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Free Fonts

Zone Erogene has ten fonts available for free download, including Migraine Serif and the faux-cyrillic Perestroika.

Tip for Mac OS X users: rename the font to remove the “.txt” extension that will get added to the filename, then double-click it.

The Dial Up ISP Wasteland

Yes, there are some parts of the continental US not yet served by DSL or cable modems. That’s why I’m looking for a dial up ISP. Nationally we’ve got AOL and Earthlink, followed by budget operators NetZero, PeoplePC, and Netscape Online. But here’s the thing, and forgive my ignorance, why do all these services suggest you need to download and install software just to dial in?

I mean, hasn’t dial up networking been a standard feature of various releases of Mac OS and Windows since 1995 or so? Why the extra “dialer”?

Anyway, my search for a bare-bones ISP lead me to FreedomList‘s ISP directory, and the list of providers offering service in New Hampshire. That’s where I found VT Rocket, which offers plans ranging from $2.90/month (for 30 hours) to $9.95/month (unlimited).

Treo 650 For Me

I’ve been talking up the Pepper Pad and Nokia 770 a lot, and I’ve mentioned a moment of lust for the LifeDrive (despite my complaints against PDAs), but today I bought a Treo 650 (even though I had doubts). My decision surprised me, but the following factors all weighed in its favor: My cell phone […] » about 200 words

The Bathroom Reader

Somebody at Gizmodo found this Agence France-Presse story about the intersection of American surfing and bathroom habits in The Hindustan Times. It’s based on a report by the USC Annenberg School‘s Center for the Digital Future. For five years running now, the center has tracked internet use (and non-use) in a 2,000 household representative sample of America (choosing a new sample each year).

This year, researchers found: “Over half of those who used Wi-fi had used it in the bathroom.”

Gizmodo is going a little farther than I’d initially care to by asking readers to comment on their behavior, but I found this gem that reminds us that this may just reflect the evolution of our media: “The laptop in the john is the new newspaper for the millennium.”

I apparently have too many neatnik issues to go down that path, but rather than devolve the discussion, I’d like to point out that this Center for the Digital Future report appears to be a good complement to OCLC’s latest report and the regular stream of reports from the Pew Internet Project.

Now back to the funny: RSStroom Reader.

Microformats

Oliver Brown introduced me to microformats a while ago, the Ryan Eby got excited about them, then COinS-PMH showed how useful they could be for libraries, but I still haven’t done anything with them myself (other than beg Peter Binkley to release his COinS-PMH WordPress Plugin). What are microformats? Garrett Dimon explains the theory: When […] » about 300 words

Raging Arguments About The Future Of The ILS

I feel a little misrepresented by a post from Talis’ Richard Wallis claiming you don’t need technology for Library 2.0 – but it helps, but the company blog doesn’t allow embedded URLs, so I’m posting my comment here: Richard, please don’t misunderstand me. Technology is the essential infrastructure for Library 2.0. My point was that […] » about 300 words

$100 Laptop Details

I’ve been doing a lot of talking about the coming information age and how it depends on access technology that is as cheap and easy to use as our cell phones (and applications of it that are as appealing as people find their cell phones). But I’ve been slow to mention the MIT Media Lab‘s […] » about 200 words

Humanoid Robots Are Eerie

My friend Troy pointed out a while ago that the more “realistic” our 3-d models of humans get, the scarier they look. Apparently it applies to robots to, at least judging by the “actroid” above. Maybe I better put How To Survive a Robot Uprising closer to the top of my reading list. More at […] » about 100 words

bsuite Bug Fixes (release b2b)

ContentsFixesInstallationbsuite FeaturesI’ve fixed a couple bugs in bsuite b2, released last week. Fixes A bug with search word highlighting that caused it to litter the display in some cases.  A silly mistake of mine that cause a mysql error for some users. Installation Follow the directions for the bsuite b2 release. The download link there […] » about 300 words

Library 2.0?

Rochelle worries that all this Library 2.0 talk is lost on her library. Ross tells us why he hates the Library 2.0 meme and Dan reminds us it’s not about buzzwords. But Michael is getting closest to a point that’s been troubling me for a while: Library 2.0 isn’t about software, it’s about libraries. It’s […] » about 300 words

bsuite Features: The Photo Spread

bsuite highlights the search words used to find blog posts in Google and other search engines, and uses those search terms to recommend other related posts at your WordPress site. — – — bsuite uses the tags of one post to recommend related posts in your WordPress blog. — – — bsuite includes an easy […] » about 100 words

OPAC Web Services Should Be Like Amazon Web Services

No, I’m not talking about the interface our users see in the web browser — there’s enough argument about that — I’m talking about web services, the technologies that form much of the infrastructure for Web 2.0. Once upon a time, the technology that displayed a set of data, let’s say catalog records, was inextricably […] » about 900 words

bsuite WordPress Plugin (b2 release)

Contentsbsuite FeaturesChangesInstallationOptionsTag SupportUsing bsuite FunctionsKnown BugsThe first thing we all have to agree on is that bsuite is the replacement for bstat. The name change reflects that fact that the plugin is doing a lot more than simply track page loads. The most exciting new feature is a module I can’t help but call bsuggestive. […] » about 1000 words

CMS Pitfalls

Everybody wants a content management system, but there’s little agreement about what a CMS is or what it should do. Even knowledgeable people often find themselves struggling for an answer before giving up and defining a CMS by example. The problem is that we know we want better websites, and we know technology should help, […] » about 500 words

bsuggestive and bsuite Tag Support

bsuite, the follow-up to bstat, now includes a module called “bsuggestive” that recommends related posts based on the current post’s tags or alternate posts based on your search words when you arrive from a recognized search engine. That is, bsuggestive does two neat things: First, visitors will see a section in each post with links […] » about 300 words

Blog Value

The sale of Weblogs Inc. to AOL last month for $25+ million got a lot of bloggers excited. Tristan Louis did the math and put the sale value into perspective against the number of incoming links the the Weblogs Inc. properties. It’s an interesting assertion of the value of the Google Economy, no?

The various properties have a total of almost 50,000 incoming links, which work out to being worth between about $500 and $900 each, depending on the actual sale price, which everybody’s mum about.

So Dane Carlson created this (now broken) how much is my blog worth? app based on those numbers and powered by the Technorati API. Zach took a stern look at it (while it was working) and decided the numbers probably represent the gross ad revenues of a blog over four years (or two years with strong growth).

My Wife The Technology Dependent Anti-Geek

My wife Sandee cringes at the suggestion that she’s a geek. She writes poetry and teaches English, she cooks fabulous meals and dances all night long. Surely you’re mistaken she’ll say. But she does have a laptop, a digital camera, and an iPod. And she immediately saw the value of having a computer in the […] » about 300 words

Using XML In PHP5

Everybody likes documentation. The Zend folks posted this overview and SimpleXML introduction The O’Reilly folks at ONLamp offered this guide to using SimpleXML. Of course, there’s always the SimpleXML docs at PHP.net.

Two problems: I haven’t encountered CDATA in my XML yet, but I do hope to develop a better solution than offered here when I do. The other is that SimpleXML chokes on illegal characters, a unfortunately common occurrence in documents coming from III’s XML Server.

Retro Gaming For The Holidays

It’s amusing how retailers will try to capture a trend. So retro gaming fans have been building their own arcade cabinets for years now, but I just saw that Target is offering a Midway Arcade Machine for the holidays. The 96-pound machine is described as “full-size” and offers Joust, Defender I and II, Robotron, Rampage, […] » about 100 words