying it. Store and display your photos and play your music or audiobooks in the supported formats. It has built-in speakers, but a headset is recommended for the best sound. Use your own images as screensavers. It comes with Chess and Sodoku already installed. Airplane mode turns off the WiFi so that it can’t be accidentally re-enabled. In addition to books, you can subscribe to many newspapers and periodicals that will be delivered wirelessly as soon as a new edition is available.

Conclusion
A good value for a dedicated E-Reader (as opposed to the more general purpose computer capabilities of the Nook Color). For a patron with vision challenges, I’d recommend the Nook 1st Edition over any of the Kindles, because of the nice, bright, touch screen navigation feature that takes the place of the Kindle keyboard and its tiny buttons.

Where can I get more information?
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/u/nook1-features/379002734/

Choosing an E-Reader

2011-08-13T14:19:00.000-04:00

Color Nook

Are you ready to take the plunge and buy an e-reader? Or maybe you have an older model and are ready to trade it in for something newer? Confused by all the choices? Me,too! That's why I wrote a short FAQ for each of the five e-readers that my library currently owns, plus one for my own general-purpose Android tablet. This is only a sample of what's available right now, and doesn't include devices like smartphones, which people presumably purchase for reasons other than just reading books.

When choosing an e-reader, you first want to think about how you want to use it. Will you be using it mostly to read the latest bestsellers? Will you be subscribing to a daily newspaper or monthly magazine? Do you want to be able to borrow ebooks from your library, or access the newspapers and magazines that are in the library's subscription databases? Do you have documents, either personal or work-related, of your own that you want to be able to read at odd moments like waiting in line at the supermarket or in the doctor's office? Do you want a device that you can also use to read your email and surf the Web, or do you want to keep those functions entirely separate?

Your next consideration should be your experience of how intuitive the device is to use, and how comfortable you think it will be to read for long periods of time. This is where the difference between e-Ink screens and backlit LED screens really matters. Are you going to want to read outdoors, or will most of your reading be indoors? Can you turn the pages with either hand, or will you get tired of holding the device the same way all the time? The only way to find out what's right for you is to try out as many e-readers as you can get your hands on. The big-box stores like Staples and Best Buy now carry a variety of e-readers that you can try, but also check with your local library, which may have one or more e-readers for you to try out or even borrow and take home.

In the next few entries, I'll post the FAQs.

Bridging the divide

2011-07-25T20:42:00.000-04:00

Jessamyn C. West has written a wonderful book titled Without a Net: Librarians Bridging the Digital Divide. I'm not even half way through it yet, and I've already gleaned more ideas than I can use in a year. One thing I know for sure, I'm going to have to find a way to cram more classes into the schedule than just the one per week, plus the Monday morning drop-in, that I do now. There may be only one or two people in each class--we're a small community and, in my experience with them, no one person has quite the same computer needs as another person. I'm also hamstrung by the lack of a real computer lab. We have laptops, but it's proven to be very difficult to keep them in a uniform state between users. I wish I could just have half a dozen laptops that were never used for anything except classes. I may have to make such an investment with my own nickel. Certainly the prices have come down to the point where an idea like that isn't totally off the wall.

In addition to all the wonderful ideas in the book, Jessamyn has even shared many of her teaching materials. I love librarians! Buy the book. You won't regret it.

Fun with photos

2011-07-19T20:44:00.000-04:00

Do you know someone who scrapbooks? (Is that the right verb?) Would you like to distribute family photos that are a little out of the ordinary? Take a look at Picnik.

To get started, just upload a photo and start playing with it. And if you already have a Flickr account, you can pull photos right from your Flickr sets. Here's a simple collage I made with some photos from a walking tour of Boston.

And here's a fancy collage I made using a photo from a trip to Greece.

I don't know who Daniel and Sophia are, but that's a text field that you can edit, and there are lots more fancy frames for making Mother's and Father's Day cards, holiday cards, vacation postcards, etc. Print them at home on your own color printer, or send them directly from Flickr to Snapfish and have them print cards, calendars, mugs, and more.

If you don't already have a Flickr account, it's like most web-based applications--there's a free version and a premium version. Likewise for Picnik. These were made with the free version of Picnik, but with the premium version you get a lot more choices of layouts for the simple collage, and lots more frames and layout options for the fancy collages.

Have you tried unplugging it and plugging it back in?

2011-06-28T21:30:00.000-04:00

Interviewers have looked askance at me when I've given this or a similar answer to one of their technical questions. They think that technology should be much harder and more complex than this, and they probably think I'm something of a simpleton and a fake technology librarian, but the fact is that a lot of networking and other connectivity problems can be solved this way.

Case number 1: This evening we had the big kickoff for the summer reading program. The entertainer we had booked had brought his Macbook to be hooked up to our large screen television monitor. He's done this dozens of times at other venues without any problems. But our television didn't detect a signal from the Macbook. Yes, he had his own adapter to convert the Mac's video output to a VGA output for the television. He'd already tried System Preferences > Display > Detect Monitors. My boss the Director had already tried rebooting the Mac. Nothing worked. Then they called me.

I tried System Preferences on the Mac again. I had to. I made sure the adapter cable was snug at both ends, but I didn't unplug anything. I made sure that the television's input was set to "RGB-PC," but it still wasn't detecting a video signal. Finally I just unplugged the video adapter from the Mac and plugged it back in again. And what do you know, the television found a signal.

I can't explain why that worked. Maybe the order that things are connected matters. It shouldn't, but it frequently does--sometimes the hardware or the software at one end or the other is not yet quite ready to start, and maybe there is a window of opportunity outside of which the other device won't be detected. But the Director had already rebooted the Mac, and that hadn't made any difference.

Maybe it was just a bad connection that appeared to be okay but wasn't. If that hadn't worked, I would have gone for the can of spray cleaner and cleaned all the connectors. You can buy this at any Radio Shack--just ask for electrical contact cleaner. It comes in a spray can like WD40, with the same little red straw to direct the cleaning fluid onto the contacts. Don't squirt it into the TV or the computer. Just clean off the connectors at the ends of the cables.

Case number 2: I used to work in a library where at least once a month I would get called to fix a computer that didn't have network connectivity. It was always the same person and the same computer. In the manner of most librarians I know, this person always had several tote bags in tow. You know how it goes. You've got your lunch, and, depending what shift you're working, your dinner, too. You've got your book bag. You've got a change of shoes so that you aren't wearing your good shoes in the car or the bus or walking. Then there are all the miscellaneous things you have to have with you--in my case a netbook--and finally you have a pocketbook. This librarian was in the habit of tossing all of that under her desk when she first arrived. Well, guess where the network drop for her computer was? Yep. It "looked" like it was plugged in, but not all eight wires were making contact. All I ever had to do was unplug the connector from the wall and plug it back in. I tried to explain to her what was happening, but it always happened again.

So, the moral of the story is, it's not always that complicated. Most of the time, it's something simple. So why do we get paid the big bucks (that's a joke, by the way) if it's as simple as unplugging it and plugging it back in? Ah, but it's knowing when, and which one.

And that reminds me of an old engineering story...

There was an engineer who had an exceptional gift for fixing all things mechanical. After serving his company loyally for over 30 years, he happily retired. Several years later the company contacted him regarding a seemingly impossible problem they were having with one of their multi-million dollar machines. They had tried everything and everyone else to get the machine to work but to no avail.

In desperation, they called on the retired engineer who had solved so many of their problems in the past. The engineer reluctantly took the challenge. He spent a day studying the huge machine. Finally, at the end of the day, he marked a small "x" in chalk on a particular component of the machine and said, "This is where your problem is." The part was replaced and the machine worked perfectly again. The company received a bill for $50,000 from the engineer for his service. They demanded an itemized accounting of his charges.

The engineer responded briefly: One chalk mark $1; Knowing where to put it $49,999.

It was paid in full and the engineer retired again in peace.

http://www.i18nguy.com/engineers.html

Mobile website

2011-05-07T20:01:00.002-04:00

Rye Public Library now has a basic mobile-friendly website, thanks to Brian Herzog of Chelmsford Pubic Library (MA). He gave a presentation yesterday at NHLA's conference, and included all the code and an excellent read-me file right on his website:

http://www.swissarmylibrarian.net/mobile/

I downloaded his code, customized it for RPL, omitted a few features that I didn't get to today, and modified our regular website to include a link to the mobile website. The biggest challenge was figuring out the correct parameters for doing a keyword or ISBN search in our catalog. So now, when I'm standing in the bookstore, tempted to buy yet another book, I can whip out my phone and quickly find out if RPL has it. Yeah, I could do that from the regular catalog website, too, but this is way cooler, and saves me the extra step of enlarging the view to the point where I can type in the search box. ;-)

Check it out!

http://ryepubliclibrary.org/mobile/

Cloud Computing in Libraries

2011-05-07T13:24:00.003-04:00

Here are some of the references I used for my talk at the New Hampshire Library Association conference yesterday. A slideshow and a written edition of my talk will follow soon.

Cloud Computing

“Where is the cloud? Geography, economics, environment, and jurisdiction in cloud computing.” Paul T. Jaeger, Jimmy Lin, Justin M. Grimes, and Shannon N. Simmons. First Monday, Volume 14, Number 5 - 4 May 2009. http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2456/2171

“The Web companies use Amazon’s cloud-based service to serve their Web sites, applications and files. Amazon’s customers include start-ups like the social networking site Foursquare but also big companies like Pfizer and Nasdaq.”
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/amazon-cloud-failure-takes-down-web-sites/

Survey Summary

https://spreadsheets.google.com/gform?key=0AkxxsS3dAUwhdDMzcnRXamFUaWFZdEVOUm1KeHVtX1E&hl=en&gridId=0#chart

Trying to see through the user's eyes

2011-03-26T06:34:00.006-04:00

A patron I've never seen before came into my office to ask me about a problem with her computer. The following recreation is heavily edited.

P: The screen is all white!
me: What kind of monitor do you have?
P: The regular kind that sits on the desk.
me: I mean, is it a flat screen, like this one?
P: No, it's big.
me: Like a television? It might be a problem with your picture tube.
P: No, no, I can see everything, but the top and bottom of the screen are gone. It's all white.
me: So you can see the desktop, and you can see your Inbox?
P: Yes! That's what I've been telling you!
[I sign into Yahoo, open my Inbox, open my Inbox, and hit F11.]
me: Does it look something like this?
P: Yes! How did you do that?
me: I hit the function key F11.
P: What does that do?
me: Just what you see here. It makes the window go full screen and the menu bars and taskbar go away. Go home and try pressing F11 and see if that brings it back.
P: If there's no F11 key, can I just type F, 1, 1?
me: No, that won't work. There is an F11 key somewhere on your keyboard. You can find it.

Then there was a whole other conversation about leaving "the system" running for four months while she was in Florida, but what she really left on was the cable modem. Not a choice I would have made, but I assured her it didn't have anything to do with her immediate problem.

Invisible Patrons

2011-03-12T07:45:00.002-05:00

Seven people came to the Excel Basics, Part 1 class the other night. Well, five really. The other two were my groopies, who have been coming no matter what the topic is and whether they're prepared for it or not. (They're still dealing with basic Windows terminology.)

Three were people I'd never seen before. The best moment was at the end of the class when I offered the newcomers a paper copy of the schedule of Thursday night talks, and they said, "Don't need it, we'll just check the website." Coming up on two years here, and no one's ever said that to me before.

There's a whole other invisible patron population in this little town, and I wonder how well we're really serving them. We're only open two nights a week, and only until 8 PM. I remember when I was commuting by car, by the time I got back to Danbury, the last thing I felt like doing was going to the library. The folks who commute to Boston by bus or commuter train from here probably don't feel like stopping at the library when they get home. We're open for six hours on Saturdays, but there are never any programs scheduled then--it's a 3-person crew, strictly for checking physical materials in and out.

The Board of Trustees meets at 4 PM on a weekday, too early for anyone who works out of town. The Friends meet at 6 PM on a weeknight, which is better, but still kind of early. I'm sure they are well-representative of a large portion of the town, but not all of it.

I hope that the new strategic planning committee includes representatives from this invisible population.

May their memory be eternal

2011-01-27T00:01:00.004-05:00

January 27, 2011 marks the 44th anniversary of the fire that took the lives of Apollo 1 astronauts Gus Grisson, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee.

The following day, January 28th, marks the 25th anniversary of the space shuttle Challenger disaster, which took the lives of Commander Francis R. Scobee, Pilot Michael J. Smith, Mission Specialists Judith A. Resnik, Ellison S. Onizuka, Ronald E. McNair and Payload Specialists Gregory B. Jarvis and Sharon Christa McAuliffe.

Christa McAuliffe was our first teacher astronaut, selected from more than 11,000 applicants. She was a social studies teacher at Concord High School in Concord, NH, and today The Christa McAuliffe Planetarium/McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center in Concord is named in her memory.

In their honor, here is a favorite poem of mine, and of many astronauts and pilots. It was written by John Gillespie Magee, Jr., a 19-year-old American who died while serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force, just before the United States entered WWII.

High Flight

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air....

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.
Where never lark or even eagle flew —
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gillespie_Magee,_Jr.

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/apollo1info.html

http://history.nasa.gov/Biographies/challenger.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christa_McAuliffe

Image from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center: http://www.flickr.com/photos/28634332@N05/4703771206/

In which we make house calls

2011-01-20T12:40:00.003-05:00

This job has made me appreciate tech support people like never before. It's difficult, if not impossible, to give good phone support to people who don't have the vocabulary to describe what they are looking at on the screen. I have a "computer comfort class" for rank beginners, to start to give them mastery over some of the terminology they need in order to help themselves find their own answers on the Web, but very few people have attended it. Those who have learned how to do email by rote, and how to locate websites that they want, don't think they need to learn anything else. Until they need to learn something else. But then they don't know how to use terms like title bar, menu bar, file and folder hierarchy, navigate/browse to a folder, active window, maximize, minimize, etc.

I get a lot of these calls from our patrons. In many cases, they have a spouse or other family member who has more experience with computers but doesn't have the patience to impart that knowledge to their close family. So they call me.

One of our devoted volunteers called me last week for help with her new all-in-one printer-scanner-copier. Her tech guru had purchased and set up the printer for her, but hadn't shown her how to use the scanner function. She had over a hundred old photos that she wanted to scan and place on a CD to give to her children. She had been using it as a printer for some time, and she had tried scanning on her own, but she didn't know how to find the resulting images on her computer.

So I made a house call. Like I said, she's a devoted volunteer. It only took about half an hour, and she took notes. She called me a couple of days later, thrilled to report that she had scanned all the photos and copied them to a CD. She was going to make another one for another daughter, and one for herself for an archive. The best part? She's in her 70s. Successes like that really make my day.

Media Player Classic saves the day!

2011-01-19T19:32:00.003-05:00

The big meeting room got double-booked today, so the Wednesday matinee had to be moved upstairs, using the older portable projector and a laptop. But we couldn't get the laptop to play the DVD. Windows Media Player would play the video, but not the audio. IntermediaDVD would not play at all, complaining that the DVD was copy-protected.

So I downloaded and installed The Combined Community Codec Pack, knowing that Media Player Classic is bundled with it. Media Player Classic played the DVD without complaints, and now I have a laptop that can play DVDs, AVI files, and several other media formats that it couldn't play before.

Totally Awesome!

2010-12-31T08:52:00.004-05:00

This week I got my first Android device, and it is truly awesome! With an absolute minimum of fuss, I downloaded and installed OverDrive Media Console, an MP3 audiobook, and an epub book. Adobe Digital Editions is not necessary, just an Adobe ID, which I already had, but which might be a small stumbling block for a few people. If OverDrive and Adobe could just connect those two data items (i.e. library card number and Adobe ID), that would eliminate most of the pain for new users, and borrowing ebooks would be just as slick as buying ebooks on a Kindle.

The device I bought is a 7" tablet from eLocity, a company that I had never heard of until last week. If this is typical of Android devices, and I don't know why it wouldn't be, it seems to me that this is the best of all possible worlds. With the Kindle app, I can buy from Amazon, and with the ODMC I can borrow books and audio. The "native" ereader is Aldiko, and it (or eLocity, I can't tell which) offers tons of free books. As far as I'm concerned, it's already paid for itself.

The next time anyone asks me which ereader to buy--if it's not already too late--I already had two calls from patrons who got Kindles for Christmas--I'm going to tell them to forget the readers and buy an Android tablet.

NORAD tracks Santa

2010-12-23T13:10:00.000-05:00

http://www.noradsanta.org/

Today's word: firewall

2010-12-23T07:49:00.000-05:00

Seems so obvious in hindsight. If two machines (in this case the PAC server and the data server) were talking to each other, and you install a new program (in this case Symantec antivirus) on one of them, and now the PAC server can't talk to the data server, and the Circ app can't talk to the data server, then maybe the problem has something to do with the program you just installed, right?

I made two mistakes--well, three.

(1) I decided to update our two servers the night before our last open day before the holiday weekend. Unbeknownst to me, our vendor was closing up shop at 5 pm (MST) instead of their usual 9 pm. They still have emergency coverage of course, but I'd hate to have to drag someone away from his or her family on a holiday weekend. Next time, I'm waiting until *after* the holiday, whatever holiday it may be.

(2) I changed more than one thing at a time. On the PAC server, there were updates for Windows 2003 server and for Symantec, which has been running fine for months. In another place and time, I would have updated one at a time, rebooted, and made sure that everything was still okay before moving on to the next thing. But I was in a hurry and I had a pretty high level of confidence in both apps. So I took care of that machine and moved on to the data server, which was also ready for a Windows update.

(3) I installed a new application without confirming that everything was still working okay. Like I said, I had a pretty high level of confidence in both programs, and Symantec isn't exactly new, except to this particular machine.

Long story short, Symantec has a lot of settings. And when you install it, you get whatever the default settings are, until you go to each one and set it or leave it alone. I assumed the default settings would work just fine on my machine. (Okay, four mistakes.) The default settings caused the communication between the PAC and the data server, and between the Circ app and the data server, to slow down dramatically. After over half an hour of deliberation with the vendor, I decided to uninstall Symantec and call it a night. Except that caused the communications to cease entirely. After following a few dead ends, the vendor asked me, "what about your firewall?"

What about it? It turns out that when Symantec is uninstalled, it turns your Windows firewall on. I guess that's sort of like locking all the doors and windows before leaving on a long trip. Once the Windows firewall on the data server was disabled, everything went back to normal.

Firewall. I won't forget that word any time soon. From now on, that will be the first thing I check.

Update: Everything seemed normal when I left, but now from home, the PAC is agonizingly slow again. Working, but slow. I have no way of knowing from here whether the Circ application is still working, but I'm sure I'll find out soon.

Speed up Firefox

2010-12-16T09:40:00.003-05:00

Here are three tips for improving Firefox's performance: clear the downloads list, remove old Java Consoles, and switch to newly opened tabs immediately. Note that if your Windows account already has administrative privileges, you don't have to close and reopen Firefox as described in the tip on removing old versions of Java Console.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/213622/quick_tips_for_speeding_up_mozilla_firefox.html

About data CDs and DVDs

2010-12-10T11:25:00.010-05:00

It's the Christmas shopping/baking/traveling season. This week only one person showed up for the Thursday night tech talk, so it turned into a highly personalized one-on-one session. The patron had an interesting question, one I've only heard one other time. He wanted to learn how to write files to a CD, and he wanted the files to be written in a predetermined order. In particular, he talked about the requirement for chapters in a book in progress to be written to the CD such that, when it was opened, the recipient would see the files in the proper order, one chapter per file.

I had this question several months ago, in the context of files being prepared to send to an attorney, and the files had to be "written in order."

I didn't spend a lot of time questioning the patrons to find out how they arrived at this requirement. It may be that the attorney who was to receive the CD had communicated the requirement. It may have been the budding author who wanted to ensure that his first chapters were read in the right order. Most people have had quite a lot of experience with audio CDs, but may have little or none with data CDs, so it's understandable that they might think that the order of files on a data CD matters. But in fact, the contents of a data CD are going to be viewed by the recipient using Windows Explorer, and that's going to determine the recipient's view of the CD. The directory of the CD can be viewed in alphabetical order by the name of the file, in order of the size of the file, in order of the type of file, and in order of date last saved. Each of these can sorted in ascending or descending order. The view can be customized somewhat, in that columns can be added or subtracted, but there is no view that would allow the average Windows user to see the files in the order that they were written to the CD. (Open "My Documents" and select "View" > "Choose details..." from the menu bar to see all the fields that can be added.)

There are many formats of CDs and DVDs, and depending on how you are going to use the resulting disc, you may choose a different type of media. This table spells out the differences between various kinds of CDs and DVDs and how to use them when writing data files.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/Which-CD-or-DVD-format-should-I-use#section_4

The patron who was preparing documents to send to an attorney was satisfied with my explanation that Windows Explorer controls the view of the directory of the CD's contents. I didn't get any feedback, so I assume the attorney was satisfied, too. The author was happy when I showed him how he could create folders on the CD, with names like "Chapter 1," "Chapter 2," and "Chapter 3." He was not as happy about my first suggestion, which was to prefix each file name with a chapter number. In Word, a new section can be defined for each chapter, so it's not really necessary to split up a book into separate files, unless it's more comfortable for the writer to work that way. But section headings, page numbering, tables of contents, and indexes are pretty advanced topics for someone who is just getting started with files and folders, so I didn't even mention them.

(flickr image by sun dazed)

Old habits die hard

2010-12-03T07:34:00.002-05:00

Even after five years of working in libraries, three and a half of them with benefits, there are some things I still haven't gotten used to. This was the actual dialog I had recently with our assistant director:

AD: Oh my golly! You still have 3 personal days that you haven't used! You have to use them before the end of the year.

me: I thought personal days were for non-medical emergencies, like car problems, or taking the cat to the vet.

AD: They are, but we don't get paid enough anyway, so we have to use them up.

Is math necessary?

2010-11-29T15:08:00.002-05:00

How much math do we really need to know, asked math professor G.V. Ramanathan last month in this Washington Post article.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/22/AR2010102205451.html

This month, some engineers respond at EETimes.

http://www.eetimes.com/discussion/other/4210903/Math-Is-Needed

As an undergraduate Applied Math major, and as someone who has a sister who occasionally tutors kids in math, I think we need to teach more, not less, math. The lottery, I like to say, is a tax on people who didn't take probability and statistics.

What do you think?

(Flickr photo)

Netflix introduces streaming-only option

2010-11-23T09:50:00.002-05:00

This week Netflix raised the prices of its DVD options, but introduced a new, streaming-video-only option at $7.99. An earlier story this year revealed that Netflix will not be opening any more processing centers for DVDs.

DVDs account for a large part of our circulation, and a large portion of our visitors. How are we going to keep them coming in the doors four or five years from now when they can get movies at home any time they want?

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/22/netflix-introduces-streaming-only-pricing/

It figures

2010-11-17T19:03:00.007-05:00

I lived in Connecticut for over 30 years and was called for jury duty three times. Four times, actually, including one day of grand jury, but I think that was a day tacked onto the first stint of jury duty. The memory is a little fuzzy. Each time I had to report to Bridgeport, about an hour away.

The first time was in the late 70s, and under the old system, you reported for jury duty every morning, four days a week, for an entire month. If you were not called for voir dire, you spent the day reading, knitting, watching television, and talking with your fellow ~~inmates~~ citizens. I fell to talking with another woman, visibly pregnant, who was also from the Danbury area. She thought it would be a good idea if we car-pooled, and I agreed, so for the next four weeks I picked her up in the morning and dropped her off in the evening. At the end of the month she pocketed her mileage allowance. I know it's petty of me to remember that all these years later, but it made an impression on me. That and the grueling month of jury duty. I did get selected at least once that I recall, for a personal injury case resulting from a traffic accident, so it wasn't a total waste of time.

The second time I got called, the state had instituted a much more humane system, wherein you phoned in the night before, or early the morning of, to find out if you had to report. I did not have to report, and that was the end of it.

The third time, I did have to report. It was a gray December day, and the snow started coming down heavily just after we arrived at the courthouse. I was driving a Geo with front-wheel drive. It was usually pretty good in the snow, but this stuff was heavy and wet and slippery. I sat in the jury room watching it come down with dread.

Finally we were called into the jury room. In Connecticut State court, each potential juror is questioned individually, but in federal court they do it in gangs of about 20 at a time. Each of us was asked to stand and recite our answers to a set of written questions that we'd each been given. No problems until I got to the question of education. "B.S. in Applied Math from NYU, J.D. from the University of Connecticut..." "Your Honor!" calls out one of the attorneys. Both go up the judge's bench for a private conversation.

When they come back out, the judge asks me, "Have you ever practiced law?"

"No, Your Honor."

"If chosen for this jury, will you follow my instructions as to the law to be applied to this case?"

"Yes, Your Honor."

Voir dire ends, the attorneys confer, and I am excused. Big surprise. There's nothing wrong with being an attorney. There were at least two practicing attorneys in the group who were selected. The difference is that they all know each other but they don't know me, since I've never practiced law. I'm a loose cannon, and they don't know what I'll do when confronted with a real case.

And that was that. I was done with that round of jury duty. Somehow I thought that maybe I wouldn't even get called again, that I'd be on someone's do-not-call list somewhere. And if I did get called, I'd never be asked to serve on a jury, so it would all be over in one day at most.

I opened my mail tonight and guess what? I've been summoned for jury duty. In Connecticut. In Danbury. Just a little less than 2 miles from where I used to live. I could have easily walked there. So I have to send the form back and tell them that I can't report because I've moved out of state.

It figures.

*The first image is of the old court house at 71 Main Street. Beautiful, isn't it? I'm so glad they haven't torn it down yet. The second image is the new court house at 146 White Street, the one I would be reporting to if I still lived in Danbury. It's not bad, but it just doesn't have the character of the old court house. At least it still has a law library. Connecticut closed two of its other law libraries this year.

I Heart Dell

2010-11-15T10:48:00.001-05:00

I just replaced the optical drive in the director's computer. The computer is brand new, just purchased late last year but, inexplicably, it was ordered with a DVD-ROM drive. (Yes, they still make those.) The old drive slid out, the replacement drive slid in, and I didn't even need a screwdriver; the new drive came with its own mounting/sliding hardware. It's a beautiful thing.

Pale Blue Dot

2010-11-09T07:31:00.002-05:00

Today would have been astronomer Carl Sagan's 76th birthday. Here is my favorite Sagan quote from Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future In Space.

Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe:, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan#Pale_Blue_Dot_.281994.29

At the Rally to Restore Sanity

2010-11-04T08:26:00.002-04:00

I wasn't there, but someone from Woot! was, and captured an image of this sign. It's good to know that librarians were represented.

Unanswerable questions of the week

2010-10-15T18:34:00.003-04:00

(1) Which e-reader should I buy? I'm going to Florida for the winter. [I launch into an explanation of the small Kindle, which is the only e-reader we have in-house today. Patron: Do I have to go to the Amazon store to buy books for the Kindle? Me: No, it's done wirelessly. You can do it here at the library, at Starbucks, at MacDonalds, ... Patron: So I have to go to MacDonalds to buy books for the Kindle? Me: No, you can do it anywhere you have a signal. Patron: I need something simpler. Me (silently): {Okay, you don't need an e-reader. You need to stick with the 500+ year old technology of the codex.}]

(2) How do I get my new wireless printer to work with my computer? [Me: Did it come with some instructions? Patron: I don't want to read the instructions.]

(3) I just bought a new computer. What do I have to do to get the upgrade? [Me: What are we talking about upgrading? Patron: I don't know. It just said "free upgrade."]

(4) Why isn't my computer receiving emails from the country club anymore? [Me: Are they in the junk mail folder? Patron: No, I looked there. Me: Did you accidentally put the sender's address on a "blacklist"? Patron: I don't know. Me: Are you getting email from other people? Patron: Yes. Me: I'm all out of ideas.]

There were more, from the two patrons who were using a flash drive for the first time (yay, I weaned two more people away from floppy disks!), from the woman who wanted some one-on-one time because her husband would not show her how to use his computer, from the patron who came for a Files & Folders class that turned into a Managing Your Digital Photos class, but I'm too tired to think about them right now.

On the plus side, our ILS is sending out courtesy notices again, and it's only been a month since we switched mail service providers. I don't know why this is always so difficult but, based on a sample of two, it is. And it's not something we're allowed to change ourselves--the vendor has to do it. The state library is starting up a project to develop an open source ILS that other libraries around the state can buy into. Maybe I'll be around to see that come to fruition, and then we can say goodbye to the hefty annual support bills. And maybe that'll save enough money to prevent salary cutbacks. Or maybe not.

Happy Birthday, Michael Faraday!

2010-09-22T08:01:00.002-04:00

Today is the birthday of physicist and chemist Michael Faraday, born in Newington Butts, England in 1791. The Writer's Almanac says of him:

"He had almost no formal schooling, but he taught himself by reading books about chemistry and physics while he worked as a bookbinder's errand boy. Young Faraday got the chance to go and hear four lectures by the famous physicist Humphry Davy. Later, Davy hired him as his assistant.

"Eventually, he became one of the greatest scientists of his era, even though he never learned the complex mathematics that many people considered a necessary context for science. He made huge breakthroughs in the field of electromagnetism — he discovered magneto-electric induction, the law of electro-chemical decomposition, the magnetization of light, and diamagnetism; and he discovered benzene."

This seems like an appropriate day to repeat one of my favorite stories from Isaac Asimov's Treasury of Humor, in which Michael Faraday plays an important role.

Jones had died and gone to heaven and, as a reward for a most exemplary life, was given the grand tour. To his amazement he found that heaven was made up of many sectors, each utterly different.

He passed though the Jewish heaven where millions of people in prayer shawls sang exultantly before the Ark of the Covenant. Then there was the Catholic heaven filled with organ music and incense, where an eternal mass was celebrated in a star-high, skywide cathedral.

"Oh," said the archangelic guide, "we're ecumenical here; we have something for every taste. After all, a good man is a good man and deserves his reward whatever little difference in ritual may exist. Over there is the Moslem heaven with its houris; yonder the Buddhist heaven of contemplation and nirvana. And here -- here is rather a little curiosity."

They crossed a bridge of the firmament and entered into a scene of whitewashed simplicity in which a relatively small number of men and women were singing hymns.

The guide tiptoed past and whispered, "This is a small sect of Christians called Sandemanians. There were only a few thousand altogether. The great scientist Michael Faraday was one. You can see him there."

"Fascinating," whispered Jones. "But tell me, why are we whispering?"

"Because they mustn't hear us. They think they're the only ones here."

Happy Labor Day, from me and Billy Bragg

2010-09-04T23:10:00.001-04:00

Internet Safety

2010-09-02T19:00:00.001-04:00

Here is most of the source material for two of the Internet Safety talks that I've given on Thursday nights. I love Leo Notenboom's articles and don't mind admitting that I shamelessly stole from him.

The first part is on keeping your computer safe on the Internet. You Mac users don't have to worry about malware as much as we PC users, but viruses can still find their way to a Mac via a Word document or Excel spreadsheet with embedded macros (small chunks of code).

http://ask-leo.com/internet_safety_how_do_i_keep_my_computer_safe_on_the_internet.html

The second part is on how to read a URL and figure out where it's really taking you.

http://ask-leo.com/how_do_i_know_that_this_web_address_is_safe.html

Get creative with your network name

2010-08-22T10:45:00.000-04:00

http://schott.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/20/weekend-competition-wi-fi-network-names/

Water under the bridge, and toolkits

2010-08-19T13:00:00.000-04:00

I don't have my own toolkit at work. If I need a screwdriver, I borrow a big one from the custodian's toolkit. All the computers are either so old that they have honking big thumbscrews holding them together, or so new that they just pop and slide apart without any tools. So Tuesday when one of our "live-in" patrons, bless his heart, spilled his water bottle on a laptop, I didn't even have a single baby Phillips head to open it up with.

As soon as I got to the scene of the accident, I unplugged the power cord and the mouse, turned it over, and started shaking out as much water as I could. (Meanwhile the patron decamped and was not seen again that day, nor all of Wednesday.) Still keeping it upside-down, I used paper towels to try to wick out as much water as I could. Then I used a can of air to try to blow out more water. Finally I slid out the battery, which is removable without tools, and saw that it was dry, so I had reason to think that the disk drive, CD-ROM, and memory module were probably dry, too. If I'd had a hairdryer, this would have been the point at which I would have used it to try to dry up the last of the water. I left the laptop lying face down overnight.

Wednesday morning I came in with my own computer toolkit and removed the hard drive and CD-ROM. The hard drive felt vaguely damp, but not really wet. I replaced everything, turned it over, turned it on, and everything seemed normal. And if it hadn't been? Well, it's old as laptops go. Replacements are dirt cheap on eBay. Still, you don't like to lose a useful, working machine for something so preventable. Oh, well. It could have been worse. It could have been coffee or cola.

A year from now I won't remember what I did yesterday

2010-07-29T08:35:00.004-04:00

At most every interview I've gone to in the last five years, I've been asked the same question: tell us an example of a problem you had to solve, and how you solved it. I'm always hard-pressed to answer this question, not because of a dearth of examples, but because of an overabundance. Solving problems is what I do on a daily basis, when I'm not actually trying to get ahead of the curve and forestall problems before they happen. Someone comes to me with what they think is a technical problem, I analyze it, I make a test plan for narrowing down the possible causes, I identify the cause and formulate a solution, I implement the solution, and I move on to the next problem. There's not always time allocated to documenting the problem and the solution, but I will frequently outline them on the staff wiki, so that someday when I'm not in the office, someone else can find my note and reproduce the solution for another patron. A good day is when all the problems get solved. A really good day is when everything goes smoothly because of something I did three months ago to prevent problems.

Yesterday was the first type of day. Before noon, I had:

Helped a patron print out a form he needed to apply for a job with the USPS.

The form is delivered to the applicant as an ASPX file, and the Windows XP laptop he was using did not have an application to open it. I only know about aspx as "active server page," a type of Web page, and I was surprised to find that Internet Explorer couldn't open it. Neither could Firefox. A quick Web search turned up the fact that a PDF reader will open it. Again, I was puzzled as to why the laptop wouldn't open it, but I directed the patron to email the form to a library account, opened it on my computer, printed it out, and gave it to him. Short-term problem solved. Long-term, I made sure the laptop had the latest version of Adobe Reader. I've been using Foxit Reader myself, but just in case there are any incompatibilities, I offer Adobe Reader on the public PCs.

Charged a co-worker's MP3 player.

Last year I gave each of my co-workers an MP3 player from the stash I had accumulated by becoming a devoted follower of Woot.com. One of my co-workers called to say that her Sansa Fuze wasn't charging anymore. A quick search of the Web told me that the problem could be the battery--bad, since it's not replaceable. I have had a couple of dozen of this brand of player pass through my hands, all refurbished units, and I've only had to return one of them. The problem could also be the USB mode. I could see how that would inhibit the transferring of files, but didn't see what it could have to do with charging.

I took it to my desk to observe its behavior. The charging icon acted like it was charging for about a minute, then went quiet. When it was unplugged from the USB cord, the player showed the "low battery" message and shut down. I have the same player, so I tried my known-good cord to see if that was the problem. No difference. A closer look at the player revealed that one bottom corner of the case, the end where the USB cord/charger cable plugs in, was loose. I snapped it shut and tried again, but no change.

Finally I decided to try changing the USB mode. There are three choices: MSC (Mass Storage Class), MTP (Media Transfer Protocol), and Auto Detect. The player is set to Auto Detect by default. I changed it to MSC and plugged it back in to my computer. This time the "what do you want to do with this device that I've detected?" Windows dialog box popped up, and I realized that I had overlooked the fact that it hadn't popped up the other times. So something is different with the way the computer now views the player. Sure enough, it started charging normally and didn't stop until it was finished.

Nothing about the player had changed. My co-worker has been using it for months now. But last week I replaced the computer at the public desk where she usually works. The new computer runs Windows XP, as did the old computer, but it's all new hardware; the old computer was at least 4 years old, possibly more. I still don't understand the details of USB 2.0, and I couldn't explain the difference between MSC and MTP in technical terms. I may dig into it again in more detail at a later date. But right now I know enough to get the job done. That's the idea I was trying to get across to my computer-illiterate patron late yesterday afternoon--learn what you need to know to do what you need to get done, and leave the gory details for later.

There was a third thing, and I've already forgotten what it was.

See what I mean?

How does a cellphone work?

2010-07-28T18:37:00.005-04:00

I wish I'd had a voice recorder going on the last patron of the day: "What's an application?" "Why do they always explain complicated computer terms with more computer terms?" "What does 'Reload current page' mean?" "How do I get back to Google?" "What's 'word processing'?" "How can I get rid of the ads on a webpage?" (She found a dating service ad to be offensive.) She says she needs to learn enough to be employable, but she keeps getting bogged down in minutiae. I wonder if she can use a telephone or drive a car without being paralyzed by the realization that she can't explain how they work?

Then to find out, after 45 minutes of this, that she's not even a patron and can't check out the "Teach Yourself Visually" book I gave her. I showed her how she can type her question in the Google search box--exactly as she would ask it to me--and get some useful results. Yes, the results use words that are also not self-evident. What to do? Go back to the Google search box. Keep doing this until some of it starts to sink in. Just as in mathematics there are axioms that we don't have to prove, we each need to reach a point in the "how?" questions that we don't really need to answer right away in order to achieve useful results.

She ~~threatened~~ promised to come back Monday for Computer Tutor Drop-In time with some specific questions. We'll see.

#headwall

The PAC is Back!

2010-07-23T00:01:00.000-04:00

Let's celebrate!

Two more laptops rescued

2010-07-08T17:26:00.002-04:00

Two more old laptops (IBM ThinkPad R40, Windows XP, 640MB RAM) were rescued today, thanks to Ubuntu 9.04. Instead of being discarded, they will serve us for at least another year or two as OPACs, express (15-minute) Internet computers to let the summer people check their email and then get back to the beach, or just general purpose public computers.

Why not Ubuntu 10.04, you may ask. These old machines can read CDs, but not DVDs, and Ubuntu Desktop 10.04 image appears to be too large to fit onto a CD, although the install instructions have not yet been updated to reflect that. Or maybe I just got a bad download. I'll try again next week.

Why not Ubuntu 9.10? The installation went all right, but the machine wouldn't reboot. It showed a GRUB Error and, while there were several solutions suggested on the Ubuntu forums, I don't yet know enough about the innards of Ubuntu to attempt them. So I punted to 9.04, which also displayed a GRUB error, but one that I could deal with. The simplest solution suggested on the forums was to make sure that the GRUB loader installs in the MBR (Master Boot Record). I didn't remember that being an option in the list of installation questions, but I started the install again and this time chose the advanced options when the question about disk partitioning came around. Sure enough, there were three options for where to put GRUB: hd0, sda, and sda1. A forum post told me that sda is equivalent to MBR, so that's what I selected, and this time the new installation rebooted just fine. All that was left to do was to get the Adobe Flash player, and I was in business. Rinse and repeat with the other laptop.

I would have liked to have installed Google Chrome for Linux, because it comes all packaged with a Flash player, but it doesn't seem to be compatible with 9.04 Desktop. Maybe Ubuntu 10.10 will install cleanly on these old machines, and be compatible with Chrome; we'll see.

Here's the clip I used to test whether Flash was correctly installed. This week I read that Louisiana passed a law that allows people to carry concealed handguns in places of worship, and this was the first thing I thought of.

Results of the Solo Car Commuter Satisfaction Survey

2010-06-29T07:58:00.001-04:00

The last response to the survey was timestamped 6/23, so I decided it was time to look at the results.

There were 177 responses. While I did post this survey elsewhere, I believe that most of the responses probably came from Publibbers.

The averages were as follows:

one-way distance to commute: 11 to 15 miles
number of stop signs: 1 to 5
number of traffic lights: 6 to 10
average speed limit off the highway: 25 to 30
minutes willing to walk to public transportation: no more than 10
minutes willing to wait for a bus or train: 15 to 30

Satisfaction with commute: on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being the
best and 10 the worst, the average is about a 4.

Correlations (-1.0 to +1.0) were as follows:

Our unhappiness with our commute correlates with the distance traveled by a factor of 0.6

The correlation with the number of stop signs was insignificant: 0.08

The number of traffic lights matters a little more, at 0.22

The higher the speed limit on the non-highway roads, the happier we are, with a correlation of -0.3, but there were many "does not apply" responses from the folks who spend more than half of their commute on the highway.

We're willing to wait for the next bus or train about 15 to 30 minutes on average, but that appears to be independent of how happy or unhappy we are with our present commute. Correlation: -0.09

The more unhappy we are with our current commute, the longer we'd be willing to walk to catch a bus or train. Correlation: 0.28

I had expected that the number of stop signs and traffic lights would matter more than they do, but I'm not surprised that the most significant factor is the distance. City planners are going to have to increase the frequency of those trains and buses if they want to get more people out of their cars, and this is something that I used to harp on in my previous hometown, where the buses run every hour, so I'm gratified to see those numbers.

The raw data can be seen here (and downloaded, too, I think).

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AkxxsS3dAUwhdHc2RDAzYWt1aTVhaElkT0taT0o5V0E&hl=en

Thank you to everyone who responded, and to everyone who caught the flaws, and to everyone who had suggestions for improving the questions--some I fixed, and some I'm saving for another time.

Windows XP Tuneup Guide

2010-06-26T14:14:00.005-04:00

Many of us have older (3 or more years old) Windows XP computers that we're not ready to replace yet, for whatever reason. Here are some steps you can take to keep that machine running a little longer while you decide which new 17", Intel i7 core, 4GB laptop you're going to replace it with.

0. Make a copy of your My Documents folder and put it in a safe place. The copy can be to a flash drive, an external hard drive, CD-ROM, data DVD, or a networked drive.

1. Update your anti-virus software and do a complete scan of the C: drive. There are several good anti-virus programs that you can pay for--Symantec, McAfee, Kaspersky, etc.--and also a few good ones that are free. You only need one; if more than one anti-virus program is running at the same time, they are likely to fight each other. Choose one and keep it up-to-date. Schedule an update every week--every day if it's your only computer and it's mission-critical--and a full scan once a week or once a month. AVG is a free anti-virus program that can be obtained at http://free.avg.com/us-en/download-avg-anti-virus-free

2. Do a Disk Cleanup and Disk Defrag. These two programs are at Start > Accessories > System Tools.

3. Download, install, and run CCleaner. This free program finds and cleans up problems in the Registry and deletes unneeded temp files.
http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/

4. Download, install, and run MalwareBytes. Keep it up-to-date and run a scan about once a month.
http://www.malwarebytes.org/

5. Download, install, and run SpyBot Search & Destroy. Keep it up-to-date.
http://download.cnet.com/Spybot-Search-amp-Destroy/3000-8022_4-10122137.html

6. Download, install, and run Spyware Blaster, and keep it up-to-date.
http://download.cnet.com/SpywareBlaster/3000-8022_4-10196637.html

7. If you're using Internet Explorer, make sure it's up-to-date. In IE, go to Tools > Windows Update

8. Make sure Adobe Flash is up-to-date:
http://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/

9. Make sure Adobe Reader is up-to-date.
http://www.adobe.com/go/EN_US-H-GET-READER

10. If you're using Firefox (I highly recommend it over IE), make sure you have the latest version. In Firefox, select Help > Check For Updates.

11. If your computer is a laptop that you use on public networks--libraries, McDonalds, Borders, Starbucks, Barnes & Noble, airports, etc.--make sure the Windows Firewall is turned on. (At home, your router probably has a hardware firewall, but it doesn't hurt to have the Windows Firewall on all the time.) For extra security, download and install Zone Alarm. Be aware that if you use Zone Alarm on a home network with more than one computer, you may need to tweak some of the settings, especially if you have computers that are running different operating systems.
http://download.cnet.com/ZoneAlarm-Free-Firewall/3000-10435_4-10039884.html

Friday music video selection

2010-06-25T09:33:00.001-04:00

Science is once again vindicated!

2010-06-23T16:43:00.005-04:00

It took almost two whole working days, but the most troublesome of the public desktop computers is whole, minus a functioning DVD drive. But that can wait; very few patrons use it, and I have an external USB drive on order in case someone does need it.

The computer is an IBM Lenovo, and it comes with an impressive suite of tools for diagnosing and recovering from problems, including a refresh function that clears the hard drive and reinstalls the operating system as it was when you first took the machine out of the box. It also comes with several levels of security and passwords, far more appropriate for a 100-computer enterprise installation than for a small public library. One of the passwords had been set, and I couldn't get past it to get to the refresh function. Over the years that the machine has been in service, it had acquired a lot of ...shall we say... quirks, and it had finally reached the point of being essentially unusable.

It took me all of Tuesday to figure out how to bypass or disable the password protection that was preventing me from initiating the refresh function, and it turned out to be relatively simple and obvious: uninstall and reinstall the program that uses the password. But first I made a set of six recovery CDs from another, identical machine, thinking that I would take them to the sick machine, boot off of them, and refresh Windows XP from the CDs, only to find out that the DVD/CD drive on the sick machine was no longer responsive. I know it used to work, because several months ago I had booted the same machine from a LiveCD for Ubuntu 9.04, and it ran like that for several days before one patron absolutely had to use MS Word.

In retrospect, even if the DVD drive were working, I probably would have found that the recovery CDs only worked in the machine that they were made on. So in the end, I reinstalled the password-protected program from a flash drive, and finally brought the machine back to its pristine "out of the box" condition. After many updates and reboots, it was back to XP Service Pack 3. And that was the end of Tuesday.

On Wednesday morning the machine was ready to be set up with our standard configuration of applications, printer drivers, and anti-virus programs, all of which are delivered on CD. And the optical drive wasn't working. I have a 4GB flash drive, so I copied the contents of each of the install CDs to separate folders on my flash drive and found, much to my surprise, the applications installed from the flash drive just as easily as they would have off the CDs, and probably much faster, even the installs that required a key. So my next question is, why don't vendors offer to deliver applications on flash drives? No CD or DVD to scratch, or break, or get dirty. It seems like the perfect delivery medium. Better still, let me download it from your website in a format that can go onto a flash drive, instead of making me burn a CD.

Many thanks to http://www.bleepingcomputer.com, http://forums.lenovo.com/, and http://www-307.ibm.com/. The Lenovo and IBM websites tend to be a little dense, with long convoluted troubleshooting paths and nested dependencies, but no more so than Microsoft's online help. Bleeping Computer is an invaluable free resource, and many thanks to Bob, who told me about it when I first got into the computer technician game.

Solo Car Commuter Satisfaction

2010-06-12T15:07:00.002-04:00

This is a little survey of no academic value whatsoever, but designed only to satisfy a long-standing curiosity on a subject that has been near and dear to my heart for many years. It may have just a tiny bit of social value. I would like to know how much various factors contribute to your satisfaction, or lack thereof, with your daily commute to work by car. If you already walk, ride a bike, car pool, or take public transportation, good on you! Right now I'm only interested in people who drive to and from work alone.

This survey is entirely anonymous. I will not ask for your name, your title, your place of work, or your IP address. A summary of the results and my random conclusions will be posted on my blog, http://firstgentrekkie.blogspot.com, whenever I finally get around to it.

Thank you for you assistance!

https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dGpqYm51STJFYVBlbWNVajE1OUNHeEE6MQ

Friday Music Video selection

2010-06-11T19:13:00.000-04:00

Wireless networks not detected

2010-06-11T12:16:00.005-04:00

Laptop23 was the last of the three laptops that the gaming teens screwed up. It would not connect to the wireless network, even though the bubble popped out of the system tray that says "one or more wireless networks are in range." When I clicked on the bubble, XP said no wireless networks were detected. The hardware was okay, because when I rebooted it with an Ubuntu LiveCD, it worked fine. After several dead ends, the search term "wireless networks not detected windows xp" turned up the following suggestion:

=========
TCP/IP stack repair options for use with Windows XP with SP2.

Start, Run, CMD to open a command prompt.

Reset WINSOCK entries to installation defaults: netsh winsock reset catalog

Reset TCP/IP stack to installation defaults. netsh int ip reset reset.log

Reboot the machine.
========

And it worked!

Hooray for Teh Interwebs! Hooray for http://www.techsupportforum.com/

Last veteran of The Great Escape

2010-06-08T17:55:00.002-04:00

Jack Harrison, thought to be the last survivor of Stalag Luft III, the home of one of the most audacious, ambitious P.O.W. escapes of World War II, has died at the age of 97. The Great Escape was immortalized in the book by Paul Brickhill and the movie starring Steve McQueen, James Garner, James Coburn, Charles Bronson, John Leyton, David McCallum, Richard Attenborough, Gordon Jackson, Donald Pleasance--and those are just the names I remember off the top of my head. Both the book and the movie made a huge impression on my young self. Although the accounts of forging papers and turning uniforms into civilian clothing were of great interest, I was most impressed with the manufacture of the tunnels and their infrastructure--the shoring up, the surveying, the trolley system, and the air circulating system. In hindsight I wonder if that's why I went to engineering school.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell (was: It's not my fault!)

2010-05-27T12:53:00.004-04:00

I just had to explain to a patron why I couldn't give her detailed instructions on how to copy the music CD that she borrowed from us onto her iPod.

"But I read about the downloadable audiobooks. Isn't that the same thing?"

"No. There are a limited number of copies of each downloadable audiobook that the state library licenses from the publishers. It's just like checking out an audiobook on CD. If everyone made 1,000 copies of "The Help"--and there's no technical impediment to doing that--then the author and the publisher have lost 1,000 sales."

"Well, all I want to do is listen to it while I'm walking on the beach."

{Hmm. Well, get a Sony Walkman--I think they still sell those--or buy the album from iTunes. I didn't say that out loud, of course.}

I did give her broad general instructions--basically rip the CD, plug in the iPod, follow the prompts on the screen--but she still wanted to bring in her iPod so I could show her.

{sigh}

p.s. A different patron just came in and checked out a stack of 16 music CDs. I handed him the receipt and said, "Those are all due back on June 26."

"Oh," he says, "if all goes well I'll have them back tomorrow."

Meet Donna Freedman

2010-05-24T19:41:00.002-04:00

She writes columns on living on a shoestring for for MSN Money, and she started her own blog last month. I'd like to have this particular article tattooed to my forehead, but I'll probably settle for printing it out and taping it to the bathroom mirror.

Turning invisibility into stealth

DVD troubleshooting

2010-05-05T21:32:00.009-04:00

A few months ago we got a new DVD player for the library, courtesy of the Friends. New, not refurbished. Good brand. Blu-ray, although we don't carry any Blu-ray DVDs at present, as far as I know. I was at my desk, working on tomorrow's class on Windows Files & Folders, when a little after 1 PM one of my co-workers came in, obviously frantic. She had been trying to get the Wednesday afternoon movie started, and it refused to play. It played all the previews and other preliminary material, but when it got to the Play, Scene Select, etc., menu, it simply would not continue. The remote wasn't working, and apparently the controls on the player didn't work, either.

First I satisfied myself that all the connectors were still connecting, and the DVD was seated properly and not jammed, and didn't have any scratches. It's a brand new DVD, hardly been out yet except to staff, and we hold back any movies that are going to be shown at the Wednesday matinee for about 2 weeks beforehand, just to make sure we have it when the time comes. Everything looked okay. Why can't we get beyond the menu screen?

Next I tried playing it from our staff laptop. That should work, right? But it didn't. Windows Media Player complained about not having the rights to play it (? didn't write the error message down--no time--do it later) and threw the ball over to another DVD player application. That program complained, too, and exited. So I tried WMP again, which played after I acknowledged about half a dozen error messages as before.

Except there was no audio output. I think that something about the DVD was signaling Windows that maybe perhaps possibly the user was trying to copy this DVD, and a copy with a picture but no audio is pretty useless, so that's the defense against copying. Or maybe it was because I was using both the VGA output and the audio output on the computer? But I wasn't trying to copy it--I was just trying to play it. And there are a lot of people out there who are watching DVDs on their computers--either feeding the a/v out to a flat panel television, or just watching from the screen on the computer, with a couple of external speakers for better audio. I'm not quite there yet, but I moved in January and still haven't set up my little bookshelf stereo. I listen to radio via streaming audio--and am able to listen to stations that would be impossible to hear otherwise. And I listen to music CDs or download music from Amazon in the form of MP3 files. It's all converging, which is a story for another time.

By this time my co-worker who runs the Wednesday matinee had apologized, turned up the lights, and put the chairs back where they were. Most of the patrons had left. I took another look at the DVD--a closer look this time--and clearly saw a fingerprint on the outer edge. I took it over to the sink, moistened a paper towel, put a drop of dishwashing liquid on the towel, and carefully wiped the DVD from the center to the edge, all around, twice. Then I rinsed it off and blotted it dry with another paper towel, popped it into the DVD player, used the Play button on the player to advance it, and it went right into play mode. I ran upstairs and caught three of the matinee people who were still hanging around, and they were able to come back and enjoy the movie after all.

The remote control undoubtedly needs fresh batteries--I think it was sill running on the original batteries from when we got it, and it's been noticeably losing range the last few weeks. Unfortunately we didn't have any fresh AAAs handy--we will from now on. But I'm pretty sure that wasn't the only problem, because two other people before me had tried to operate the DVD player from the on-board controls. With two points of failure--the dying batteries and the dirty DVD--it took longer to isolate the real problem because there were more factors that had to be methodically eliminated. But, as Bill Landesberg, my boss at T-bar, used to say, "Science is once again vindicated!"

Google celebrates 20th anniversary of Hubble

2010-04-24T10:39:00.004-04:00

Google celebrates the 20th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope this week.

I didn't work on the Hubble, but I did work on the mirrors for the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, made at the same company under a different name. Hughes-Danbury Optical Systems, and other NASA contractors, surely learned a lot of lessons after the error in the Hubble mirror was discovered. In true engineering fashion, they tracked down the root causes of the error and put into place procedures that would eliminate such errors in future products. Chandra, known during development as AXAF, was the best, most rational engineering project I ever worked on, before or since. No dramas, no crises, no heroics, just calm, methodical engineering design, development, and testing. Lots of testing. And lots of documentation. And it paid off.

http://chandra.harvard.edu/about/top_ten.html

Health Insurance Reform Quiz

2010-03-25T22:35:00.002-04:00

Here's a feature of the New York Times that I never knew about until today. I'm not sure what grade level it's aimed at, but I guess junior high or high school. Here's a 10-question true/false quiz to test yourself on how well you know some of the key points in the bill that was signed on Tuesday.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/learning/pdf/2010/20100323healthreformTFquiz.pdf

Here's a lesson plan on ‘The Reality of Reform’: Understanding the Health Care Law:

http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/23/the-reality-of-reform-understanding-the-health-care-law/

Try the quiz first. When you're done, go back to the lesson plan, compare your answers with theirs, and look up the explanations.

First class in downloadable audiobooks

2010-03-24T09:41:00.001-04:00

Well, there's nothing like trying to teach a subject to learn more about it yourself. Monday I had my first class in downloadable audiobooks, trying to squeeze a 4-hour class into an hour and a half. (Actually it ran over another half an hour.) One of the attendees brought an iPod, which she has had for a year, and on which she already had many hours of music that she doesn't want to lose. She has a Windows PC at home. Is it safe to assume that the iPod is formatted for Windows, since she has been syncing it with a Windows PC? How would I/she find out for sure?

I'm thinking that going forward, I will alert iPod users when they sign up for the class, that if their iPod isn't already Windows-formatted, and if they don't want to have to reload all their music, they would be better off buying a cheap MP3 player for their audiobooks. Inconvenient, I know, but not as inconvenient as having to reload all their music.

The other thing I learned is that it's essential to have the latest version of Windows Media Player installed. I used to know this, but forgot it when I was planning the class. None of the laptops I used for the attendees was up to date, and didn't recognize the players when they were plugged in. Lucky for me, the other two attendees were both staff members, and thus more forgiving than a member of the public might have been.

Here's yet another thing I used to sort of know and already forgot. My Sansa Fuze was not being recognized by my computer here at the library. Well, it was, sort of, but then I'd get an error message that it might not be usable. Didn't have any trouble with any of the Sansa Clips I've used here. I've been playing with a USB camera, but I don't know if that's related, or just a coincidence.

The Fuze has three USB modes: MTP (Media Transfer protocol), MSC (Mass Storage Class), and Auto (try MTP and fall back to MSC if it doesn't work). Here's the best description of the problem and the solution that I found, and it did work. Except that I've left the Fuze in MTP mode.

http://forums.sandisk.com/sansa/board/message?board.id=sansafuse&thread.id=2623

We're trying to help. Honest!

2010-03-03T20:50:00.002-05:00

But sometimes it seems we're just making things more complicated for them. I had a visitor from out of town come in today to try to pay her bill (due in 2 days). She'd been in town much longer than she anticipated (maybe because of last week's storm?) and she needed to go in person to a branch of HSBC Bank. She usually pays by phone (or online, it wasn't clear). Except that she left her PIN at home. In Buffalo. And there are no branches of HSBC in NH. Or MA. But their website doesn't tell you that--half an hour wasted trying to find one that way. There is a physical branch in Buffalo--three, in fact--so I gave her the phone numbers of all 3 and suggested that she try to get a real person and [re]establish banking by phone with them. It was like the dreaded "what's my email password?" question, but worse.

Fake AP Stylebook

2010-02-24T18:38:00.002-05:00

http://twitter.com/FakeAPStyleBook

Can you view that even if you're not logged in to Twitter? I hope so.

Amazing Libraries

2010-02-24T16:49:00.000-05:00

Two sets of photos of Amazing, Beautiful Libraries from Huffington Post:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/amazing-libraries

Values

2010-01-27T07:11:00.002-05:00

Thomas Friedman writes about "situational values" versus "sustainable values" in today's column, and summarizes them as follows. Someone who is acting on situational values thinks, "I'll be gone when the bill comes due." Someone acting on sustainable values thinks, "I will never be gone. I will always be here." He then goes on to point out the many ways our leaders, corporations, banks, and individuals have been acting as if they'll be gone when the bill comes due.

I like this description. Back when I was developing software, I ran into the same two kinds of programmers. There were those who wrote code as if they would be gone tomorrow, and there were those who wrote code as if they were also going to be the ones who would have to maintain it. I tried to write code as if the person who would have to maintain it were a homicidal maniac who knew where I lived.

If we're only living for the moment, if we are not thinking about the consequences of our actions today on the next generation, and the one after that, and the one after that, then what does that make us?

Extreme pricing

2010-01-26T13:36:00.006-05:00

I've been aware for a while now that Amazon has a real-time pricing algorithm going on in the background, but I don't think I've ever seen prices change by a single penny before.

Socialism, Communism, or Co-Op?

2010-01-13T10:27:00.002-05:00

Public schools?
Toll-free roads, bridges, tunnels?
City water?
Public hospitals?
Employee-owned company?
Neighbors and friends buying food in bulk and splitting it up?
Public libraries?
Public safety (police, firefighters)?
Interstate highways?
Electric company?

The missing manual for iPhoto

2010-01-08T07:53:00.002-05:00

Apple makes beautiful products, no doubt about it. But they still can't read the user's mind.

A patron is using iPhoto to make a slideshow, and we weren't able to find a view or a menu option that would let us change the order of the photos. A little research and I learned that we first have to make an "Album" and then a "Library," and then we can order the photos in the Library Or was it the other way 'round? Library then Album? I'm still not too clear on that.

Here's Apple's explanation:

http://www.apple.com/support/ilife/tutorials/iphoto/ip4-1.html

The patron will be back in today. Maybe we can figure this out. But it's slow going when the patron is at the keyboard/touchpad.

Ferguson Library Goes Open Source

2009-12-30T11:39:00.002-05:00

This is big news! I think the Ferguson Library in Stamford is the first stand-alone Connecticut library to migrate to an open source ILS--Koha in this case. Bibliomation, a consortium based in Middlebury, is already working on a migration to the Evergreen ILS. Who will be next?

http://liswire.com/content/ferguson-library-stamford-connecticut-migrates-liblime-enterprise-koha

Use it or lose it

2009-12-14T20:41:00.002-05:00

In New Hampshire, at the end of the calendar year any unused public library allocations are supposed to go back to the city, town, or other taxing authority from whence they came. (In reality, I don't think they actually seize your checking account, but ...) Because our director position was vacant for nearly 6 months, we have some money left over, so the end of year spending spree is on. Today I ordered a video camera and all the fixins' (spare SDHC cards, camera bag, 72" tripod, USB adapter for the SD cards), and a blu-ray DVD player. I've already bought a Windows application called ConvertXtoDVD, which converts from many video formats (the X in the name) to a format suitable for burning to a video DVD that the typical home DVD player will recognize. I'm also buying a still camera, but there are so many choices in the $200 range that I will probably just go to Staples and Target and see what's on sale.

The new director is getting quotes to set me up with a real workbench down in the basement, complete with bench-level power outlets and additional network drops. (Right now there is only one network drop. Yeah. And that's for the OPAC server.) And he's going to get some quotes to double the number of network drops all over the building. Ten years ago I guess it must have seemed perfectly adequate to have two network drops in the staff room, two at the circ desk, one at the children's desk, a couple for OPACs, and a scattering of singletons in the public areas. Sort of like the way Intel thought that no one would ever need more than 640K of address space.

I've also gotten a go-ahead to start getting quotes for a website re-design, but I don't see how that can happen before December 31st. And we're going to do something for the Youth Computer Room; I don't have a dollar amount for that yet, but I'd like to see what we can do with Linux and our existing equipment, with help from a company like Userful.

Good times!

Ray Bradbury on public libraries

2009-12-12T11:17:00.002-05:00

"Libraries raised me. I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries, because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years." Ray Bradbury, 2008.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/09/us/09library.html

Instructional design 101

2009-12-09T14:41:00.005-05:00

I took a one-semester class in instructional design, but I have a hunch that this 4-minute YouTube video was more helpful to me than the project I did for class was to my former co-workers. I was able to swap the original CD-DVD drive in my laptop for a new DVD burner, and it took me only a little longer than it took to watch the video. Thanks jgc731!

Sometimes low tech is best

2009-12-09T12:09:00.005-05:00

I love technology. I wouldn't be the Technology Librarian if I didn't. But I also like helping people solve problems, and sometimes the "low tech" solution is best.

A couple came in this week, he on Monday and she on Tuesday. They wanted to make a purchase from a certain retailer that has both an online and a brick'n'mortar presence. They don't have a computer at home, don't have an email address, and have no need of either, except for this one transaction. He insisted that I had helped him with a previous online purchase, but I have no memory of this and would have given the same answer then as I did this week. I certainly would not have let him use my own email address, as he suggested I had done.

I started to explain to him that it is still possible to begin purchases online and then complete them by phone. Many online retailers do this for customers who are understandably reluctant to entrust their credit card numbers to the dangers of the Internet. But to find out if we could do that with this particular retailer, we might have to go through the steps of starting the transaction, putting items into a virtual shopping cart, and saving the contents of the cart. Then we could find out what information was required to complete the transaction and what our options were. But before I could finish, he waved me off and left the library, clearly unsatisfied and convinced that I was "not willing to help him."

On Tuesday, she came in, clearly more experienced with using a computer and the Internet, but still without an email address. When she got to the screen for billing and shipping information, she asked for my help.

"Do I have to give them an email address?" Yes.

"Why?" It's a required field. It has a red asterisk next to it.

"What do they need that for?" They'll send you an order confirmation and, when your order ships, a shipping notification.

"Can't they just call me?" It doesn't work that way.

It looked like we had once again reached an impasse, but she at least recognized that there was no point in opening an email account if this is all she was going to use it for. She allowed me to help her locate a phone number for customer service, then she pulled out her cellphone and started calling the retailer, at which point I retreated to my desk. I didn't see her leave, but the staff member who was at the Circulation Desk told me she appeared to leave satisfied.

I hope she went home and told her husband that those mean old librarians were very helpful after all, and I hope that a Christmas surprise was not spoiled by the recipient having to purchase her own gift.

(photo of old-fashioned phone dial by Leo Reynolds, http://www.flickr.com/photos/lwr/)

2009-12-07T18:56:00.002-05:00

"Librarians at Woodrow Wilson provided an excuse note for 15-year-old Juan Henriquez after he lost an eight-page paper on the Bill of Rights because his computer session timed out before he'd saved his work."

Please, please, PLEASE, can we get the word to these kids and these librarians about using Google Docs, or Zoho, or some other web-based productivity tools, so no one ever loses hours of work again?

Gowen, Annie. Lack of computer access hampers some students. Washingtonpost.com, Sunday, December 6, 2009.

(Photo By Susan Biddle For The Washington Post)

This Island Home

2009-12-04T18:07:00.007-05:00

I was surfing the web this evening and an article about the declining quality of television included a quote from a July 2009 op-ed piece by Tom Wolfe, which reminded me of a quote from Babylon 5, voiced by Commander Jeffrey Sinclair. I remember the excitement over Alan Shepard's maiden flight in Freedom 7 (which lasted about as long as it took me to get from home to school that morning), John Glenn's flight in Friendship 7, and of course Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins in Apollo 11. In those days I read a lot of science fiction—though still not keeping up with the prodigious output of Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Ellison, Sturgeon, et. al.—and I fervently believed that the destiny of the human race lay beyond our little solar system. Now, I'm not so sure.

"Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics, and you'll get ten different answers, but there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-Tzu, and Einstein, and Morobuto, and Buddy Holly, and Aristophanes, and - all of this - all of this - was for nothing. Unless we go to the stars." ~Commander Jeffrey Sinclair, "Infection," Season 1, Episode 4 http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0012584/quotes

"I remember him saying something like this: 'Here on Earth we live on a planet that is in orbit around the Sun. The Sun itself is a star that is on fire and will someday burn up, leaving our solar system uninhabitable. Therefore we must build a bridge to the stars, because as far as we know, we are the only sentient creatures in the entire universe. When do we start building that bridge to the stars? We begin as soon as we are able, and this is that time. We must not fail in this obligation we have to keep alive the only meaningful life we know of.'" ~Wernher von Braun, as recalled by Tom Wolfe http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/opinion/19wolfe.html

If we really believed that this precious Earth is the only place in the entire universe that supports sentient life, would we continue to treat it the way we have been doing?

Sarcasm ...?

2009-12-04T16:42:00.002-05:00

... or just the painful truth? Every new librarian, everyone who's thinking of becoming a librarian, and everyone who's a librarian but is thinking of switching careers, needs to give this some thought.

http://lisnews.org/should_you_become_librarian

The Blacklist

2009-12-04T11:36:00.002-05:00

Here's an interesting story about the Blacklist era. Note especially the link at the end to a copy of the CBS loyalty oath.

http://thekisseloffcollection.com/wordpress/KC/?p=236

I wrote a paper on censorship back in my first year of library school, using as examples Dalton Trumbo's "Johnny Got His Gun" and Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse 5."

http://www.vsa-software.com/mlsportfolio/ils503/censorship.doc (Word 2003)

And here are some books on the McCarthy hearings from our collection:

New Hampshire Is Different

2009-12-04T06:50:00.005-05:00

The scene is the first visit to a new internist.

Nurse: Do you use a seatbelt?
Patient: Yes.
Nurse: Bicycle helmet?
Patient: Yes.
Nurse: Is there a smoke detector in the home?
Patient: Yes.
Nurse: Is there a carbon monoxide detector?
Patient: Not sure about that. I rent.
Nurse: Are all fire alarms secured?
Patient: Excuse me?
Nurse: Fire alarms.
Patient: I'm sorry, I .....
Nurse: Fire. Arms. Are there any firearms in the home?
Patient: Oh. No. No, there aren't.

Note to self: Find out the annual rate, by state, of death or injury due to firearms in the home.

Adventures in DVDs

2009-12-01T22:22:00.003-05:00

Today I made my first DVD, one that is recognized as a playable DVD both by my computer and by the 5-year-old DVD player in the community room at the library. The Friends of the Library had a program a few weeks ago on the history of farming in Rye, NH, in conjunction with the historical society. Partly as an outreach effort, and partly to get the Friends to give me money for our own camcorder, I borrowed a camera from the middle school up the street to record the program. The camera I borrowed records on miniDV tape, and the only outputs are Firewire and standard a/v outputs. I don't have a computer with a/v inputs, so I borrowed a staff member's Macbook and transferred the tape to .dv files. On the Mac I used iMovie to make an .m4v file, but couldn't figure out how to get iDVD to write it to a DVD. My friend Bob took the .m4v file and converted it to a burnable format on a Windows PC using ConvertXtoDVD. Then I took the resulting files back to the library (I don't have a DVD burner on my laptop, but I will in a couple of weeks) and burned them to a DVD with Roxio MyDVD on a Windows PC.

It was another Learning Experience, but a satisfying one. Now we have a DVD of the event that we can loan out to people who couldn't be there, and we can start to build up a little library of these. Maybe we can start an oral history project and interview some of the old-timers before they're gone.

Serendipity

2009-11-30T08:27:00.005-05:00

An old friend and former co-worker told me that H-1B visas are still being doled out, even with unemployment figures as high as they are. This topic was of great interest to me just a couple of years ago. While I was a software engineer, I watched as jobs in my field were alternately outsourced, sent overseas, or undercut by immigrants with H-1B visas who typically worked for far less than the average American-born software engineer, at least during their first year or two here. This isn't a new phenomenon, but it only started becoming painfully obvious about 10 or 15 years ago. Just last year, I heard of a public library that hired a webmaster and sponsored his H-1B visa. So I thought it might make an interesting self-directed research project to find out how H-1B visas relate to unemployment in the technology sector and how the allocation of H-1B visas is decided.

I'll start with some figures from the Statistical Abstract, aka The National Data Book, a publication I discovered a few years ago at the Ruth Haas Library at Western Connecticut State University. Of course, it's all online now, but it was so much fun to flip through the pages of the Abstract from 20 years ago and discover a table of the employment figures for various professions, including engineers. That's the kind of serendipity that's hard to duplicate in an online database.

http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/past_years.html

Got Windows 7?

2009-11-24T07:49:00.001-05:00

My first Microsoft operating system was DOS, and after that Windows 3.0. From what I've heard so far about Windows 7, anyone who was using Windows Vista is very happy to upgrade to Windows 7. I've been reasonably happy with Windows XP; it's a stable product. I stuck with XP through the short life of Windows Vista, as did our ILS vendor, which hasn't yet had anything to say about Windows 7 compatibility.

But for once I am looking forward to trying out a new Windows operating system. Windows 7 could solve all my problems with the three wired public computers; they're running Windows XP but, as is so frequently the case these days, we have no media for them. Lenovo has a pretty neat setup by which they store an installable image on the hard drive, accessible only by a key combination and optional password. It provides a time-consuming but reliable recovery for a computer that has been hopelessly compromised by malware. A couple of our public computers have the security password set; I've tried all our standard passwords, but none of them work, so I'm pretty sure a patron must have set it, whether accidentally or deliberately I can't say. Both these machines have problems that make a reinstall necessary, but without media and without the password I can't do much. Buying Windows 7, with the media, solves two problems at once.

Think renters are immune?

2009-11-23T18:31:00.002-05:00

When I was fortunate enough to sell my house in Connecticut this summer, I thought I would be insulated from most of the trickle down effects of the banking and mortgage crisis. And so I am—for now—but not because I'm a renter. I live in a building that has been in the same family for nearly 140 years. I'd hazard a guess and say that there is no mortgage on the property, and that it probably pays for itself and then some. It's in a neighborhood of multi-million dollar homes; Senator Judd Gregg lives around the corner, and author Dan Brown lives down the street. I'd hazard another guess and say that a multi-family dwelling like this one could not be built in this community today, nor could it have been for the last 70 or 80 years. So I'm safely housed. For now.

http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/now-even-renters-are-losing-their-hom

The History of the Internet In a Nutshell

2009-11-23T11:58:00.000-05:00

http://sixrevisions.com/resources/the-history-of-the-internet-in-a-nutshell/

Where are the serious Republican politicians?

2009-11-23T07:24:00.002-05:00

I don't usually read Ross Douthat, but this headline caught my eye. Can serious politicians--of any stripe--get a fair hearing in this age of politics-as-entertainment? Are there any leaders in the Republican Party who are more interested in leadership than in celebrity? Douthat doesn't name anyone who fits that bill.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/23/opinion/23douthat.html

Thanksgiving menus

2009-11-21T10:19:00.001-05:00

Mine will include barbeque brisket, barbeque beans, corn casserole, and hot artichoke dip. It will definitely not include any unfermented soy products.

How to identify a phishing scam

2009-11-19T08:28:00.002-05:00

An experienced patron who has had an email account for over a decade told me the other day that he'd received an email asking him to "verify" his account. He had created an "anonymous" account--not given his full name--and the message said that the service was purging these to make room for new accounts. I said to him, "You didn't answer it, did you?" and he said "Yes, I did." So he showed me the message, which asked for his password and his birth date. I had him change his password and his security question and answer, but the damage was already done, I'm sure. "They" now have his birth date and the contents of his address book--more people to phish. I asked him to call Equifax and put a three-month freeze on new credit accounts opened in his name, and I think he did do that.

http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Identify_a_Phishing_Scam

Fair's Fair

2009-11-13T20:25:00.000-05:00

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/immoderate-proposal-by-digby-i-have.html

Looking for a good movie? Got bandwidth?

2009-11-13T10:15:00.002-05:00

Here is a list of 30 websites offering free movies:

http://www.openculture.com/2009/11/free_movies_online.html

Library videos

2009-11-12T22:51:00.002-05:00

The videotaping went well. And it really was a "taping." The Sony DCR-HC28 that I borrowed from the librarian at the junior high records to tape. The newer digital video cameras record to internal memory and/or SD cards, and can record for many hours. I had to change tapes after about an hour, and lost a few minutes of the program. A better spot for the camera would have been right on the center aisle, but the slide projector already had that spot. The room was packed, standing room only, or I would have thought about moving the camera after the slideshow was over.

The camera has two outputs: Firewire, and A/V (red/yellow/white, aka video plus left and right audio). I don't have easy access to a device that accepts either output. I could connect the A/V cable to the television, but I don't want to just watch it again, I want to get the tapes into a digital file on a computer so that I can edit it and burn it to a DVD. So one of my co-workers agreed to bring in her MacBook which, of course, has a Firewire connector built-in. I plugged the camera into the MacBook, started iMovie, connected iMovie to the camera, and off we go. I would have been awfully disappointed if I'd had to consult a user's guide for either the camera or the Mac. Say what you will about Apple--it's more expensive, it's a closed, proprietary system, etc.--but the out-of-the-box experience is great for most of the things that most people want to do with a computer. I had to give my co-worker back her computer for the weekend--I know how I'd be if someone took away my computer for a whole weekend--so the editing and burning will have to wait until next week.

Sony is having a sale today--right now--on the current generation video camera, the HDR-CX100. It's only $499, down from $599. I don't know how long the sale will last, but I will call the Friends president first thing tomorrow and see if she can release $500 now instead of $600 or $700 later.

In which I become a videographer

2009-11-10T16:32:00.003-05:00

We're going to jump on the video bandwagon tonight and record a program being put on by the local Historical Society on the history of farming in this community. That's assuming that all the participants will consent. My goal is to produce a DVD of the event that we can then put into circulation. If it goes well, this could turn into a local history project. I've been wanting to do something like that ever since I started working in public libraries four years ago, and especially when I was taking Digital Libraries, but no one ever wanted to take me up on the offer. Maybe they thought it would take up too much staff time to support.

Do we still need open source evangelists?

2009-11-02T19:52:00.001-05:00

Matt Asay says no: R.I.P., open-source evangelism

Whitehouse.gov now powered by Drupal

2009-10-26T20:39:00.002-04:00

Pretty exciting stuff. This short article explains a few of the advantages of open source software over proprietary software.

http://crooksandliars.com/jamie/whitehousegov-finds-familiar-power

HPL To Go

2009-09-01T09:44:00.003-04:00

Houston Public Library has started a trial program where books are carried out to patrons' cars at two of the system's more parking-challenged branches. At least one public library in CT has had a drive-through window for some time now, similar to the drive-through window at a bank. In fact, the building may have been a bank in a former life.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/6594373.html

New job, new town, new state

2009-08-21T11:09:00.004-04:00

On June 6th, I started a new job as the Technology Librarian at Rye Public Library in Rye, New Hampshire. This blog started out as my contribution to the 23 Things/Learning Library 2.0 program at New Canaan Library in Connecticut, but now that I'm a "dropout" from that program, I'm hijacking this blog (can you hijack your own blog?) to become a log of my adventures in managing the technology needs of this small, rural library.

We only have 12 public access computers, but they're a challenge in that they are all Windows machines (or were until a few weeks ago, when I installed Ubuntu on 2 of them) and we have no domain server to enforce group policies or serve up other means of locking them down. Five of the public computers are actually laptops, because we don't have enough space to set up permanent stations for them. We also have a number of staff computers, of course, but my primary focus for the last 10 weeks has of necessity been the public computers.

All of the laptops were running Windows XP, which is astonishing when I tell you that 3 of them--the cute little ThinkPad R40 pictured here--only had 128MB of RAM each. After adding an additional 512MB of RAM to each, disabling all the background programs that run at Startup, canceling all Scheduled Tasks, and installing and running Malwarebytes, Spybot Search & Destroy, and Spyware Blaster, all three are running a lot better now. More on this next time.

#8 Blogging About Technology

2009-05-12T08:44:00.008-04:00

The New York Times reports that the problem of pirated books has ballooned in recent months on file-sharing sites such as Scribd. Author Ursula K. Le Guin was browsing the Web one day and was surprised to find a complete copy of her 1969 Nebula and Hugo award-winning classic, The Left Hand of Darkness.

Authors Cory Doctorow and Harlan Ellison expressed two opposing views. Doctorow, author of the 2009 Hugo-finalist novel Little Brother, has long been a vocal opponent of DRM and has routinely, with his publisher's blessing, released his new novels onto the Web under a Creative Commons license, on the belief that free versions will entice new readers.

Ellison, also an award-winning science/speculative fiction author, has seen his work routinely pirated in print in many languages, and has spent a lifetime defending his copyrights. Ellison is 74, Doctorow is 37. Ellison just wants to get paid for his work. Doctorow says that obscurity is more to be feared than piracy.

Question 1: Who do you agree with and why?
Question 2: Why is it always science fiction authors?

Drum Roll, Please

2009-05-06T09:47:00.004-04:00

This morning I submitted my MLS portfolio to the department at SCSU for archiving and review. The graduation ceremony is Thursday, May 28th.

http://www.vsa-software.com/mlsportfolio/

#7 More Flickr Fun

2009-05-03T16:05:00.002-04:00

Oh, the possibilities!

#5 Locating Useful Feeds

2009-05-03T14:55:00.005-04:00

I tried searching for interesting blogs using both Bloglines and Technorati. Using the "search for posts" option in Bloglines with the search term "calligrapher" turned up no results. Changing the search option to "search for posts" turned up a few results, but nothing that interested me. I changed the search term to "calligraphy" and tried both options again. This time "search for feeds" turned up posts on a Japanese calligraphy blog and on BibliOdyssey, a blog on books, illustrations, book history, and other aspects of the book arts. Finally I tried the "search the Web" option, and that turned up the most interesting and relevant results, although not all of them are blogs and may or may not have an RSS feed. Interesting to note that Bloglines has partnered with Ask.com for its "search the Web" option. Google has so pervaded the Web that it's easy to forget that there are still several other very useful search engines.

I repeated the exercise using Technorati, searching both posts and blogs for "calligraphy" and "calligrapher," and got an entirely different set of results. I found public domain (mostly) illustrations From Old Books, and Arabic Calligraphy. The posts are mostly in Arabic or romanized Arabic, but the illustrations are still very enjoyable. Technorati also turned up the blog on the website of a calligraphy supplier in the UK.

I first had the impression that Bloglines was only searching the feeds and posts of blogs that other Bloglines subscribers had already subscribed to, but then I saw that some of the blogs it found for my search had zero subscribers. So I can't quite account for the differences, but my overall impression is that Technorati did a better job of finding "what I really wanted," as opposed to "what I asked for."

I forgot which one found Chainsaw Calligraphy, which is most decidedly not about calligraphy as I know it. One of them found the website of the Society of Scribes, the real pros, but it doesn't have an RSS feed. One of these days maybe I'll have time to take a class with them.

Library ethics

2009-04-27T14:01:00.002-04:00

"I’m a librarian. A regular patron, a man in his late 40s or early 50s and virtually technologically illiterate, asked me to print a few e-mail attachments for him — photos of a young and attractive Russian woman. Many of the messages were titled “I Love You” or the like and included explicit requests for money. I believe he is being scammed. May I intervene, or does that violate his privacy and my professional boundaries? N.P., LAWRENCE, KAN."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/magazine/08wwln-ethicist-t.html

Flyaway

2009-04-27T09:10:00.008-04:00

Suzie Gilbert, author of "Flyaway: How a Wild Bird Rehabber Sought Adventure and Found Her Wings," and Melanie Pearson, Director of Animal Care at the New Canaan Nature Center, with Topper and Socrates. New Canaan Library, Sunday, April 26, 2009.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/groopie/sets/72157617367318826/

Got Spell-check?

2009-04-22T10:30:00.002-04:00

Patron asked for title "Origin," author "Malouf." After coming up empty a few times, I did what I usually do, which is go to Amazon. The author's name is actually Maalouf, and the title is "Origins." When are our proprietary ILSs going to incorporate a feature that's been available on other web sites for years?

#6 Flickr

2009-04-21T20:04:00.002-04:00

Dallas TX, 1961: That young fella in the striped shirt in the center of the front row is Stevie Ray Vaughan, future electric blues guitarist extraordinaire. Also on the front row, third from the left, is my sister, and to her immediate right is her best friend who is still her best friend today.

Stevie Ray died far too young. Decades later I visited this memorial to him in Austin, TX, where he made his name as one of the finest blues guitarists of all time.

Click on either photo to see the full-size original.

Library websites that use WordPress

2009-04-17T10:57:00.000-04:00

WordPress is a blogging application similar to Blogger, and you can set up a free, hosted account at Wordpress.com. But it's different from Blogger in that the source code is free and can be downloaded and installed on your own web host.

Here are some libraries that are using WordPress to build their websites. No FrontPage, Dreamweaver, Contribute, or other applications to buy and learn. Just "type in the box and publish."

Library Sites That Use WordPress

10 former librarians, not all of them surprising

2009-04-16T10:01:00.000-04:00

http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/24574

#4 RSS Feeds

2009-04-15T15:23:00.001-04:00

Here's a link to my Bloglines public subscriptions:

http://www.bloglines.com/public/firstgentrekkie

I've been using an RSS reader for about 3 years now, ever since I got my first Gmail account. RSS is the only sane way to keep up with the amount of information coming from the "biblioblogosphere"—the legions of librarian bloggers: Jessamyn West, the Librarian in Black, Michael Stephens, Jennie Levine, and Meredith Farkas, just to name a handful of the many who write about Library 2.0, Web 2.0, and other technology issues. Then there are all the libraries that are blogging: Danbury Public Library, New Canaan Library, Cheshire Public Library, just to mention three that are of particular interest to me. If it weren't for RSS, I would have to visit a dozen websites each morning, besides the New York Times, to find out everything that's happening.

Libraries that have blogs, like New Canaan, already have RSS feeds for their blogs—that's usually built into the blogging platform. Blogs like Events of the Week are a great way to publicize events at little or no cost. One of the challenges is making patrons in that intermediate level—the ones who are comfortable with email and using a browser—aware of RSS feeds and showing them how to use them.

Cat-aloging

2009-04-13T11:54:00.000-04:00

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

New England Carnegies

2009-04-10T09:34:00.000-04:00

A website that documents the Carnegie-funded libraries in New England—maintained by a librarian, of course—has been updated to include academic libraries. Of the 95 public and academic libraries that Carnegie money helped to build in New England, all but 3 are still standing. If we add in the Carnegie-era libraries that have preserved the original building even as they have been added on to—like New Canaan, Ridgefield, and many others—the number would be even higher. That says something about the enduring value of libraries. Think about it the next time you see a 20-year-old strip mall being torn down to build a new strip mall.

http://www.necarnegies.com/

#3 Hello New Canaan Library!

2009-04-08T09:10:00.003-04:00

This is my first blog post for the Learning 2.0 program. Thank you Alice, for initiating this, and thank you, Maura, for being our guide.

Sharon