http://www.hennigweb.com/blog Fun with gadgets & technology Sat, 18 Nov 2006 17:31:37 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I'm back to the blog after more than a year of not posting! Today I felt inspired to write about some of the books I've been reading lately. It's my habit to read several books at the same time. Here's what I'm reading now: - Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind: how ... http://www.hennigweb.com/blog/2006/books-im-reading/ Given the home prices in the Cambridge/Somerville area, I thought I would never be able to buy a place in such a good location as I live now (where I've been renting for the past 10 years). But it happened! After 2 years of looking I found a "for sale ... http://www.hennigweb.com/blog/2005/my-new-condo/ OK, I finally decided to try Vonage. So far, so good. The quality is great, can't tell the difference between it and my Verizon land line. This will save me a lot of money in long distance calls! I don't use my cell phone that much for talking long distance ... http://www.hennigweb.com/blog/2005/voice-over-ip-with-vonage/ Another thing I demo'ed at the awards dinner last night was Audioblogger. What you can do is save their number in your cell phone, call it, say whatever you want, or interview someone with your phone, and it gets immediately posted to your blog as an MP3 file. Here's the ... http://www.hennigweb.com/blog/2005/audioblogger/ At the NEASIST awards dinner last night, I gave a talk about gadgets (my gadget life). One of the things I demo'ed was Blogger Mobile. With it you can take a photo with your cameraphone, then send the photo to this address: go@blogger.com. It gets posted to your blog immediately. ... http://www.hennigweb.com/blog/2005/blogging-from-my-cameraphone/ Some thoughts from Michael's talk: - Control your technolust - sexy technology - beware "technomust" - technodivorce - can we let go of dead tech?, cabinet of dead & dying technology, library garage sale - article: "planning for wireless in kansas city" - user-centered planning - expose hidden costs: training, staff time, promotion - technology landscape: bringing ... http://www.hennigweb.com/blog/2005/neasist-event-syndicate-aggregate-communicate-michaels-talk/ Some ideas from Jenny's talk: - use a wiki for OPAC documentation: let users ask questions - password protect your wiki to hide from spammers (most people don't have time to keep doing the rollbacks to kill spam) - del.icio.us has 50,000 users & growing 20-30%/month - ideas for del.icio.us for libraries: Thomas Ford ... http://www.hennigweb.com/blog/2005/neasist-event-syndicate-aggregate-communicate-jennys-talk/ Megan Fox is giving an overview: Tools in Personal Environments: A Taste of New Technologies. Here are a few ideas that I'm interested in: - there is a mobile edition of Bloglines (for phones) - Personalized RSS: Library Elf (I'm using this one already) - Podcast: Schoolhouse Rock - use wikis for staff manuals ... http://www.hennigweb.com/blog/2005/neasist-event-syndicate-aggregate-etc/ I've been coming across info lately about videoblogging. Cool! I'm going to try Ant as my program to subscribe to and download video: And "mefeedia" allows you to tag video (just like Flickr). Cool! Here's my del.icio.us tag for videoblogs: http://del.icio.us/nic221/videoblogs http://www.hennigweb.com/blog/2005/videoblogging/ Check out Google maps combined with Craigslist for housing searches: http://www.paulrademacher.com/housing/ This is really cool. You can see all the listings in Craigslist on the map and immediately get a visual idea of where they are as you are browsing through the listings. This is great! http://www.hennigweb.com/blog/2005/google-maps-craigslist/