What a great title for an application. If you have a mac, you simply must go grab delicious library, this cool library management application that uses a webcam to scan the barcodes of objects and build a database of them for you. It’s initially geared towards your personal book, cd and DVD collection, but it uses an open data format and I have almost no doubt that it will quickly be expanded by the development community to store records on virtually anything with a barcode on it. It’s also radically less expensive than similar systems sold to do the same thing, plus it’s high in the ol’ cool geek trick factor.

It won’t actually be released for another couple of days, but check it out, if the screenshots and the notion of pointing your webcam at anything with a barcode and automatically adding it to your dataset doesn’t interest you….er, then you’re not enough of a geek to be reading this site, time for you to move right along now.

I’ll post impressions after I’ve acquired a copy in a week or so.

Longtime readers will recall that the last mac laptop I purchased so infuriated me that I dropped all personal use of Apple products – it was a g3 ibook at the dawn of the osx age and I still stand by my opinion that it was basically an unusable machine. Subsequent revisions to the OS addressed most of the issues, but that took over a year. In the interim I have been using pc laptops. At their best they were decent, mostly I didn’t care very much for them though, and when I left Maine I sold my laptop to one of my students, planning to buy a new one in NY….

(well, actually that’s not entirely true – I was promised one when I was hired at my new job, but it hasn’t made itself available to me yet, and meanwhile I need the machine at home. That left me unwilling to press the issue at work (after all, my immediate needs for it are at home, not the office) so last week, I bought a new g4 ibook on my own nickle.)

Anyway, so far it’s been great. I don’t like that Apple solders 256 MB to the board of the machine and then leaves only 1 slot free for ram expansion (at a bare minimum if they’re going to solder ram to the board, it should be 512MB), beyond that I have nothing but praise for the machine. While it’s no speed demon, it is more than adequate for my needs – it’s basically a writing tool and something to browse the web and chat online with when I’m sacked out in my living room. It excels at these tasks.

As soon as it’s paid off, I’ll be buying an isight for it and (get ready to chortle in triumph kevin, jesse, and the rest of you who have been hounding me about this for literally 6-7 years) re-activating my long dormant AIM account, or making a new one if the old one has been purged, so that I can use ichat’s built in av chat functions, which is really cool stuff. There’s also a very cool app, Delicious, which I’ll blog about soon that uses an isight in an exceedingly clever manner.

I’ve mentioned this before – Verizon is aggressively rolling out Fiber To The Premises (fttp) – this is true asynchronous broadband to our homes folks, imagine connectivity several orders of magnitude faster than that so-called ‘speedy’ cable modem on your desk now, but for the same price. Anyway I’m mentioning it today because verizon has announced that they’re expanding their rollout to six more states, including mine (NY). My bet is I am still at least a couple of years away from seeing this available to me, but it’s progress. I’m excited about this in the same way I anxiously anticipated cable modems 8-10 years ago- it’s going to enable another round of innovation just as the cable modems did.

(and it has the fringe benefit of kicking time warner in the ass – longtime readers know how angry I’ve been about the limited upstream capacity of their network. If the cable company can’t figure out this isn’t a broadcast medium, fine. We’ll let the telcos make the point. It can’t happen soon enough for me).

I’ve talked about and linked to folks talking about how to route around the existing tv networks. It’s already happening right now of course, just take a look at suprnova.org a few hours after your favorite tv show has aired and you’ll find it there for the downloading, usually edited such that the commercials and filler material are gone. The problem is it needs to be automatic – this needs to happen as seamlessly as your existing tivo setup works for this to really take off. I love peering into the crannies of the software development community to see what kinds of things the developers are cooking up. Here’s today’s excellent example – Buttress. There are a number of apps attempting to do the relatively simple thing buttress is doing – subscribe to an RSS feed, whenever that feed links to a torrent file, Buttress grabs it and ques it up in your Bit torrent client. You come home and find your favorite content ready and waiting for you.

Cool, cool stuff. A little rough around the edges, but some digging on your part and you’ve got yourself the perfect personalized tv network. Give these concepts another 6 months to a year to evolve and we will start to hear the networks squealing and the congress legislating to stop this.

This is Java-based so it should run on any platform with the appropriate JVM installed. I leave it to you all to find the appropriate RSS feeds 😉

Think of a discussion board, then cross it with that corkboard in the hall outside the administrative offices in your high school, and imagine what a programmer might do with it. Then check out webnote. Does it look anything like what you were imagining? Be sure to try the filtering feature. This is cool cool stuff. I’m going to try and get this up and running on my server once the code has evolved a bit, it’s still under very active development. Note that you can jump to the root address (www.aypwip.org/webnote) to make your own ‘corkboard’ and read about the codebase and the developer’s plans for it.

This requires a modern browser, Firefox, IE 6 or Safari, just fyi.

I’ve touched on this subject before, but I want to bring it up again today – google has just stealth launched their new Google Print service. No doubt you’ve been to amazon.com and noticed how they publish exerpts of many books on the book’s product page. This is an extension of that notion – Google’s intent is to make the full text of books searchable. I know this is going to sound like hyperbole, but if Google manages to succeed in convincing publishers that this is a good thing, it’s medium term effect on our civilization will be as profound as Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press. It’s all about the knowledge transmission folks, doing it in the most expeditious way possible, and this is a major step in the right direction.

Once again, my plea – make your government representatives aware that these kinds of advances are good things, that locking away content behind copyright is a bad thing – it’s impeding progress in the evolution of the information age.

Meanwhile, go read the text of the talk Brewster Kahle gave at the recent Web 2.0 conference and if that doesn’t convince you…..I give up 😉

Many folks probably remember the proliferation of free online file storage services during the dot com boom – places similar to the still running xdrive. Most of them died off as the funding evaporated, and the ones that didn’t have mostly transitioned to paid services. Some clever folks have figured out how to use your gmail account as free online file storage. This can be extremely handy if you don’t have a thumb drive or some other way to carry files you always need from machine to machine. You’ll need to install the client software to get this running. Note that it’s windows and IE (Ugh!) only.

I have a large thumb drive to deal with this problem but for those of you who don’t this is well worth a look. No doubt some enterprising mac hacker will build a mac analog to this (or already has, if so post in the comments and I’ll link over to it).

I’ve mentioned a number of times how much I love my PVR, the tivo-like device I built that sits in my stereo setup. Griffin Technology, maker of many beautiful, cool and even useful products, has another gadget for me to lust after – the radioShark, which is a USB powered AM/FM radio for your computer that comes bundled with PVR software for radio. I will definitely be adding one of these to my home theater setup so I can record Fresh Air, in tune by 10 and the BBC news hour for later listening. Cool cool stuff, for only $70 or so. I’ll be waiting on the reviews before I buy though just to make sure the radio works reasonably well. The software is less of a concern for me, there are a number of packages out already and I’m sure they’ll adjust them to work with Griffin’s device.

I mentioned last week that I would do this…erm, last week 😉 But anyway I’m getting around to it today. Snipsnap has made it incredibly easy to get a weblog/wiki hybrid running on your own machine. Simply go to their site and click on the java webstart link in the upper right hand corner, execute the file, answer some simple questions, and viola, you’ve got a wiki running on your local machine.

Mind that you’ll need the appropriate version of java for your platform installed, and you should also be mindful of your network and the implications of installing a webserver on it. If you’re at work and reading this, it’s highly likely you shouldn’t do this.

Others, have fun. Snipsnap has its quirks but is a great way to get introduced to how wikis work.

Mostly I try to be modest, and to be honest what I’m about to describe didn’t take a rocket scientiest to recognize, but I did recognize it wereas most did not so….today’s New York Times has a short piece on the use of weblogs in education and how they’re approaching the tipping point. Why am I pleased with myself? Because I was doing this 2.5 years ago at Bowdoin, well ahead of the curve in terms of technology use. This is why if you manage an academic technology program at a small liberal arts college, you should consider hiring me 😉

Kidding aside, I do love the (very) occasional opportunity to feel just a bit smug. You know when something hits the pages of the NY Times that it’s entering the public’s awareness, and being and staying ahead of that curve is a big piece of what I’m all about.