Category Archives: PopCulture

Friday Fun Link – BookSeer (August 14, 2009)

Some of the folks on MetaFilter are reporting bugs but after a few trials (admittedly with fairly well-known and recent books), I had no problems with BookSeer.  It's nothing ground-breaking – simply a pretty cool interface to present the book recommendations provided by Amazon and LibraryThing in a unique, streamlined fashion. 

The Tipping Point For E-Books?

As I mentioned before, the first book I downloaded to read on my new iPhone is “Little Brother” by Cory Doctorow.  I'm quite enjoying it – both the story and the convenience of always having a book with me in a very compact form.  I also just finished “Free: The Future of A Radical Price” […]

Teenage Wasteland: RIP John Hughes

[Edit: A wonderful story I came across detailing the relationship between John Hughes and a teenaged pen pal.] When I'm forced to choose, “Ferris Bueller's Day Off” is one of the movies I often pick as my favourite movie of all-time.  “Breakfast Club” pretty much defined my high school days with its perfect delineation of […]

Music Monday – "You talkin' about Hammer/You talkin' about a show"

Shea thought I was joking when I said I wanted to go see MC Hammer play our local summer exhibition here in Regina.  I wasn't…but I didn't make it so I guess this clip I found will have to do:I recently blogged about songs I could listen to over and over and “U Can't Touch […]

Friday Fun Link – Which Songs Do I Have The Most Copies of On My Computer? (July 31, 2009)

I'm trying to free up some space on my hard drive (70 GB of music on a 200 GB drive will do that to you) so am looking through my duplicate MP3 files (which make up ~10 GB of that collection).  Looking closer, I see that there are a few songs that I have no […]

Who's Gonna Save Me? Ten Songs I Could Put On Repeat and Listen to Non-Stop

We all have those songs that are so catchy or that have great lyrics or that we connect with so strongly for other reasons that we could put them on repeat on our music players and just listen to them over and over (in the old days, this same effect was accomplished by taping the […]

Cory Doctorow on Copyright

Because Cory Doctorow's new novel, “Little Brother” is the first e-book I'm reading on my iPhone (very readable, thank-you very much), I got to see his copyright notice which I'm reproducing here in its entirety because it's such a great summary of how copyright should work in a sane and rational world: THE COPYRIGHT THING […]

Turning the Page In A Digital Age

A recent Globe & Mail article on Indigo's current practices and strategies provides a lot of ideas about what public libraries will have to consider in an increasingly digital age. 

Friday Fun Link – You Can't Judge A Book By Its Cover – But Can You By Its Title? (July 3, 2009)

Print-on-demand web site, Lulu.com has a service that helps project how well your book will do based solely on its title.  The algorithm was developed exclusively for Lulu by statisticians who studied 50 years' worth of bestseller data encompassing over 700 titles from 1954 to 2004.  They compared the attributes of these titles against a […]

Friday Fun Link – "This Bespells Doom" – Authors Signing Kindles (June 26, 2009)

If Jeff Bezos was smart, he'd have incorporated a stylus right into the design of the Kindle so authors could “sign” their digital books.  (Of course, maybe they feared this would make getting a signed book no more special than getting a package from UPS.)