Category Archives: Technology

Pirate Bay’s Longest Surviving Torrent Turns 10 Years Old

I would’ve guessed the longest lasting torrent would’ve been The Anarchist Cookbook (uhm, probably a bad idea to link to that, eh?) 😉 but it’s not.  Instead, it’s RECIPES!!! Exactly ten years ago a Pirate Bay user uploaded a torrent linking to “Top Secret Recipes” ebooks. Today, this torrent is the oldest surviving torrent file […]

Friday Fun Link – Ten Things That Can Ruin An E-Book Help Session at the Library

So I consider myself a fairly tech-savvy individual. I’ve been using computers since I was ten years old.  The first computer I used regularly was a Commodore-64.  I sent my first e-mail in 1995 and designed my first web site in 1997. I’ve since designed numerous web sites and even got paid to produce many […]

Minecraft Mania!

Saskatchewan Legislature Re-created in Minecraft So today, Majong, the company formed around the hugely popular Minecraft video game, released the TU14 update for Minecraft on XBox360. If you’ve been living under a rock (or at least without an obsessed six year old in your house!), Minecraft is a “sandbox” game – basically, a game that […]

Edward Snowden’s Surprise TED Talk

Hero.

Friday Fun Link – Who Owns The Copyright to the World’s Most Retweeted Photo?

Ellen Degeneres arranged a “spontaneous” selfie with some heavy hitters at the recent Oscar telecast.  After tweeting it, it quickly crashed Twitter, became the most re-tweeted photo of all-time eclipsing Obama’s “Four More Years” tweet many times over, and becoming ripe for parody. But it also quickly led to a question about who owned the copyright to […]

Dewey Plug-in For Google Chrome

I haven’t installed or even tried it yet.  But I came across a Chrome plug-in called Dewey which is meant to assist with bookmark management and, based simply on the name alone, decided to post about it! 😉

Some Ways Public Libraries Should Be Like Apple Stores (and One Way They Shouldn’t)

Back from a week in Edmonton (well, “a week in the West Edmonton Mall” would be more accurate!) During the week, I took advantage of being in a city with an Apple Store to visit the Genius Bar and get some help with a few different questions I had about my laptop and iPhone. (Unfortunately, […]

Forget Dystopian Fiction, Is Sochi A Dystopian Reality? (Or Is The United States?)

Wired magazine asks if what we’re seeing in Sochi is a manifestation of some of the tropes of current dystopian literature like “Hunger Games”, the “Divergent” trilogy, etc. – a gleaming, authoritarian rule masquerading as a utopia but with a barely hidden sub-class, propaganda, televised spectacle, corruption, rigged competitions, doublespeak, etc. It’s an interesting idea […]

The Greatest Software Misuses

Quora has a great question about the best software mis-uses that people have seen. Because my family members read this blog, I won’t mention some that I’ve seen personally (ahem, Googling for a common web site instead of just typing it in the URL bar.  You know who you are!) but I will highlight a […]

Travel The World Without Leaving Your Laptop

The day before we left for Hawaii a couple years ago, I did a post summarizing how much of a role various web sites – from Google to Reddit to Trip Advisor – played in helping to plan and just generally build excitement for our trip. I mentioned Google Maps in passing in that post […]