Loading the microfilm viewer

I have uploaded a very bad video of me demonstrating how to use the ancient microfilm viewer at my workplace, Glenorchy LINC.

This video is showing in mirror image, and I was unable to find a way to flip it over.  This occurred during the process of cropping out the customer who popped up into the background of the video, and needed to be removed due to permissions.  Any and all suggestions for flipping the image would be appreciated.  Also, due to quality loss during the upload process, it is really difficult to see what's on the screen of the microform viewer.  Apologies for this.

The purpose of this exercise, is to get some practice at using Youtube, as well as video.  Thanks a heap to Yvonne from class for making this video for me.

Wiki Wonders

The most exciting photo of a wiki I could find...

Lurking around the web, checking out various wikis for this assignment, I came across two very distinctly different versions of what was called a "wiki".

The first thought that springs to mind for me is the old faithful "Wikipedia - the free encyclopedia", which, love it or hate it, is plain brilliant for finding information about what you need.  For a trivia buff like me, I am constantly fascinated by just how much information is actually available there.  How reliable that information is, depends entirely on the person who shares the information, but what a great way to get research or a conversation started.  This is the penultimate example of a working wiki - an open, collaborative tool for sharing information, that anyone can edit or add to.  This has had the effect of creating a resource that is many million times bigger, more relevant and broader than the tomes that those poor Encyclopedia Brittanica salesmen used to lug from door to door - some 4,505,641 articles when I was there today.  Some forward thinking and innovative libraries even have "Wikipedia Librarian" positions these days. 

3D printers becoming accessible to communities through libraries

How fabulous would it be to work in such a forward thinking library as the Townsville Public Library, who have installed a 3D printer and scanner for the public to use?

ABC North Queensland's website reported on this innovative addition to the services offered at the library. This library believes that they need to offer and make accessible the latest technology for their community.

The printers work by building up a plastic or metal substance layer by layer.  You can scan in a real object to be printed or it can be printed from your original digital files.  Once exclusively expensive, these days a printer can be purchased for well under $1000.

Evernote - endless possibilties

Comparing Evernote with Delicious is really comparing apples and oranges.

I am so glad I have discovered Evernote and have installed it on every device I own.  I can clip recipes, notes, pictures, websites...everything of interest can pop into Evernote for posterity and I can access it from anywhere with any device, synced and up to date.  Not only is there a web interface, there are apps and downloads for every device.

This is not a social bookmarking site, like Delicious, this is more like a personal electronic organizer that you can tag and search.  I spend so much time taking screen shots of recipes or interesting pages on my ipad and now I can just save to Evernote and have a completely indexed wiki for my own use, that I can share with others for collaboration purposes.

Just how "delicious" is Delicious, really?

I first found out about Delicious, the social bookmarking site, back in my Certificate III blogging course and I saved a few bookmarks as part of an exercise, and I've never been back.  It's not something I found the time or inclination to explore or learn how to use properly.

I've been back today and I have been searching some gesture based computing bookmarks and I've found a few that might be really useful for my research, but it says a lot that I automatically saved the links in my own "favourites" folder rather than remembering to add the links  to my Delicious account.

Wylio Flickr App and Creative Commons searches - a mashup made in heaven!

Wylio makes Creative Commons image searches easy

While frolicking in the Flickr App Garden, I came across a very unassuming little app that does a pretty amazing job.

How about an app that searches free photo hosting sites such as Flickr and provides you with only Creative Commons attributed images that are free to use?  I'm thinking, yippee and hooray and words to that effect.

Well, Wylio does just that. There is a subscription to pay of about $US3 a month for a download of 125 images or a pro subscription for $10 for over 1000 images.  You can play for free, but that limits you to 5 images per month and there is advertising with the free subscription.  All very reasonable I'm feeling. 

Flickr no longer loves Wordpress & Blogger

This is really a note for my fellow classmates, but I'm disappointed to note that this week, Flickr wound back it's support for both Wordpress and Blogger, removing the blog share tools that have been so handy.

From now on, we will have to embed the Flickr images, rather than using a simple tool.  I'm thinking its going to be really hard for people who are just learning how to blog to work out the embed functions.  Apparently, Wordpress and Blogger make up such a tiny amount of Flickr traffic these days, they no longer consider it to be a viable partnership.  See this link for more info.  I think this may be a signal that blogging is on the way out in the traditional form and should we be looking at what is now more popular - Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram etc.?

Anyway, I'm feeling disappointed about the change.  It was always so easy before.  I shall probably explore Photobucket or Instagram a lot more closely now, to see how their sharing capabilities compare.