Really slick design, and SugarOS is awesome for kids. Bad news? They don’t have any retail plans nor a manufacturer.
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CES 2012, Day One
Today is a travel day, mostly, but tonight will be check-in at the show and CES Unveiled, the first press event of CES 2012. I’ll be streaming live from CES Unveiled as long as my signal holds out.
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CES 2012
On Sunday, I leave for CES 2012 in Las Vegas and will be reporting from the show as I go. My current plan is to use a combination of Ustream and YouTube for video content, SoundCloud for audio-only content, and everything important will end up here on my blog. If you want to try and catch any live broadcasts, I’m going to have the channel embedded right here for you to watch, and if you follow me on Twitter you’ll get a message the second I go live with anything.
What am I likely to see at CES that would be interesting to libraries? I would argue that nearly everything I see should be interesting at some level, but I’m betting on a lot of Android and Windows tablets (hopefully a Windows 8 tablet will make an appearance), a lot of cheap video cameras, and ridiculously nice 4K displays among the thousands and thousands of gadgets on the show floor. I’m looking forward to meeting with Barnes & Noble as well as hopefully getting a chance to talk with the Makerbot guys, and I’m probably too excited about seeing the first demo of the OLPC XO 3.0 Tablet.
Lots, lots more once I hit Vegas. Stay tuned!
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Mineways – 3D printing from Minecraft
Mineways 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?
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.
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It’s been a good year
So many nice things happened in 2011. Another wonderful trip to Disney World, Eliza’s 4th birthday, Eliza learning to write her name and other letters, fun visits with family and friends near and far, Jason having successes at work, and decent health for all of us, among them. We’re lucky people. Here’s hoping 2012 is even more wonderful.
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.
On December 28th I received notice from George M. Eberhart, the Editor for American Libraries Direct, that my contract with American Libraries for Perpetual Beta is not being renewed. As of December 31st, my involvement with this experiment in blogging will end.
Perpetual Beta was, to my knowledge, the first American Libraries blog written by a non-staff member. It was originally conceived of by myself and Sean Fitzpatrick as a way of highlighting edgy, interesting tech that pushed the boundaries of what might be considered “library technology.” I tried very hard to curate the content that it linked to in such a way that it might help illustrate where libraries have opportunities in technology that might not be completely obvious. I hope that some of you out there in libraryland found it useful, and got some measure of value out of the two years that I’ve been writing and curating Perpetual Beta.
The content that exists here on Perpetual Beta will continue to live here, so don’t worry about links breaking just yet. And while American Libraries may use this site or the Perpetual Beta name for other projects, if you’re looking for my stuff…well, here’s a short list of where you can still find my writing:
Pattern Recognition: http://www.jasongriffey.net/wp
ALA TechSource: http://www.alatechsource.org/blogger/16
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/griffey
Google+: https://plus.google.com/110359014984825004385/posts
I’m still deciding what I will do with the sort of content that I curated for Perpetual Beta. I may create a new site for it, or I may continue to use my Tumblr blog (http://perpetualbeta.tumblr.com/) to collect this sort of thing. Whatever I choose to do, if you’re interested in what I’ve done here at Perpetual Beta over the last two years, keep an eye on the above and I’ll announce it as soon as possible.
Thank you to everyone for reading, and thanks to American Libraries for keeping it going this long. If you can, drop a note here in the comments…I’d love to know if this has been valuable to you.
“I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past…” – Thomas Jefferson
Perpetual Beta was, to my knowledge, the first American Libraries blog written by a non-staff member. It was originally conceived of by myself and Sean Fitzpatrick as a way of highlighting edgy, interesting tech that pushed the boundaries of what might be considered “library technology.” I tried very hard to curate the content that it linked to in such a way that it might help illustrate where libraries have opportunities in technology that might not be completely obvious. I hope that some of you out there in libraryland found it useful, and got some measure of value out of the two years that I’ve been writing and curating Perpetual Beta.
The content that exists here on Perpetual Beta will continue to live here, so don’t worry about links breaking just yet. And while American Libraries may use this site or the Perpetual Beta name for other projects, if you’re looking for my stuff…well, here’s a short list of where you can still find my writing:
Pattern Recognition: http://www.jasongriffey.net/wp
ALA TechSource: http://www.alatechsource.org/blogger/16
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/griffey
Google+: https://plus.google.com/110359014984825004385/posts
I’m still deciding what I will do with the sort of content that I curated for Perpetual Beta. I may create a new site for it, or I may continue to use my Tumblr blog (http://perpetualbeta.tumblr.com/) to collect this sort of thing. Whatever I choose to do, if you’re interested in what I’ve done here at Perpetual Beta over the last two years, keep an eye on the above and I’ll announce it as soon as possible.
Thank you to everyone for reading, and thanks to American Libraries for keeping it going this long. If you can, drop a note here in the comments…I’d love to know if this has been valuable to you.
“I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past…” – Thomas Jefferson
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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: