Categories
3D Printing

Mineways – 3D printing from Minecraft

Fire and IceMineways is a program that translates Minecraft models into object files that can be printed on 3D printers, resulting in you being able to hold in your hand something that you designed in a game. This isn’t the first time this sort of thing has been available…one of the very first instances of 3D printing that I reported on (way back in 2006!) was the ability to print your character from Second Life. In 2007 I had a chance to hold my first 3D printed object that I designed…my Mii from my Nintendo Wii system.

So printing from games isn’t new, but the popularity of Minecraft and the free-form creativity of it is certain to lead to some really interesting stuff. How can you incorporate this into what you offer to patrons?

Categories
Apple Library Issues Media

January Apple Event – Education/Textbook related?

Multiple industry sources are reporting that Apple plans to have an announcement event in New York sometime in January, most likely featuring something new in the Media space. Most interestingly for libraries, Clayton Morris is reporting that his sources tell him:

  • This event will focus on iTunes University and Apple in education
  • The event will be in New York rather than in the Silicon Valley because New York is more centrally located for textbook and publishing.
  • This initiative has been in the making for years.
  • The announcement will be small in size but large in scope: a big announcement in a demure space.
  • I expect at least two large project announcements as they relate to Apple in education.

Anything involving Apple, textbooks, publishing, and education is something that libraries should be paying attention to. This isn’t going to be a hardware announcement, but given that it seems to revolve around iBooks and iTunes U, I’m guessing it’s a publishing/distribution deal with textbook publishers…or maybe a new publishing platform specifically for textbooks? We’ll see as the month rolls along.

Categories
Apple Images mobile

Photos, backup, iPhone 4S

Over at Librarians Matter, my friend Kathryn wrote a post about how to deal with removing photos from the Camera Roll on your iPhone when they become burdensome. In her case, it was 3000 or so photos from her recent jaunt around the world. Here’s an easier way to deal with photos on any iOS device, make sure you have plenty of space on your iPhone for more pics, and make sure that you have backups of all of your photos.

What you need: an iOS device with a camera running iOS 5 or higher, a Mac at home running the most recent versions of iPhoto or Aperture, and…well, that’s it, really. Oh, an iCloud account as well. But if you have an iOS 5 device, iCloud is a no-brainer.

Turn on Photostream on both your iPhone and inside iPhoto on your Mac (on iPhoto, it’s an option in the preferences). Anytime your iOS device is attached to a wifi signal, it will send any photo that is in your Camera Roll to your Photostream. From there, your Mac running iPhoto (just leave iPhoto running while you’re out) will grab the Photostreamed pics and save them to your computer. I assume that you are backing up your system in some automated way, including your iPhoto or Aperture libraries, so…as soon as the pic you take shows up in Photostream, it should be safely in the hands of your home computer and part of your regular backup process (I backup my Aperture library and other important files from my desktop automatically using Crashplan)

Your iPhone will show you your photostream, so you can actually check to make sure that the photos in question are uploaded (photos don’t show up in the “photostream” section of your Photos app until they are uploaded). Once they are in your Photostream, you can safely delete them from your Camera Roll.

If you are a techno-traveller and have a laptop with you on your travels, you can use it as a first-stop backup (sync your iPhone to it), and Photostream as a safety net. But in practice, Photostream seems to work amazingly well. During our trip to Disney World this past October, I took somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 pictures with my iPhone, all of which were waiting on me when I got back home to sync to my home computer. With iCloud and Photostream, you technically never have to plug your iPhone into your computer at all to get photos off.

Things that can go wrong

If your computer at home isn’t online for any reason (powers down, loses connectivity, etc) or if iPhoto or Aperture closes for some reason, your photos won’t be saved locally. They will still be in the magical land of Photostream, however, which holds the last 1000 photos that you took. So you’ve got a thousand pic buffer before you’ll chance losing anything. If you are never in a wifi area, and instead rely on 3G for all your data needs, your pics will never be uploaded to Photostream in the first place.

So while it’s not 100% solution at all times, I’m betting it’s a 99.999% solution for most people. Give it a try…iCloud and Photostream are free from Apple for this purpose, so there’s no downside.

Categories
Legal Issues Library Issues

More on SOPA and PIPA

Discovered today, here’s a list of all of the Senators and Representatives that have signed on in support of SOPA or PIPA respectively. And if those links for some reason stop working or change, here’s an embed of the contents in PDF form from 12.23.11:

SOPA & PIPA Supporters in House and Senate

Categories
Legal Issues Library Issues

SOPA and Publishers

Here is a list of all of the companies signed to SOPA (which, while delayed until after the first of the year, isn’t dead):
Companies supporting SOPA

While there are a few surprises (GoDaddy? A DNS company that supports breaking DNS? Huh?) most of the names on the list are exactly who you’d expect: copyright holders that are clearly desperate to hold on to their business model. These happen to include publishers like Hachette, Harper-Collins, Macmillan, Elsevier, Hyperion, McGraw-Hill, Pearson Education, Penguin, Random House, Scholastic, and Norton. Not to mention all of the video/music companies that produce content that libraries spend money on: Sony, Universal, Disney, etc.

For those who aren’t keeping up with SOPA and PIPA and what exactly it is that the above companies are suggesting, let’s be clear: SOPA and PIPA are both so completely bad that I have trouble describing how bad they really are. I consider myself a writer, and I have trouble conjuring forth a description about just how incredibly fucked the USA would be if we allow these ridiculous bills to pass into law. So I’ll let someone else say it for me. Mr. Savage:

Make no mistake: These bills aren’t simply unconstitutional, they are anticonstitutional. They would allow for the wholesale elimination of entire websites, domain names, and chunks of the DNS (the underlying structure of the whole Internet), based on nothing more than the “good faith” assertion by a single party that the website is infringing on a copyright of the complainant.

Or maybe Mr. Dotorow? Or how about, oh…the engineers who built the Internet in the first place? Or maybe even the Stanford Law Review? All of them agree (as do I) that SOPA and PIPA would break the fundamental way that the Internet works, making the US into a third-world-country of ‘net access, and threatening the very concept of Free Speech online.

These are agressive, wrong headed pieces of legislation that attempt to find a technical solution to a legislative problem…we already have laws that punish individuals who infringe upon copyrights. This would be the equivalent of legislating the ability for private companies to decide to close down roads and revoke your drivers license just because someone claimed they saw you take a drink, instead of simply having and enforcing laws against driving under the influence.

So what can libraries do? I think we should let these signatories know that we disagree fundamentally with SOPA and PIPA and indeed any law that would lessen the freedom of speech on the Internet. Tell everyone you speak with at these companies that this is not the sort of thing that we will support. If SOPA and PIPA are still on the table at the time of ALA Midwinter, I plan to try to speak with as many employees of these companies as I can about this. I suggest you do the same.

Categories
Google+

HP makes WebOS Open Source

HP announced today that they are going to be Open Sourcing the underlying code for WebOS. I had hoped this would happen, but never actually expected it. This is really, really good news for consumers, I think. From the Press Release:

"HP will make the underlying code of webOS available under an open source license. Developers, partners, HP engineers and other hardware manufacturers can deliver ongoing enhancements and new versions into the marketplace.

HP will engage the open source community to help define the charter of the open source project under a set of operating principles:

The goal of the project is to accelerate the open development of the webOS platform
HP will be an active participant and investor in the project
Good, transparent and inclusive governance to avoid fragmentation
Software will be provided as a pure open source project
HP also will contribute ENYO, the application framework for webOS, to the community in the near future along with a plan for the remaining components of the user space."

Hat tip to The Verge for breaking this (http://www.theverge.com/2011/12/9/2623943/webos-being-open-sourced-says-hp). They are doing awesome reporting these days.

#patrec

Embedded Link

HP to Contribute webOS to Open Source
HP today announced it will contribute the webOS software to the open source community.

Google+: Reshared 1 times
Google+: View post on Google+

Categories
Google+

Sony Reader for $49?

Sony has dropped the price of it's Reader to $99, and has $50 trade in deal for ANY old eReader you happen to have laying around. $49 for a brand new Sony reader is a pretty great deal if you're looking for a cheap way to get an eInk eReader.

#patrec

Embedded Link

PRS-T1BC | Reader Wi-Fi | Sony | Sony Store USA

Google+: Reshared 1 times
Google+: View post on Google+

Categories
ALA Library Boing Boing

Libraries go bOING

Boing BoingI am incredibly excited that we’re finally launching Library Boing Boing! From the ALA post:

On the one hand, Library Boing Boing is a collaboration between ALA and the fabulously amazing Boing Boing folks to highlight all of the great new things libraries are doing. The most visible result will be regular posts about those great new things on the Boing Boing site itself.

On the other hand, Library Boing Boing: The Group has its own goals to help happy mutants in local communities connect with their happy mutant librarians to do good, work together on our shared interests, and make the world more better.

What can you do? To start with, head on over to the petition to make us a formally recognized ALA Member Interest Group…we need 100 signatures to get in front of the ALA Committee on Organization. Then at ALA Midwinter, it will go before ALA Council for approval.

We’ve already started a Library Boing Boing group over on ALA Connect, so go join that. It’s where we’ll hash out our plans to take over the world figure out what we can do to promote libraries and generally make some awesome happen.

Boing Boing is one of the most popular websites in the world, and having the opportunity to work with them to connect people to libraries is just about the coolest thing ever. I’ve been lucky enough to be featured on Boing Boing four times (1,2,3,4), mostly because the overlap between what libraries and librarians are interested in (freedom of information, democratization of information, copyright, DRM, technology) and what Boing Boing is about is huge. This is a great match, and I can’t wait to get started.

So, as Jenny said on the announcement post:

Start dreaming big. What could a dedicated, motivated, inspired group of librarians do with both Boing Boing and their own local happy mutants? How can we spread Library Boing Boing goodness throughout the profession?

Thanks to Andrea Davis and Patrick Sweeney for co-convening this thing with me, and special thanks to Jenny Levine for the idea and the wrangling! If you’re coming to ALA Midwinter, we’ll have a meetup on Sunday night (location and time TBA), and we’ll have some swag of some type to help identify other Happy Mutants. Keep your eyes out, go sign the petition, join the Connect group, and be on the lookout for wonderful things!

Categories
Google+

Scooby Doo as Skeptic Vector

Totally awesome analysis of Scooby Doo teaching kids to be thoughtful and skeptical. Best pull quote:

"The very first rule of Scooby-Doo, the single premise that sits at the heart of their adventures, is that the world is full of grown-ups who lie to kids, and that it's up to those kids to figure out what those lies are and call them on it, even if there are other adults who believe those lies with every fiber of their being. And the way that you win isn't through supernatural powers, or even through fighting. The way that you win is by doing the most dangerous thing that any person being lied to by someone in power can do: You think."

#patrec

Embedded Link

Ask Chris #81: Scooby-Doo and Secular Humanism – ComicsAlliance | Comic book culture, news, humor, commentary, and reviews
Here at ComicsAlliance, we value our readership and are always open to what the masses of Internet readers have to say. That's why every week,

Google+: View post on Google+

Categories
Books Legal Issues Media

Ripping your books

A really great article from Christopher Harris over on the American Libraries E-Content blog called “What’s Next? Book Match?” is getting passed around the web today. The pull quote that seems to be catching everyone’s attention is:

If I can rip my CD to an MP3, why can’t I scan my book to an EPUB?

I just wanted to step in and say: You can. There is decent case law in place that indicates that format shifting of personal copies is allowable in the United States. There is also strong case law in place for the ability to personally back up media that you legally aquire…both of these indicate that while there may be no clear “Yes you can” statement in copyright law, there is a lot of evidence that it’s perfectly ok for individuals given Fair Use rights in the US.

Moreover, there’s easier and easier ways to digitize books out there. If you haven’t seen the DIY Book Scanner project, go and check it out. This group is doing awesome stuff towards making digitizing books something that isn’t nearly as time-consuming as it once was. Plus, as I often point out in my presentations to libraries and librarians, if you think that digitizing books is going to be difficult forever, well…think again: