OK, I liked Stubleupon. I like how simple it is. I can see that people on cell phones would like it in particular.

It actually works well with my current RSS based reading set up. The one limitation of this is that you don't bump into new sites so much as follow the ones that you already like a lot. So this is a way to get a little glimpse of what else is going on out there.

This is what I found via the site and then tweeted: www.shambles.net/worldclock/worldclock.swf/

Reflection

Unless I missed a Thing, this is the end. Well, almost the end: I still have to try out StumbleUpon.

In terms of reflection, this wasn't the most helpful project in that I did not learn that many new things, but I had to sign up for a bunch of sites that I had already decided were not interesting to me. That's why I am just finishing up now: the last few weeks were mostly about getting accounts and sharing things.

This isn't really the fault of the project though: I finished my MLIS in the last year and have always been pretty forward looking when it comes to technology--I think I might be too old to be a "millennial", but my father has always had a computer around the house (although he was a journalist with CBC, he learned to program via punch cards at UNB in the electrical engineering department before computer science was a thing), so I fit the term "born digital" if not the other aspects of the term.

But there were some good moments and fun times. In particular, I appreciate the chance to write non-academically. It has been a long time since I have just knocked a bunch of words into a computer for "fun" (yes, it was mandatory: I mean that in the sense that no one is really judging me for content here).

Mostly, I have been writing papers, professionally, or just the short nonsense of social media posts. At least here there are paragraphs and more developed thoughts.

So that was probably the best thing about this: just writing.

Things that I have been doing instead of working on this 23Things project

So I had not been keeping up on my 23things for work. Why is that? Because I had a bunch of other technology projects on the go and just a limited amount of time at work. Fortunately, today I am only on the reference desk for two shifts, so I have the time to catch up.

And the other projects? Well, there are a few non-work ones: I am learning Python, which is going slowly honestly just because I am spending more time on French, I have reconfigured my household media server (not that Plex requires that much work), and I assembled a new computer for my wife.

Building a computer is actually pretty simple: you just need to buy a bunch of parts that all work together: I chose a new Gigabyte motherboard that only supports certain types of RAM, processors, and so on, so you just choose the best that you can get for whatever price you have set and make sure that it is all compatible.

The hard part was that I wanted it to run Apple's OS X, which is not something that just works out of the box. There is a community of people online that are into this sort of thing though, and they call these hacked macs "Hackintoshes" (quelle surprise). I had to choose the right hardware: only certain motherboards and CPUs will work, configure the BIOS on the motherboard just right, run a special program off that installs the OS off of a USB key, run a bunch of configuration tools so that everything worked right, and now I still have to troubleshoot a few issues that have come up (volume is disabled after it goes to sleep, Bluetooth is not working, occasional freezes that I think are being caused by GUI animations, and a kernal panic on boot when something is plugged into a particular USB port.)

Meanwhile, at work I have been preoccupied with Minecraft and Minecraft servers. Bea and I are running this program for teens and I want us to have our own stable server that they can log into while they are here--not shared over the internet, just connected to a wireless router here so you can connect to the network and join. This means running a server via Java in windows, which I know relatively little about.

The first issue was just getting the thing to run via a batch file. I had to learn about Path and how to specify what Java to launch, since the work laptop I was using had Java 6 and 7 and there are these issues with 32-bit compatibility with Windows 7 that I didn't want to even have to figure out. So I learned how to point to the exact version of Java that I wanted and I got the batch file configured so that more RAM is allocated and all that.

The second issue is Windows networking and Windows firewall. Both are, from my OS X and minimal Linux background, insane. Networking just makes no sense. There are Public, Home, and Work environments with different conditions, all the settings are buried here and there. I can get it to work, but I just do not understand the logic of it. The firewall is the lesser evil, although it still has the different environments and the issue of multiple Javas was confusing there as well.

All that is mostly behind me: I now have a server that works and I can start configuring. But the process was so annoying that I would rather track down an older computer somewhere (2 gigs ram and a post-"core2duo" CPU would be fine) so that I can put Ubuntu on it and have it set up as a dedicated server.

The other thing has being figuring out Hootsuite, which has simplified library social media significantly. I know that Cat was using it, so I gave it a shot and the ability to schedule posts is great.

So that is what has been up.

Sharing

Scoop.it

Not interested: I use Feedly instead. RSS readers are a bit different that scoop.it, sure, but I am less interested in seeing a feed of things curated by topics (a la scoop.it, pinterest, even tumblr) than I am getting a feed of new things from a specific news source.

The days of RSS may be numbered and I may end up switching to one of these new services. Before Feedly I used Safari's RSS feed support, but then they got rid of that in order to push users of RSS towards their newer concept of system wide "following" of sites where you get notifications as pop ups (which is similar to an addon called Growl, but also to how notifications work on a phone). So I moved to Google Reader. But then Google shutdown reader to move users to Google+ and following sites through that (do you see a trend?). Even now I am thinking of leaving feedly because they have switched to a "Pro" system where all the new features require you to pay a fee and there the interface is cluttered by annoying ads for these new features.

But I digress.

There is nothing wrong with scoop.it. My only issue would be that by default you get messages with suggestions every day and I have managed to forget my password and now have to sort all of that out and disable my account.

But I did my two "things": I signed up and then I tweeted something that I found via the site: this link to an article about Minecraft Servers.

I didn't use the "post to twitter" button as suggested. I just copied and pasted the link. I don't like all of my online accounts having access to all of the other ones (on my home computers that is even disabled because I use a browser extension to limit sites from communicating with social media) and I don't see the time savings in pressing one of those buttons. Oh digressions.

For the EXTRA COOL THING portion of this: one of my schemes would be to get a raspberry pi and set up Calibre on it with a locally stored copy of the entire collection of out of copyright books at Project Gutenberg. Then you could have an eBook terminal in the library where people could move over non-DRM out of copyright classics onto their devices even if the internet is down. And a copy of pretty much every significant work of writing from pre-1900.

Apps

I'm skipping around here because I am still deciding if I like Scoopit (the next 23Things task). But I already went over everything relating to the apps.

The process is relatively simple. I had an iPhone before with Overdrive on it, now I have an Android Nexus 5 (which is great and more affordable, but requires more DIY ethic). Downloading a book is easy, reading is easy, no problem.

I do this frequently as a reference librarian in Moncton, so it is nothing new. As long as you can get overdrive onto the device and don't have to add the extra step of going through Adobe Digital Editions and all that, it goes smoothly.

In terms of using the online library, I can't stand reading on digital devices and I am not an audio-book person (maybe on the next big drive I will give it a shot?), so that is about it for me.

The last thing today is BiblioNB, which appears to be the app that was made for us by Bibliocommons. I have used it on Android and iOS.  It is fine--it works as advertised. My only criticism is that the logo that we supplied to Bibliocommons is really low quality, so when I launch the app I get a grainy, unprofessional looking welcome to the NB Public Library. Might be that it is just that the logo is from before people had HD screens on their phones (that wasn't that long ago really), but it something that we should try to fix when the app is next updated.

Finally, I wrote this ages ago and forgot to publish it. Oops!

Multimedia

It has been awhile since I have done my 23 things training. It has just been busy around here with the departure of some staff and March break activities. But here we go once more. Embedding a youtube video in blogger is very intuitive and straight forward. I will probably end up messing around trying to get the alignment of the video to the left and the spacing around it just right, but format pickiness is one of my weaknesses. I have it close enough for now, so I'll move one.

This is a video of one of my favourite historians, Howard Zinn, discussing the topic of a just war. This is the idea that there are "good" wars that are worth fighting. Zinn himself fought in the Second World War, which is generally considered the easiest to justify. I can't actually watch this video at work, but I have read a fair amount of Zinn's writing and I assume that the content is fairly similar.


So that`s that.

In terms of professional development resources, I am currently going through the introduction to computer science course videos from MIT. The course teaches computer science concepts using Python, which would be handy to know if we start using RaspberryPi computers at work as part of a markerspace since it is the recommended language for that platform. I'm using an older set of videos, but here is a link to the newer ones. I have not really had the time to watch more of them recently as I have been working more on day-to-day things and on improving my French, but learning Python is one of my goals for 2014.

dis-Pinterest

I played around with Pinterest.
I used my wife's account.
I pinned some things and made a board and so on.

Pinterest is not for me, though.

I appreciate the features and I could see using it if my lifestyle was more cooking and home decor based,¹ but I don't see it as meeting any of my social media needs. I'd rather invest the time into tumblr, which seems more open and strange, than pinterest.²

So this is a pretty minimal week in terms of training exercises. In terms of e-learning and whatnot, I did finally order the last few parts for the computer that I am assembling. Maybe I will blog about if there are other slow weeks. I also found a portable version of the image editor GIMP, so I can now have a copy of that on my work PC without having to jump through the hoops of having it installed for me.

Oh, the interns here made a Vine that I am featured in. It refers to a scene in the movie Her.

1 If I was renovating a house and wanted to see a bunch of examples of--say--trim or floorboards, I could see this being useful. But I don't need a social scrapbooking site in my life right now.

2 Not that I am actually investing any time into tumblr--too many other internet things on the go right now.

Legislative Word Clouds

Last thing for my workplace internetin' this week: Wordle. Wordleing. Making word clouds.

I thought I'd do some legislation word clouds.

New Brunswick Public Libraries Act


Those clouds sure are small Andrew, why didn't you make them bigger. Well, I don't want to have to take screenshots of them, paste them somewhere (why does Prnt Scrn in Windows send the image to the clip board?), safe them, and upload them.



Canadian Copyright Act
Is that in 3D or somthing? That's weird.  I don't know. Maybe? My eyesight is just weird all the time. The professionalism of this blog is really going downhill. Shhhhhhhh.





Canadian Human Rights Act
Let's talk a bit about CanLii. Now I know that you just love digging through random government attorney general websites to check out what your favourite laws are, but have you ever stopped and thought, "Wouldn't it be hella awesome if I could just use one website for all this with a standard interface and features?" Son, welcome to CanLii.

Social Media Automation

Instead of just doing the activities this week (I've already made my share of library memes), I thought I'd talk about automation site IFTTT.

I use IFTTT a ton. It lets you create simple If This, Then That recipes that connect different social media sites and web services. It's basically an intermediary between the dozens of web apps and sites out there that lets you automate and customize actions and activities.

An example that I set up recently for Tania was that when she is using her RSS reader Feedly, any time she labels a story "Tumblr" it gets sent to Tumblr as a draft post with a link to the story that she can review later, add some thoughts, and then post.

The most complicated thing I have done was setting up a series of conditions that monitored Twitter, Facebook, and newsmedia for mentions of a local public library and sending everything into an Evernote where everything was automatically tagged. This required a bunch of workarounds--using RSS feeds and Google alerts, I'd have to pull up the recipes to remember all the details--but the result was an index of all of the times that anyone mentioned the library that you could search, add labels, and then create stats and graphs from.

Corentin Lamy CC 3.0

Now I was hoping to illustrate this with a photo of some IFTTT recipes, but all of them seem to be on flickr, which is blocked at work, so instead here is a picture of the band I am listening to right now:

It's Do Make Say Think. A great Toronto post-rock band who are perfect for when you are typing away in the office.

We don't have any of their albums in the catalogue, so maybe try some Broken Social Scene instead.

MORE RAMBLINGS: The default spacing of that image to the left was annoying me: there was no gap between the image and the text to the right of it. Well I was going to drop an old hspace="10" into the table's html to fix that. And that would work, but double check the HTML 5.0 standards since I learned HTML back in the dark ages. As with most style and formatting issues, you should use CSS instead, so I try adding a margin: 0px 10px into the image style. But then I look at he code and see that there is already a margin-left: 1em attribute in there. So I change the left to right and we're solid.

More Social Reading

So I've poked around a bit and I think that I am going to stay away from Goodreads. I am not interested in sharing that much data with Amazon, who bought the company last year. I'm going to try LibraryThing instead, because:

• They're older
• They seem to handle the nerdy-librarian cataloging side of things better
• There is less emphasis on "social"
• While Amazon does have a stake in the company (due to buying Abe Books), it is still majority controlled by the original programmer of the site.
• They are based out of Maine, which is basically America's New Brunswick.

(More comparison of the two.)

So yeah, I'll try it out if I have the time.

Bibliocommons

I played around in Vison/Bibliocommons. There is a lot of potential here. I should probably just start using it to keep track of what I intent to read and have already read. I have a spreadsheet for tracking that and I don't care for the discovery aspect (I get too many recommendations from traditional media and just seeing things around the library), but I the community aspect is nice. If I can contribute to making it a better place and encourage library use, why not?

Anyway, here is my list from Vision: 20 great albums from the last two years. I'll probably add 2012 and earlier to get the last five represented while on a quiet desk shift.


Thanks as well to another NBPLS librarian for explaining how to do this.

EDIT: Dear all seeing government, I did the tagging and commenting too. :)

Social Reading

This week in 23 Things...

I don't get involved in social reading sites. I think of it as the sort of thing that I'd rather talk about with people in person. Plus I have this worry about giving corporations too much data. Amazon owns all of the major social reading sites now--do they really need more data on what I read and what I like beyond my Amazon ordering history?

I guess that it is a moot point given the number of tracking cookies and beacons that are tracking us online and keeping an eye on where we go, what we "like", and what we say (unless you use a tool that blocks that sort of thing). And I've already given a good portion of my soul to Google, so how is Amazon any worse?

Maybe I've just being cranky. I'll give it a shot and report back.

Fragmented social media

So what am I to do with all these social media sites now that I am writing on a blog again? What roles should each fill? Should I keep updating everything?

Currently I have: Fb, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter, blogger, Wordpress, and Tumblr.

Just a few weeks ago I restarted Twitter with the intention of using for more professional purposes. And I just started using Google+ more to keep up with some friends that are not on facebook. So what are all of these things going to be for?

• Fb: almost everyone is Facebook and that is now the problem with it. It is good for keeping up with things, but maybe I don't want my in-laws to be bombarded with library and political annoyances. And I feel bad swearing because my mum is there.
• Google+: I have been using this to keep up with non-facebooking friends. A bit of a wasteland. My blogger posts are cross posted automatically.
• LinkedIn: online CV that I am not sure about. I don't think that it helped with my recent job search. I keep it updated because it can't hurt and it is a good place to "friend" school and conference acquaintances where neither of us really wants to see photos of each other's pets or pastas.
• Instagram: Almost forgot about this. I don't know. There are a million places to put and share photos these days. I was trying to use it as a place to post things so that I didn't spam Fb with photos, but I have not been taking that many photos recently.
• Twitter: professional development and comedians basically. I like to follow the hashtag of conferences that I can't go to and then check out any blogs or articles of people that seem interesting.
• Blogger: I was here with a lame personal blog/journal/writing exercise thing ten years ago. It was typical of that era and I am glad that I deleted it at some point.
• Wordpress: plglondon.wordpress.com This is the Progressive Librarians Guild site for where I went to get my MLIS. I used to post a lot of the articles there and I still keep in touch, but I am not actively involved anymore.
• Tumblr: I was here to see what it was all about and then because Tania likes it a lot. I was thinking this would be a place to just post random things: music and gifs and whatnot. But I am not sure.

So there is too much here really. I will probably try to set up a system where somethings get cross posted automatically from one service to another. The biggest issue is that google+ doesn't seem to play nice with other services. I'll post another time about setting automation of posts with a site called ifttt.

hello world

Hey there everyone. This is part of a social media exercise at work. I already know a bit about tumblr and twitter and whatnot. (When I logged in to Blogger it reminded me that I joined up in 2004 when I was bright eyed and undergraduate.) And I am usually suspicious of anything mandatory. BUT I am really excited to interact with all of the other NBPLS library workers.