Category Archives: Technology

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 […]

A Day in the Life of a Branch Librarian

About once a week I work a 10-6 shift instead of a more typical 9-5 one.  With one staff member on holidays and one having called in sick, today happened to be particularly busy day starting as soon as I arrived, an hour later than usual. So I thought I’d do a list of a […]

Friday Fun Link – Copyrighted Books For Free, Legally! (Offer Only Good in Norway)

On top of the recent news that by being excellent stewards of their country’s oil wealth, each Norway citizen was now a “millionaire”* (as opposed to some oil-rich jurisdictions that weren’t quite so successful in this regard), comes this story about the National Library of Norway finding a way to make copyrighted works available to […]

About That Future…

Man, we live in amazing times… 50 Things We Know Now That We Didn’t Know This Time Last Year 10 Best Gadgets at the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show The Future of Technology (Infographic) A Day with Google Glass… …and for a reminder of how far we’ve come…  10 Most Influential Software Packages of All-Time