In conclusion? Smooth, easy-to-use app that satisfies a need I didn’t even know I had (up-to-date news on a few specific subjects from a wide variety of sources).

But here is something else for ya – not quite as beautiful, though hopefully mildly interesting. A student worker and I presented at the Technology, Colleges, and Community (TCC) conference earlier this evening. It was cool: it’s an online conference, so presentations are done through Elluminate, and there are people from all over the world interacting and discussing technology and learning. Our presentation was called Digitizing Moving Images: Saving Yesterday’s Videos for Tomorrow, and the slides are available on Slideshare. The audience was pretty small since 5pm in Hawai’i is midnight in Tokyo, late night on the U.S. mainland, and supersleepytime (5am?) in Europe. Still, it was fun, and everyone was supportive,

Ooh, Slideshare has an EMBED function!!

Yes, I DID just stop mid-sentence when I realized I could embed the presentation in this post. Have you seen UP? The Pixar film? You know how the dogs are all hunting that crazy bird through the jungles of South America, racing through bushes and around trees and over rocks and the all of a sudden SQUIRREL!!!! And the dogs all stop in their tracks? Yeah, sometimes I feel like that.

View Makiki Hike in a larger map

First, Chris Lacinak at AVPreserve.Com just posted A Primer On Codecs for Moving Image and Sound Archives (PDF). Good reading.

Second, I want to read Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates. I also want to read Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars. I wish I had more time for reading.

Third, here is a link to the Community College Open Textbook Collaborative. Good resource.

(A note on the Mac thing: I grew up with Macintosh computers. I love using them. My MacBook makes me happy. But with the growth of iTunes, iPhones, iPads, iThis, iThat, I’m really wary of getting locked into a world that is defined by what Apple creates, and what Apple lets me use.)

Here’s the list. Not nearly as well-organized as Aaron’s, sorry:

• Open Office: Word processing, spreadsheets, presentations – heck, it even does databases! I use this pretty regularly at home for composing short documents and doing little budget-y spreadsheets. I’m interested in finding out how it would work with a most complex project like a long paper or book chapter. Runs on my Mac and the netbook.
• VLC: I love VLC because it can play pretty much any video or audio format you throw at it. I mostly use it for playback, though – I need to explore its editing/converting abilities more.
• WordPress: My blog’s built on it, I’ve used it for years, it’s easy and nice and free.
• Audacity: I don’t use it nearly as often as I did when I was studying in the linguistics department, but it’s a great audio editor. If we started doing podcast work at the library this would be my software of choice.
• Drupal: I barely know how to use this and am only mentioning it because I’m excited to learn more. Someday.
• Ubuntu: This is the Linux distribution I recently installed on our Acer netbook. It’s wonderful, and I find myself thinking, quite seriously, that I could probably get by now without my MacBook. It is, of course, running a whole lot of open-source software, but I won’t put that all on this list – it’s mostly the basic stuff that comes with Ubuntu.
• Gimp: This is probably the one I’ve been using the longest. I’m no pro at it but can use it to do all the basic Photoshop-type editing and graphic creation I need.

**Edit**

Forgot three!!

• Firefox: Use it regularly.
• Thunderbird: I use Thunderbird for email at work. Just looked up the URL and realized I can upgrade to 3.0. Here I go . . .
• Android: Linux-based mobile phone operating system. It runs my phone. It makes me happy.

AIME attorney Arnold Lutzker has created a short primer on educational video streaming (part of the AIME vs. UCLA ruckus).

Glide offers 30GB of free storage space and supports all the operating systems and devices I use. Definitely going to check it out.

Dive Into Accessibility: 30 Days to a More Accessible Website. Really good; focuses on the question of “who benefits?” from improved accessibility.

The Berkman Center at Harvard offers a Creative Commons licensed course on Copyright for Librarians. I am currently feeling VERY overwhelmed by all the good resources out there.

The conference venue was beautiful:

We showed up early to eat beignets (perfect little fried dough things) with lilikoi butter at the farmers market on campus, then got ourselves registered and started putting our names on mysterious pieces of paper with topics written on them. Within 45 minutes the organizers had the papers arranged on a time/room grid, and we had our conference schedule! I went to talks on software for photography, news and new media, blogging platforms, Android app development, and finally the use of social media in businesses. All fantastic, and all much more than just talks – they were conversations going on, often at lightening speed, bouncing around a roomful of intelligent and interested people with very diverse backgrounds. Very cool. Lunch gave me a little opportunity for netbook show and tell, along with some netbook envy:

(left: my netbook, running Ubuntu. Right: a 9″ Dell netbook running Mac OSX.)

It was a success. I learned a lot, met some of the “movers and shakers” in the tech community here in Hawaii, and joined TechHui, a Ning-based social networking site for local tech stuff. Not bad for the first Saturday of spring break!

1. Got Ubuntu installed and running happily on our Acer AspireOne netbook (it can still boot into Windows too, ’cause I still need that for the TOEFL test grading I do once in a while for extra cash). I know I need more time to really see how I like it, but right now my thinking is “if Ubuntu can do everything I need, and more, and it’s free, and it’s open source, why buy another Mac when my current one dies?”. This last year has been one slow series of moves away from Apple products for me – first the Android phone instead of an iPhone, and now becoming totally smitten with the Ubuntu-tastic netbook while my MacBook sits on the shelf.

2. American Library Association Tech Source webinar on Metadata with Karen Coyle on April 1. I’m signed up. I’m diggin’ metadata these days.

3. The Unconferenz (oh! the Z at the end is like nails on a blackboard!) is coming to Kapiolani Community College this Saturday, March 20, 8am-4pm. Tech, Internet, T-shirt, and lunch, all for $25. Yes, I’m signed up.

4. Interesting New York Times article: Fending Off Digital Decay, Bit by Bit. Emory University recently acquired a huge collection of archival material from Salman Rushdie, including FOUR COMPUTERS. With drafts on them. Pretty cool, if you can get at the information in those old files (which it sounds like they could).

5. NiceREALLY GOOD post at The Book of Trogool on open source, open access, open standards . . . all those “opens”. Because yeah, open things are good. But do you really know what exactly you’re talking about? I don’t. Not all the time, at least.