Ruling issued in TechCrunch/Fusion Garage JooJoo lawsuit
Speaking of tablets, anyone remember the JooJoo nee CrunchPad? It got a software update last week, and when I saw the story on Engadget a few days ago I actually had to cudgel my brain before I remembered what it was.
But that’s actually not the most interesting news to hit about the device lately. Last night, the ruling came out on the lawsuit that Mike Arrington filed against Fusion Garage for allegedly stealing the tablet right out from under them. The ruling itself can be found on Scribd, but an interesting analysis can be found at Hank Williams’s “Why does everything suck?” blog.
In short, Arrington’s reques...
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TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home - August 30, 2010 Author: Chris Meadows Tags: Chris Meadows Tablet legal Fusion Garage JooJoo lawsuit Michael Arrington TechCrunch
The Guardian’s John Naughton gets it right – its the system, not the hardware, that matters; my comments from 2008
This is a brilliant essay in the Guardian and I think all hardware reviewers should take note of it. Naughton discusses how people are making an “… an elementary schoolboy mistake, namely the assumption that, in a networked world, it is the hardware that matters most. According to this view, because the iPad, viewed purely as a device, was seen as incomparably superior to the Kindle, it followed that Apple would triumph in the ebooks market.”
He then goes on to say:
In the end, however, it’s not hardware that matters, but the effectiveness of the overall system in which the device is embedded. That...
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TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home - August 29, 2010 Author: Paul Biba Tags: Paul Biba Sony ereader kindle Amazon Apple Guardian iPad John Naughton
And the Chet Traylor dream dies just like that
Also District 2 dismally comes down to Richmond vs Cao. (Dismal is not an unfamiliar modifier for District 2 elections.)At Rising Tide yesterday I got the impression that Richmond's problems may actually be even worse than current information suggests. But I'm still unable to understand exactly why the current information has not received more attention in the so-called mainstream press. Clancy DuBos and Stephanie Grace both seemed to agree that the LSED grants at the heart of the scandal are commonly understood as a poorly managed "slush fund" through which any state legislator can direct money to shell non-profits. But ...
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Library Chronicles - August 29, 2010 Author: jeffrey
A boom heard 'round a good portion of the world
Aug. 26, 1883: Krakatau Erupts, Changes World … Again
Krakatau (aka Krakatoa) had been rumbling and sending up puffs of ash since May 1883. The eruption turned deadly on the afternoon of Aug. 26, with the first explosion coming at 1 p.m. A column of black ash soon rose 17 miles into the sky above the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra.
The earth around and under the volcano continued to move, sending a tsunami out around 5 p.m. Others would follow.
Explosions continued at night, and lightning jumped between the ash column and the island. St. Elmo’s Fire played on a ship’s yardarms and rigging 25 miles away, ash ...
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The Rabid Librarian's Ravings in the Wind - August 26, 2010 Author: Eilir
The power of Suck
T-P: Congressional party primary turnout may end up 'in the teens' on Saturday Perhaps if there had been more substantive reporting on the candidates in the mainstream press, we wouldn't have this problem. It isn't like there hasn't been any information out there to talk about, only that no local media outlet has deemed it newsworthy for some reason. Instead, we get bland summaries of the candidates' fund raising efforts which tell us next to nothing about who is backing these candidates and why. Reporting on political campaign fund raising this way leaves the impression that we are comparing some innate physical talent ...
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Library Chronicles - August 26, 2010 Author: jeffrey
MacBook Pro – The Down to Earth Experience
Once again, I keep struggling with being connected while travelling on business trips. I guess very little has changed in the last few years … Specially, if it is abroad, outside of the reach from my 3G card(s) which would only work in Spain and for which I wouldn’t want to expose them to massively expensive roaming costs. So, as you can imagine, it’s been a few days, since my last blog post, because, as most of you know already, I just got back, over the weekend, from another one of those biz trips. This time around to Germany. This time around to talk about Enterprise 2.0 and social software adoption, c...
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E L S U A ~ A KM Blog - August 23, 2010 Author: Luis Suarez Tags: General Interest Knowledge Tools Productivity Tools Social Computing Tools and Gadgets Travelling
LiB Recommends – 2010-08-18
Is the Android sticker on my MacBook ironic? http://tweetphoto.com/39846912
Brilliant! RT @sxseventy Today I have invented the sarcasterisk*. It’s for typed sarcasm. Example: Sure, that sounds like a fantastic* idea. My first sarcasterisk* sarcasm: “Oh yes, library eBooks have very flexible* use policies & are easy* to download.” Ta-da!
Ebook Summit Preview: At the Tipping Point http://bit.ly/9L9X9k
If we believe this we must press library eBook licensing NOW. Via @ALA_TechSource: How Libraries Ensure Ongoing Freedom http://bit.ly/cYrTuX
Niiiiiice! Bash that info overload! “Email sucks. ...
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LibrarianInBlack - August 19, 2010 Author: Sarah Tags: Uncategorized
Beloit College's Annual "Mindset List"
For most college freshmen starting school this fall, e-mail is passe and wearing a watch on your wrist is, well, unnecessary, according to the Beloit College Mindset List for the Class of 2014, most of whom were born in 1992. The list of 75 characteristics of the class was first created by the Wisconsin school in 1998 to remind professors what cultural factors have gone into shaping the lives of their students.While e-mail was revolutionary for their parents, today's college freshmen find it terribly slow, instead choosing to use their opposable thumbs to send dozens of text messages a day on their smartphones, which they ...
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The Centered Librarian - August 18, 2010 Author: David Booker
Twitter Search Engines
Twenty two days ago, I asked readers to tweet how they get permission to do stuff using the #getpermission hashtag in Twitter. Yesterday, I remembered that I needed to copy/paste some of those tweets into my How YOU Get Permission post … and failed miserably! Why? Because tweets pretty much disappear after about a week and a half. Technically the tweets are still there – they’re just not found by most search engines, Twitter’s included.
So I did some furious searching, and actually found a few of those hashtag tweets! Which search engines worked?
Here’s a list of Twitter search engines and what th...
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David Lee King - August 17, 2010 Author: David Lee King Tags: Cool tools Search Engines twitter hashtags
Govistics and the need for library data microservices
Several of us here at Stanford library who deal with data and/or govt information have recently received emails asking if we'd be interested in a free trial of the Pro level of subscription to the Govistics Government Spending Database built by the Center for Governmental Research (CGR). I'm a sucker for free trials, so took them up on their offer. Here's what I found -- and please take it with an FGI grain of salt ;-)
The interface is easy for quick results and high-level comparisons, but I found it lacking for any kind of in-depth scholarly pursuits -- the researchers and students I work with would most likely be inter...
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Free Government Information (FGI) blogs - August 16, 2010 Author: jrjacobs Tags: Census of Govts Data govistics Many eyes U.S. Census
LSW coloring contest, round 2!
Cross-posted from thelsw.org.
image for the new LSW coloring contest; please see post for details and a printable versionRemember the last time we had a coloring contest? Wasn’t that fun?
Let’s do it again! Using my expert librarian searching skillz, I have located this dubiously copyrighted image and made it into a coloring sheet for you all. Download and print yourself a PDF copy (or upload it into Photoshop or whatever you want to do), color, embellish, destroy, do whatever, and then send it back by September 1, 2010 to
Laura Crossett
LSW Clubhouse North
PO Box 85
Meeteetse, WY 82433
Or, if you insist, you ...
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lis.dom - August 16, 2010 Author: laura Tags: library society of the world
eBook Use in Libraries, Survey and Summit
Speaking of ebooks, do you use them in your library? And wouldn't you like to know how widespread their use is in libraries?
LJ/SLJ is taking a survey and wants your participation. It is designed to measure current and projected ebook availability in libraries, user preferences in terms of access and subjects, and library purchasing terms and influences. This survey is open to all types of libraries, and high level results will presented during LJ/SLJ's first ever virtual summit, ebooks: Libraries at the Tipping Point to be held on September 29, 2010. Detailed results will also be reported in LJ and SLJ later in the fall...
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LISNews.org - August 4, 2010 Author: birdie Tags: Academic Libraries Announcements Ask LISNews Ebooks Journals & amp; Magazines Public Libraries School Libraries
Book Reviews!
Stolenby Lucy ChristopherI am not sure how to describe this book. It was definitely good, but it was one of those scary realistic novels. The book begins with Gemma traveling with her parents through the Bangkok airport. While there, she meets a handsome man named Ty. In the course of their conversation, he pulls her away, drugs her, and kidnaps her to the outback of Australia. It is a strange situation and relationship between Ty and Gemma. She hates him for taking away the life she has known, but also she feels something else for him. What really makes this story eerie is that it is told in first person; Gemma is ...
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Teen Stuff @ Mesa County Libraries - August 4, 2010 Author: Teen Librarian
iPad e-reading app review: Flipboard
One of the more controversial e-reading apps to hit in recent days is Flipboard, the free app that aggregates content that friends have shared on social media. I’ve previously reported on the controversy it engendered by its potentially copyright-violating aggregatory nature. Lately, I’ve finally had the chance to examine the app itself.
In summary: wow. Flipboard is one of the prettiest things I’ve seen on the iPad yet. And it’s free. If you have an iPad, and are on Facebook and/or Twitter, you have absolutely no excuse not to go and download it. Even if you’re not on social media, it does have some internal cha...
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TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home - August 2, 2010 Author: Chris Meadows Tags: Apple Chris Meadows Review: iPhone/iPad e-book apps Twitter magazines aggregators Facebook Flipboard Social networks
The Letters of Sylvia Beach edited by Keri Walsh | Book review
Kathryn Hughes delights in a stream of missives from the 'midwife of literary modernism'Sylvia Beach, sometimes called "the midwife of literary modernism", wrote the kind of letters that any of us might produce if we were running an under-capitalised cottage industry while simultaneously trying to be nice to James Joyce. In other words, the stream-of-paper communication which issued forth most days from the Shakespeare & Company bookshop in Paris during the interwar years is chock-full of worries about recalcitrant radiators, searing headaches and whether or not it might be possible to smuggle banned copies of Ulysses into...
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Guardian Unlimited Books - July 30, 2010 Author: Kathryn Hughes Tags: James Joyce Biography Books Culture The Guardian Reviews
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
Week two: fanciesDr Faraday, the narrator of The Little Stranger, believes in natural explanations. He even has a ready language of "nervous" disorders to explain the gathering fears of the Ayres family about the strange occurrences in their old house. He is forever telling them they are "tired", susceptible to every fancy. The reader's uncertainty – is this a ghost story? – is kept taut by the narrator's refusal to believe in the supernatural. Waters's technique is to make him give us the evidence to doubt his own perceptions. His own witnessing of anything that might be thought supernatural is limited. He sees the pe...
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Guardian Unlimited Books - July 30, 2010 Tags: Sarah Waters Books Culture The Guardian Features
The Last Airbender: I See You’ve Added a Rainbow
We went to see M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender tonight. I had heard bad things (bad like the rotten tomatoes freshness rating, pictured). I had heard about the racebending problem, wherein characters presumed to be Japanese, Chinese, Tibetan or Inuit are portrayed by white or Indian actors. I knew all this, but had to see it for myself.
Walking into the theatre today was prefaced by spending the last week forcing my spouse Jeremy to watch the entire three seasons of the Nickelodeon tv series not two weeks after watching the entire series by myself. We were primed. I absolutely love the series; it’s bri...
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Random Access Mazar - July 30, 2010 Author: Rochelle Tags: rants
30 Posts in 30 Days #27: A Day in the Life
Here’s my post for the Library Day in the Life project.
6:30am Alarm goes off and 6-7 minutes I’m in the shower
6:50am Phone, iPod and lunch packed, I’m in the car and off to work.
7:00am Parked on the street six blocks from the office where the free on-street parking starts. Nice walk to the office. (Which totally sucks in the winter.)
7:15am In the office and turning on at least two of the three computers on my desk. Unpacking various objects from my bag. Logging into e-mail, Google Reader and HootSuite.
7:30am Diving into the e-mail, tweets, and feeds. This can last anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour depe...
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Travelin' Librarian - July 28, 2010 Author: Michael Tags: 30x30 librarydayinthelife
Mauritania's hidden manuscripts
Precious Arabic manuscripts from western Africa are under threat as Mauritania's desert libraries vanishThe bone-dry wood creaks as the book opens at a page representing the course of the moon, framed by black balls and red crescents. The manuscript contains 132 pages of Arab astronomy bound in well-worn leather, a 15th-century treasure stored, with similar items, in a cardboard box in a traditional dwelling in Chinguetti. This historic town, on the Adrar plateau in Mauritania, holds some of the finest collections of old Arabo-Berber books, but now the desert libraries are disappearing.With a sudden decline in tourism, Mau...
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Guardian Unlimited Books - July 27, 2010 Tags: Mauritania World news Books Heritage al-Qaida Guardian Weekly Features
Summer Fiction
Some of the books on the Beach Read display this month. (Can you use dust jackets for wallpaper?)Tomato Girl by Jayne PupekEleven-year-old Ellie's mother has bipolar disorder and her father falls under the thrall of the tomato girl who sells her produce to their store.Every Secret Thing by Laura LippmanOn a July afternoon two little girls, banished from a birthday party, take a wrong turn onto an unfamiliar street - and encounter an abandoned stroller with a baby inside it. Dutiful Alice Manning and unpredictable Ronnie Fuller only want to be helpful, to be good. People like children who are good, Alice thinks. But whateve...
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Berkeley Heights Public Library Book Blog and Buzz - July 27, 2010 Author: Ellen
Compared to e-reader makers, Apple is an 800-lb gorilla
Dan Frommer at Business Insider’s “SAI” section reports that AT&T activated 400,000 to 500,000 3G-enabled iPads last quarter, compared to “roughly 900,000” other devices. The “other devices” listing, Frommer notes, would include the Kindle, the Nook, and literally hundreds of other Internet-capable devices of all descriptions, from e-book readers to digital photo frames.
There’s no telling what percentage of those were Kindles and Nooks, but as Frommer points out we can likely assume it was fairly high (and of course it doesn’t include wi-fi only devices, such as the new $150 Nook model). For comparis...
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TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home - July 26, 2010 Author: Chris Meadows Tags: Amazon Amazon Kindle Apple B&N Barnes & Noble Chris Meadows Nook books e-books e-reader ebooks ereader Apple Holic AT&T Computerworld e-readers ereaders
Tell-All by Chuck Palahniuk
Cape, £12.99Act 1 opens with two Jewish homosexual babies clamped to Lillian Hellman's tits while Nazi bullets spit past her. Samuel Beckett and Pablo Picasso sit passively at the dinner table breathing in the scent of Chanel No 5 as Miss Hellman manipulates the world to her bidding. Oink, bark, cluck . . . Katherine Kenton catches my eye as Miss Hellman grabs Adolf Hitler by the throat.Allow me to part the fourth wall. My name is Hazie Coogan. My vocation is not that of a professional housekeeper – though I am proud to scrub her pots and pans – to the glorious film actress Katherine Kenton; nor do I enjoy what Walter...
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Guardian Unlimited Books - July 26, 2010 Author: John Crace Tags: Books Culture Chuck Palahniuk The Guardian Features
Real-life violence rocks the Comic-Con nerds in San Diego
Assault by ballpoint as zombies stalk Hall H and Brian Michael Bendis rises to a new screen challengeIn pictures: Comic-Con comes to CaliforniaThose of us who yearned for more action and excitement at Comic-Con after a drab Friday may have ended yesterday thinking that we should be careful what we wish for. Real violence, real blood, came to Hall H at the San Diego Convention Centre on Saturday afternoon when a fan was rumoured to have been stabbed in the eye with a pen during the presentation for Resident Evil: Afterlife. (Some hours later, the assault-by-ballpoint transpired to have resulted in a mere scratched eyelid.)S...
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Guardian Unlimited Books - July 25, 2010 Author: Ryan Gilbey Tags: Comic-Con Comics Film Culture Books Daniel Craig Harrison Ford Simon Pegg guardian.co.uk Blogposts
Howard Hodgkin - the last English romantic painter
Jonathan Jones on the artist whose work is in the best intellectual tradition from Cézanne to TwomblyIt is difficult to look at Howard Hodgkin's paintings without a picture in your mind of where they might hang when they are not on loan to an exhibition. They are haunted by secret worlds, not only that of the artist, but also those of his collectors. They are paintings for and of the private sphere. Only one work in his captivating exhibition of recent work at Modern Art Oxford has been lent from a museum. The rest have come from houses and apartments, from over the mantelpiece or the bed, from a dark office or a bright d...
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Guardian Unlimited Books - July 23, 2010 Author: Jonathan Jones Tags: Culture Howard Hodgkin Painting Jasper Johns The Guardian Features
Silent Summer: The State of Wildlife in Britain and Ireland | Book review
Stephen Moss surveys a timely reminder of where the wild things wereAlmost half a century ago, in 1962, the American writer and biologist Rachel Carson published a short work of non-fiction called Silent Spring. Over the next decade, it not only became a bestseller, but achieved something very rare in the book trade: it changed the world.At the 11th hour, people on both sides of the Atlantic woke up to the dangers posed to wildlife by the widespread use of agricultural pesticides. Following a major campaign, the British and US governments banned the most dangerous of them, DDT. The populations of insects, wildflowers,...
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Guardian Unlimited Books - July 23, 2010 Author: Stephen Moss Tags: Books Culture Science and nature Environment The Guardian Reviews
American Caesars by Nigel Hamilton
A collection of waspish mini-biographies of the most recent US leaders enthrals Peter PrestonThis is a delight of a summer book: history for the beach, politics for the deckchair, and waspish entertainment come rain or shine. Nigel Hamilton takes Suetonius's set formula for mini-biographies in The Twelve Caesars – where they came from, what they did in power, who shared their beds – and uses it to work over every US president from FDR to George W Bush. Scope for jokes, gossip and something much more: a space to set a dozen leaders everyone knows in a context where secrets fall out of the cupboard and comparisons come n...
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Guardian Unlimited Books - July 23, 2010 Author: Peter Preston Tags: Books Culture Politics The Guardian Reviews
Pass the Buck: Character Is Sucked into a Book
At the first Writer's Ink meeting, we played a writing game called "Pass the Buck." This game is a classic and produces some very interesting short stories. Every person is given a paper with a story starter, and they have five minutes to write the beginning. Every five minutes, the papers are rotated until each story has parts written by all of the participants. The end result is a mishmash of everyone's writing styles! Anyway, here is one of the stories:Jacques was walking around in his attic, when he came across and unusual book. It was lying open, and it showed a town of clocks. He bent down and attempted to pick up th...
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Sellers Library Teens - July 23, 2010 Tags: short stories Writer's Ink summer 2010 programs writing
WilsWorld 2010 : Electronic Texts and the Evolving Definition of Librarianship
WilsWorld 2010: Electronic Texts and the Evolving Definition of Librarianship
By Eric Lease Morgan
Enormous opportunity in libraries
Must evolve first & adapt to environment
Find is not the problem that needs to be solved
Indexes not databases – databases suck at search
Go beyond find and help patrons use and evaluate content
More full-text content – open source and licensed
Collect online free resources like free classic books and blogs- bring in locally
Analyze them, add value
Enable people to do things against the text – Digital Humanities Computing
Must visualize content – word clouds
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Sites and Soundbytes - July 22, 2010 Author: Tasha
Digest mode
Busy day. Busy time of year in general, really. Here are some more half-assed bulleted blurbs to fill the space in the meantime.This Digby post about the White House caving to cheap bullying idiots is all well and good but until we draw the logical conclusion that it means the failed White House occupant needs to be replaced with someone who will actually stand up to this shit then we're not going to learn anything constructive from it.Mayor: N.O. needs a new City HallThe Chevron building is still available, of course. I wonder if the City Council will agree to buy it for this mayor... and what the rationale will be.Meanw...
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Library Chronicles - July 21, 2010 Author: jeffrey
Notes on Reading Resumes
First of all, let me apologize right up front, because I know I’m going to come off sounding like a jackass in this post. I really don’t intend to, and I honestly am sensitive to what I’m saying.
Remember last week when I posted about our opening for a Head of Circulation? We’ve received close to 50 resumes so far, and I (and my coworkers) have spent a lot of time reading resumes in the past few days. I am certainly not a human resources professional, but I do have input on who will get interviewed and ultimately hired, so I thought I’d share some observations and trends I’ve been n...
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herzogbr.net blog - July 20, 2010 Author: Brian Herzog Tags: Library application applications apply applying cover letter cover letters hire hiring job jobs libraries public resume resumes
