But an email I got just a week or so ago put everything into focus for me. Here it is, edited to protect the identity of the person writing and anonymize the location a bit.

I’m a foreigner living in [REDACTED], and volunteer twice a week to help low-income [REDACTED] learn English. English classes are obscenely expensive, so it’s becomes a means for the Haves to keep the Have-not’s out of more lucrative jobs and overseas educational opportunities. Helping really motivated people, who just can’t afford access to this sort of education is quite rewarding and enjoyable.

We get upwards of 100 people showing up in the park to practice every week, so I do quite a bit of running around. One of the issues is that because of the [INFORMATION CONTROLS], often access to very simple, innocuous study material is blocked (of course well-to-do families have VPNs so don’t have these problems). So at first I would print things out, and then when the group got too large, encourages them to bring USB drives- which was a bit time consuming, and I’m concerned might attract the wrong sort of attention. Lately I’ve been using Piratebox, because even the cheapest [REDACTED] phones have wifi. It’s better than the alternatives to date, but as you pointed out it’s not really meant for the purpose and can be quite confusing…

[HARDWARE DISCUSSION REDACTED]…I just barely managed to get Piratebox installed- I’m not very good at command line. Most of the people who would probably get the best use out of this also would have similar problems, anything that could be done to simplify the install procedure would be great. If LibraryBox could simply open to some sort of file structure- read only, with no links or chat like the PirateBox has. Then I could just load the USB drive up directly with relevant study material for them to download to their phones, and at the cost so low I’m sure that the use would become widespread.

This is something I truly believe in, and a little English can make a massive difference in the quality of life here for some. Also for a hungry mind not to have access to books… well you probably feel
about the same way about that as I do or you would not have started this fork. So if any sort of donation would help with the development costs- please let me know.

As a result of this email, I would like to publicly ask for help with the project. I think two things need to be done: the first is moving the LibraryBox fork up to the current version of Piratebox, something which I have the hardware to start testing soon. But once I grok how to make the customizations work, I think the next step in the project is a true fork…producing an IPK that is installable directly to LibraryBox, bypassing Piratebox altogether. I had been holding out against this, hoping to continue to benefit from the code being produced by the Piratebox team. Once LibraryBox starts being a separate install, it becomes more complicated to merge code. But the letter above sold me, and I am asking for help with this.

If you feel as strongly as I do about the free flow of information, the sharing of books, and the education of the disadvantaged, help me. In the next couple of weeks I hope to have the customizations done, and if you have any coding skills, or understand how to build IPK’s for install, help me make this easier for people like the author above. The idea that this project could be something that helps make lives better around the world…well, that has a way of inspiring me. I hope it inspires you to volunteer some time to help out.

If you have questions, ideas, or want to touch base to find out how you can help, use the contact form here.

The Light from Stephen Alvarez on Vimeo.

Client: University of the South

Music by Boy Named Banjo

http://boynamedbanjo.bandcamp.com/

24 hours on the campus of the University of the South.

The original page for the video is

http://give.sewanee.edu/thelight/

There is no video in this video.

I shot 27,000 images in the course of 3 weeks. Around 5,000 appear in the finished video.

Everything was shot as Canon raw, converted in Adobe Lightroom and edited in Apple Final Cut Pro.

Motion control is with a Dynamic Perceptions Stage Zero Dolly.

Cameras were Canon 5D MK II, the MK IIIs didn’t fit into my workflow.

lens are all Canon

16-35mm L 2.8 model 2

24mm L 1.4

34mm L 1.4

50mm L 1.2

70-200mm L IS 2.8

85mm 1.8

300mm L 4

But, you may ask, what is it for? It’s for any situation where you need to distribue digital files but don’t have or don’t want Internet access. LibraryBox is based on a fork of the PirateBox project, using the TP-Link MR-3020 router, an 802.11n router that is capable of running on a USB 5 volt power source. This means that for about $40 and some time, you can have a file server that fits in your pocket. I loaded my demo unit with the top 100 Public Domain ebooks from Feedbooks and Project Gutenberg, and hooked it up to an iPad battery pack that will run it for 16 hours.

This means I can be a walking digital library, giving people access to eBooks anywhere I happen to have the LibraryBox. These could be used in a million different ways, from bringing eBooks, Audio, even movies to areas with digital devices but without Internet access to just being a personal file server for conference slides or other resources.

More information, including pictures and such, are all up on the LibraryBox website. The code is all licensed under the GPL and is available on Github. Several people have looked at the project, and I’m hoping that others will see the value and help me make it better. There’s lots of improvements possible, and I (and hopefully many others) will be working on making the process easier and better for users.

Emptiness is impermanence, it is change.
We should not complain about impermanence,
because without impermanence, nothing is possible.

I am not a spiritual person. I do not believe in a God, or a spirit, or an afterlife. But I can see the beauty and truth in the above Buddhist quote, and I feel its weight. It is incredible to me how emotional I have been tonight after learning about the death of Steve Jobs. It is fortunate for the 21st century that we had Steve as long as we did, but I will not complain about impermanence. It is what allows the future to happen.

Thanks for showing us your vision of the future, Steve. I look forward to seeing what is possible next.

Keynote about the future of libraries, change management, and technology over the next 5 years given to Western Kentucky University Libraries, August 24, 2011 by Jason Griffey

The family lives outside Sewanee on the edge of a one-acre pond in a thicket of woods teeming with rabbits, bats and deer. Inside the house signs of Griff, 3, were everywhere: a basket of toys near the wood-burning fireplace, a child-size canvas swing from Ikea hanging from the ceiling and a remote-controlled train set taking up most of Ms. Couch’s office upstairs, where she writes her poetry on a drafting desk in the corner.

I’m thrilled to see Kevin getting such attention…he and his family are amazing, awesome people. I hope that The Family Fang is a massive hit, and that they find the success they deserve. As I said in my last post, if you haven’t bought it, go buy it. It’s an awesome read, and hopefully one of the year’s bestsellers.

And if you are in any of the cities where Kevin is speaking/reading on his book tour (going on NOW…he’s speaking in an hour or so in Birmingham, AL) you should definitely go and see him read.

Literally while I was writing this, my wife texted me to tell me that she was taking Eliza to the playground to meet up with Leigh Anne and Griff. Hilarious!

Mr. Wilson explores the damage inflicted on children raised in an atmosphere that is intentionally confusing. They have been told that their parents do important things; they have been told that their own feelings do not matter. They have learned the hard way that either of them might be betrayed in an instant by parents who bring a lofty, arty, guilt-free approach to everything they do. So as “The Family Fang” begins, Mr. Wilson shows just how badly the adult Annie and Buster have been damaged by Fang ideas of fun. He also makes it clear that the senior Fangs can be amusing. And then, all of a sudden, they are not.

His previous book of short stories, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, won an Alex award from YALSA in 2010, and should be a part of any library collection by now. If you haven’t picked it up, do so…it’s an incredibly good book.

The Family Fang is something else entirely. It’s a book that stands up to anything on the shelves, a brilliant first novel. I’m in awe of Kevin when it comes to his skill with words, his imagination, and can’t wait for this thing to be a huge hit so that everyone can see how talented he is. And it’s not just that I know the guy…he’s getting reviews from all over:

• Best of the Month on Amazon.com
• Librarything
• Entertainment Weekly
• Kirkus reviews
• Goodreads

So: Go buy it now. Seriously. Buy a copy for yourself, and put it on the purchase list for your library. It’s going to be huge.

What I don’t like is that my writing, thoughts, interests…the comprehensive set of my online self, really…are distributed and scattered. I was ok with it for a long time, and I’m becoming very much not ok with it anymore. In the past, I’ve dabbled with pulling things from those other networks back here, but that doesn’t actually bring any of the reasons I use them here….it just brings the content. Which isn’t always what it’s about.

When I started writing here at PatRec back in 2003, none of those other networks even existed. It’s possible that if I were to start writing online these days, I wouldn’t even think of hosting my own blog, and one of the possibilities is that it’s time to let PatRec die a natural death. It may be that a distributed presence is the future of personhood on the ‘net….except I don’t think that’s true. I believe strongly, more than ever, that it’s important to own and control your own words, both in presentation and in regards to copyright/legal control. So I’m confronted with this tension: I like the tools that I don’t own, but I want to own the stuff I make with those tools.

I’ve been thinking a LOT about this. And I’m going to start experimenting with some ways to change things, starting with a post that I’m working on now about iCloud and Lion and the future of the filesystem. I would love to start a conversation about this, and see how others are dealing with this tension. Because I think I’m going to start reeling things in, reducing my contributions to other channels, and try to re-center my online presence.