If you haven’t yet seen the two cookbooks put out by MaintainIT, you should take a look. In addition to these resources, they have started a series of free, monthly, 30-minute webinars on topics pulled from the cookbooks.
The first was today, April 16th — Notes from a Laptop Circulation Program. It is archived, so you [...]
CAPTCHAs are a test that is supposed to identify you as a real person as opposed to a computer program. Here’s an example from Google’s Blogger:
Until lately, this seemed to be working. However, some of these CAPTCHAs have been cracked — those from Windows Live Hotmail and Gmail. Websense Security Labs also states that there [...]
Ever want to know if your friends and colleagues actually click on the links you send them? LinkBlip will let you know.
This could be really helpful. You give the service your email address and the address of the web page. LinkBlip gives you a new URL to use in your email, blog, website, etc. When [...]
Flickr, a photo-sharing site, now will allow you to upload videos! A couple of caveats:
You have to be a Pro member ($25 per year)
Videos cannot be more than 90 seconds in length
Videos cannot be more than 150mb each
Only safe or moderate content is permitted (no restricted content)
Only videos you have created yourself
By the way, Flickr [...]
The State of Virginia is the first state to have mandated Internet safety classes for public schools. Apparently this law went into effect this school year, so I’m guessing that schools have been integrating this curriculum throughout the year. Yahoo Tech found this PDF from the Virginia Department of Education which provides ideas [...]
At the Computers in Libraries conference, Jeff Wisniewski discussed some small things you can do to your website that will make it better and easier to use for your patrons. They are all excellent suggestions. I haven’t yet found his handouts, but the Librarian in Black has an excellent summary.
Lee Raine of the Pew Internet and American Life Project spoke at the Computers in Libraries conference. Always interesting, he provides us with more information to consider as we look at libraries and their place in our communities:
2000: 56% of adults used the Internet, 5% had broadband at home, 50% owned a cell phone, and [...]
A new version of Unicode is now available. Version 5.1 contains:
the enabling of ideographic variation sequences which are needed for Japanese, Chinese, and Korean.
changes to properties and behavioral specifications, which primarily deal with Polish, Portuguese, and Tamil and other languages.
1,624 newly encoded characters
[from Cafe con Leche]
In Switzerland, a data center sits next to a local swimming pool. Keeping the equipment in the data center cool requires pushing cold air in and pushing hot air out. Instead of losing the hot air by pushing it outdoors, this data center is using it to heat the next door pool.
One of [...]
Apparently, the Google Terms of Service includes an age requirement.
Section 1 — The Terms of Service document is used with all Google’s “services and web sites (referred to collectively as the ‘Services’ 
. . . “
Section 2.1/2.2 — You must agree to these Terms in order to use the Services. You can accept the [...]
