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Category: Tools and Technology

The evolving face of shelves and desks

The evolving face of shelves and desks

Published by Iris on Wednesday, March 21st, 2012
Harvard Library Reading Room

Libraries have always been many things, but one thing they’ve generally focused on is providing materials and places to read and engage with those materials. Shelves and desks.

With more and more of our collections moving online, an internet connection is now the equivalent of a shelf for our electronic collections, browsers and computer desktops are now the places to read and engage with those materials.

This hit home for us in a big way when our wifi infrastructure crumbled under the ever-increasing demands on its resources (thank heavens for smart and dedicated IT folks!) and when “use one of the library computers” wasn’t an alternative any more because they were all in use. All three labs of them.

I used to think of wifi and computer access in libraries more as amenities. People come here to do their academic work, so isn’t it great that they can stay here and actually do their work. But over the last few years I’ve decided that our collections and the assignments that our faculty require have evolved such that it’s no longer useful to think of these and things like them as “extras.” These are our shelves. These are our desks. These are part of our core mission. We provide materials and ways of engaging with those materials, just as we have always done.

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Last Week in OSes Connecting to our Campus Network

Published by Iris on Wednesday, March 14th, 2012

Here is a list of OSes that connected to the campus wireless network last week, and the number of each of those OSes that connected. Dorm rooms don’t have wireless, only wired, so they don’t show up here, and lab machines are all wired, so they don’t show up here. Also, we don’t currently have guest access to the wireless network, so this is Carleton folks connecting.

  • 944 Mac OS X
  • 915 Apple iPod, iPhone or iPad
  • 640 Microsoft Windows Vista/7 or Server 2008
  • 340 Mac OS X Lion
  • 133 Generic Android
  • 69 Microsoft Windows XP
  • 26 OEMed Wireless Router
  • 11 Slingbox
  • 11 DD-WRT Router
  • 9 Ubuntu 11.04
  • 9 HP Printer
  • 8 LaCie NAS
  • 7 Samsung Android
  • 7 Playstation 2
  • 5 Nokia Internet Tablet (udhcpc client)
  • 5 Android Tablet
  • 3 Ubuntu/Debian 5/Knoppix 6
  • 3 Motorola Android
  • 3 Debian-based Linux
  • 2 Xbox 360
  • 2 OS/2 Warp (actually BlackBerry, I think)
  • 2 Microsoft Windows 8
  • 2 Gentoo Linux
  • 2 Epson Projectors
  • 1 Symbian OS
  • 1 Fedora 15 or 16 based distro
  • 1 Chrome OS
  • 1 Brother Printer

Coming after the recent Chronicle of Higher Ed article on how Tablet Ownership Triples Among College Students (apologies for the pay wall), it’s very interesting to see iOS connections outnumber all Windows connections.

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I will manage these passwords if it’s the last thing I do

Published by Iris on Tuesday, December 20th, 2011

With passwords proliferating like tribbles, I’ve had to upgrade from my two previous methods of managing my accounts.

The first method was the easiest: I had two passwords, an easy one and a complicated one. If the site was important I used the complicated one. If the site wasn’t important I used the easy one. Well… that started to seem like less and less of a good idea pretty much as soon as I started online banking and getting work passwords that mattered and stuff. So.

The second method worked for a long time: I had several passwords written down in a fairly secure online place that was itself password protected, and then I had an easy password that I used for all my “I wonder what del.icio.us is” experimentation online. That started seeming less and less good after several of the sites with the easy password got hacked multiple times and the hackers stole their databases of user passwords. Multiple times. And then I’d have to go through these millions of little sites changing a bunch of passwords all day. That got to be a less and less appealing way of spending a few hours. So.

Now I’m using an encrypted password manager. Here’s the setup. KeePassX (the Mac version of KeePass) on each of my computers and KyPass installed on my iPod Touch, each of these is directed to look at the KeePass database that’s stored in Dropbox (and the file made available offline on my iPod Touch).

Hopefully this solution lasts me for a while.

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Leaving this mortal coil

Published by Iris on Monday, November 14th, 2011

Google has been rolling out redesigns of its major web services, like Gmail and Google Reader, and like a docile citizen of the Internet, I’ve been waiting for my eyes to adjust and for my hands to quit directing the mouse to places where buttons used to be. It’ll happen. Sooner or later.

What I find fascinating is that the design changes that keep catching my eyes off guard seem to be more than updates to look and feel. They seem to embody a shifting focus or philosophy on Google’s part.

The new designs seem just enough divorced from any 3D metaphors to leave me feeling unanchored. I no longer look through digital windows or at pages on a digital desk. There aren’t enough edges for those things to exist any more, and what edges there are on the page are flat and insubstantial enough that my eye can’t interpret them as edges. They’re just lines. Even suggestions of the existence of friction (like the bumpy edges of messages that you could “grab” to drag) are gone.

What’s left is a denial of the physical. We’re not in Kansas any more. We’re not even “navigating” the digital world any more. Little by little, Google has stopped shipping information down to our world. Little by little, Google has started asking us to give up on gravity and friction and join it in the ever-shifting, edgeless, 2D existence of the digital cloud.

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