Category — General

The HomePod.

It's not from Apple, but the HomePod will let Mac users do something that PC users have been able to do for a while – wirelessly beam the MP3s stored on their computer to anywhere in the house:

The HomePod enhances Apple's digital hub, picking up where iTunes and iPod leave off. Think of HomePod as an iPod for home distributed entertainment. The handheld device functions just like an iPod, with the ability to browse by artists, style and song name. The device checks how many computers are on the wireless network and pools all the song lists together.

Works with Mac, PC, and Linux.
Read

[Gizmodo]

cool toy, i could stream to my whole complex…

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print_r($x);

'Knit One, Purl Two… Um, Nay'. Plastic::Politics::Politics:Culture: New Zealand MP Judith Tizard was recently upbraided for knitting while conducting a debate on the floor of the House of Commons. [Plastic: Most Recent]

yup, this is politics as usual in new zealand;)

Stephen's Web ~ Copyright and Theft. Quote: “The relation between copyright and ethics is not nearly so clear as supposed. While it is easy to piously pronounce that people who copy online content are unethical and even evil, it is also wrong. The copyright debate is not a case of the morally right trying to maintain the defense against the morally wrong. It is a debate about what should even count as morally right or wrong. ”

Comment: Well-written and articulate argument. [Serious Instructional Technology]

this is pretty interesting too, it is fairly hard to teach students about this i've discovered…

E-Learning – What's Wrong With Distance Learning?. Quote: “Who or what exactly is distant? The learning isn't distant. Oh, it's the content that's delivered over a distance, is it? By analogy, then, since I don't grow my own food and it's delivered to my store from worldwide locations, we should call my dinner preparations distance cooking, right?”

Comment: Nice rant. [Serious Instructional Technology]

this is a pretty interesting article.

LibraryLookup Gets A Little Library-Related Press – We Need More!.

“Jon Udell is getting record flow on his weblog. The librarians are figuring out what he's doing. Nice.” [Scripting News]

Of course, what I want to know is how do we keep evolving this. What can librarians do? Is there a way for us to implement the ISBN-mapping Web service Jon describes? Jon isn't a librarian and look at what he's been able to come up with. What's our next step?

I've been remiss in noting Jon's other recent articles about his work in this area. They're all worth your time:

GeoURL
ISSNs and Z39.50
The Disruptive Web
Genus, Species, and ISBN
Where Angels Fear to Tread

Update: Here's an article about it from SearchEngineWatch.com.

[The Shifted Librarian]

libraries are temples to knowledge, this is the pastoral power associated with those temples.

SanDisk introduces Compact Flash Wi-Fi

“Alan Reiter writes up SanDisk's announcement at CES of their Cmopact Flash-based Wi-Fi cards that are available in configurations with 128 Mb and 256 Mb or no memory. The memory plus Wi-Fi combination is particularly useful because in cameras that could be upgraded to handle Wi-Fi networking support, for instance, it would require much more engineering to add double Compact Flash slots.” [80211b News]

Digital cameras with lots of memory and Wi-Fi…. I need a sound icon of Homer drooling over donuts….

[The Shifted Librarian]

this is interesting, i didn't thing it was designed to do this type of thing.

“Franklin Covey has announced it will start selling Bluetooth-equipped pens.

'Franklin Covey Co. plans to sell pens and paper-based planners using Anoto Group AB's technology that let customers transfer handwritten text to mobile phones, hand-held organizers or computers. The pens, made by Logitech International SA, will be sold starting next week for about $199, said Jeff Anderson, Franklin Covey vice president of technology products on Thursday. Planners and related software will cost about $45 at stores run by the company, which is named for efficiency proponent Benjamin Franklin and Stephen Covey, author of the bestseller The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.' ” [The Bluetooth Weblog]

Of course, I don't actually write long-hand anymore.

Addendum: On another front, 3M is making Post-It Notes for Digital Pens, and you can upgrade to their Office Edition software for free if you buy a LogiTech io Personal Digital Pen before April 30th.

[The Shifted Librarian]

new toy, new toy, woo hoo

 From Boing Boing Blog: “Dan Gillmor defines “We Media”. Dan Gillmor's latest piece in the Columbia Journalism Review extends his Journalism 3.0 thesis (”my readers know more than I do”) and talks about “We Media:”

<<Interactive technology — and the mostly young readers and viewers who use and understand it — are the catalysts. We Media augments traditional methods with new and yet-to-be invented collaboration tools ranging from e-mail to Web logs to digital video to peer-to-peer systems. But it boils down to something simple: our readers collectively know more than we do, and they don't have to settle for half-baked coverage when they can come into the kitchen themselves. This is not a threat. It is an opportunity. And the evolution of We Media will oblige us all to adapt.>>

My perspective: Dan's always been way ahead of most others in seeing, from an on-the-ground level, how interactive media changes journalism utterly (thus, he was one of the very first print journos to blog). But most publications are too terrified to do much more than 1) create a website that primarily functions to repost print content, and 2) confine contact between hacks and readers to a mailto (ie no one else gets to read the response except the hack) or within a small discussion forum. Blogs are a new form that encourages (and celebrates) contact (though granted,  a problem is keeping the useless flames out of the discussion — and also not allowing criticism to be censored). Blogs make written journalism more like a radio discussion show. At the same time, for reasons I've noted variously in the past, I just don't think that blogs will replace traditional journalism, or even that there is some titanic strugle going on between the two. They are (for the most part) complementary — for the reasons Dan is noting above.

Meanwhile, Dave has this opposing perspective on Dan's piece:

I'm a bit more radical. The idea of “audience” is obsolete. The new medium is read-write. Low-low barrier to entry. Journalism is all about barriers. Today you have to be sure there's lots of value in your barriers, or else you have nothing to offer. That's hard to do.

[[ t e c h n o \ c u l t u r e ]]

you media, me media, we media….

Newport Corporation Hologram Making System [Bidboy]

you could use this to make a hologram of the beatles tapes…