 Okay, good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event where we cover anything that may be of interest to librarians across the state of Nebraska and across the country. Actually, we are now, I guess, a national show. We have people from all over the country on with us right now today. We do these sessions live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time. So you can join us on Wednesdays if you want to. However, if you're unable to join us, that's fine. We do record everything. So we have all four years now into our fourth year of Encompass Live archives on our website. So you can go there and watch anything that you might have missed. We do all sorts of things here, presentations, interviews, sort of little mini-training sessions. We only have an hour, but we do our best. Basically, anything related to libraries, we'll put it on the show. What? And this morning, and we do have commission staff that do this, our own library commission staff that do some sessions. And we do bring guest speakers from across the state, libraries across the state, or from across the country. And today we have a kind of a mixture of that. I'm here. Staying next to me right now is Michael Sowers, who is the Technology Innovation Librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission. And he is going to help me with today's session because it is a little more techy than I am comfortable. Yeah, I'm comfortable. I don't know. I can do a lot, but sometimes something just goes, and I'm totally willing to admit that. On a scale of 1 to 10, this is probably a 7 or an 8 for what we usually do. It is, but I also would say that it's not something, and I know we're talking about it until what it is, except what's up on the screen there. It's not something to be scared of. I've seen the instructions, and it's something if you just put your mind to it. I know you screwed up. That's actually a good lesson, but you can do this yourself. Anyway, what we also have on the line with us, let's get to this now, is Jason Griffey, and I'm going to unmute you. Jason, are you there? Hey, guys. Hello. I am. Hello. He is head of library IT at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga. So he is on the line with us to tell us about his library box, which I think we'll let Jason kind of just take on over here. So we're going to send presentation control over to him. We should take just a moment in here. Jason, while it's doing that, why don't you give us a little bit about your background, where you're coming from, and then tell us what this is all about. Hi, everyone. I was going to say, hi, state of Nebraska, but that is not actually true. I guess we do have people from all over. So thank you guys for joining us this morning. And thanks to Krista and Michael for the invitation to come and speak with you about this project. So what I'm planning on doing, at least at first, is just giving an overview. And then Krista and Michael, feel free to chime in with questions or attend to each chime in with questions on the chat. This is not going to be a formal presentation because, as yet, this is not really a formal project. It's a side project that I've been working on and trying to find kind of a place for. So library box, what is library box? Well, the short answer is that library box is this little thing right here. Library box began as a project that I had an idea for because I was following an art project by a New York University art professor named David Darts. Dr. Darts did a, put together this, what I thought was an interesting, and I'll click over here, you guys, using the web as my slides. So he did what was, what was an interesting art project where he created what he called pirate box. And pirate box was this hack that he put together of a, what at the time was a pretty big router, an actual Wi-Fi router. You can see the large lunch box there with the antenna sticking out the side. It was a large wireless router with some storage and he managed to kind of hack together a system with a big battery and a big router that would be a wireless access point that you can walk around with that was a file sharing box. So the idea with pirate box was that it was built to enable people to share files from their devices to the pirate box and then the pirate box would share them to anyone else that was connected. So it enabled totally anonymous, totally mobile file sharing. Now he did this, Dr. Darts did this as an art project. So obviously it doesn't take very long for people to realize that having a totally anonymous file sharing device might be something that would quickly devolve into copyright infringement or potentially other illegal, illegal activities. So as an art project it was great, but as a tool, especially as a tool for kind of libraries and educators, I thought it was a little too dangerous, maybe? I don't know if dangerous is the right word, but certainly a little more than most educators or libraries would probably be willing to take on. So the risk there is just a little high. So I started thinking about kind of how that would get changed, what needed to change about the project in order to make it something that was beneficial for libraries and beneficial for educators. And it really came down to just a few changes on some of the interface and a little bit of tweaking to make it work with some new devices. So I had thought about this when I originally saw the Pirate Box project. And then a couple of, this Pirate Box, it's open source, all of the code is freely available. This is something that the software is all out there in the world. This is not proprietary or anything. You can get in and hack away at it, no problem. Well, then back around Christmas I guess of last year, a little earlier probably, a couple of coders, Matthias Drubel and Christian Reutten, worked together to kind of port the Pirate Box project, the large kind of Pirate Box project to these routers that would run open firmware. So there's, if you look right in the video window there, this is a wireless router. This was originally designed to be actually a 3G repeater. So the idea, TP-Link, the company that makes this, sells this so that here on the side in the little USB port, you would put a 3G router, a 3G modem, something that connects to the cellular network. And then the box translates that 3G signal into Wi-Fi, standard Wi-Fi for your laptop or your cell phones or whatever. And then you use standard Wi-Fi on your devices and it goes out through the 3G modem. Well, these coders, developers figured out that with just a little bit of work, you could actually kind of change the function of this device. And to give you some idea, so Pirate Box is something that was in a big lunch box, right? It required big batteries and lots of power and everything. So this, the open WRT version of Pirate Box, fits on a router. I've got a quarter here for scale. So that's a quarter. You can see how big this box is. It easily fits in a pocket. It's very, very tiny and it weighs practically nothing. The other kind of benefit of moving the code onto something that would run on one of these boxes is, you can see right there, it's plugged in that little USB, the mini USB, or micro USB actually, sorry, the micro USB. That micro USB is the power and it will run, this little box will run off of any USB power source. So right now I have it connected to a battery, this little battery right here. That's designed to charge iPhones and iPads, but it will run off of any USB power source, any number of things. So once the Pirate Box project was ported, once these coders moved it over to this little box, I thought, oh now this has promise. If I had to build a big lunch box full of lead acid batteries, it's a lot less interesting than building something that you could carry around in your pocket. So that was the kind of the moment where I was like, okay, I could actually make this work. This might be something that was used. So this was around the holidays of 2011, moving into 2012, the new year there. And so I started taking a look at the code. And because the code is all open, I was able to kind of dig in and figure out how the Pirate Box project worked. It's not totally straightforward, and especially the version that Library Box is based on. Again, this is months and months ago, so the Pirate Box project is an active project that's still being worked on. But the code that I was using was, I won't say difficult, but challenging. It took a little while to kind of wrap my brain around what was going on. But once I did, I was able to make it a bit more friendly for what I would consider kind of library or educational use. So I took the Pirate Box project, which was, again, a file sharing tool upload download. I eliminated the upload portion of it. So the Library Box is a read-only device. Whoever is in control of the box can put files onto it. That's actually the thumb drive that you see, the little tiny USB drive that you can see right there. That's actually the file storage. That's where all of the content of my Library Box lives. And so you can put digital files on that. You take this router and plug in some power. And it becomes a Wi-Fi hotspot that you can connect to and download any of the content from. So it is, in effect, a portable digital library. I haven't mentioned the important thing about the Box. I mean, it's small and it doesn't take much power, which are huge. Those are big advantages. But this, the router itself, costs $40 on websites. You can order it online for about $35 to $40. So it is incredibly inexpensive for the flexibility of what you can do with it. $40 is a pittance for what it does. So that's the project. I want to show you quickly, I guess, kind of how it works and what the user interface and stuff looks like. Michael, Krista, any questions? Anybody asking anything so far? We're good at this point. I think you had a new egg page up there where you could show people where they could. I did. Order one of these if you want to. New Egg is a company, it's an online electronic retailer for those of you who have not used it before. They have the cheapest price on lots of different pieces of electronics, but this one is just under $40. That's the hardware that I'm using for the project. Yeah, why don't you go ahead and show how it works from the user interface and then we can kind of go on from there. Sure. So I've got a library box and it's connected to a battery. It's on. You can maybe see the little green lights there that show you that it's on. So I want to move it out of the frame and show you how you might use this. So here's my iPhone. It's a picture of my daughter. That's the way things go. So I'm doing this upside down. Forgive me if I... No, go away boxcar. So it's currently connected to the Wi-Fi at my place of work. I'm in my office. So I'm going to take a look to see if there are other Wi-Fi spots available. And sure enough, you can see library box. I hope you can see that. Christa and Michael tell me if for some reason you can. Yeah, it's quite... If I connect... Okay, excellent. So if I connect to library box, the little router is sending out Wi-Fi signals. I can connect. At that point, I'm connected to the box. And the box acts as a captive portal. So if I try to go to any website. So I'm going to go... Can type on your iPhone upside down? I can. It's just a little harder. So, okay. So if I go to any website. I just typed in Google.com. It gives me this page. And the router is any website you go to. It doesn't matter. It's going to redirect you to this. Now the box is not connected to the internet. It's not part of a wider network. It is its own network. It's its own hotspot. So it's directly serving this web page. So you get this little web page that says library box. And then it says... I'll make it a little bigger so it's easier to see. Download content here. So if I hit the content here. It gives me a list of all of the contents of the box. It's a little small because there's a lot on here. But you can see I have lots of Lewis Carroll. Jonathan Swift. Jane Austen, et cetera. So I'm going to choose one of these. Let's say I'd like to read... Oh, Gulliver's Travels. I haven't read that in a long time. So I'm going to choose Gulliver's Travels. I'm going to... I've got... On here I have both an EPUB version and a Kindle friendly version. Just because I've decided that's what I wanted to load. I'm going to choose the EPUB because I know that I've got an EPUB reader. So... Upside down. Iphoneing. So I tell it I want to download the EPUB from LibraryBox. It says, oh hey, this is an EPUB. Do you want to open it in iBooks? Or do you want to open it in one of the other things you've got on your... You know, on my device that will read EPUBs? I'm just going to open it in iBooks. So it will... Download it and open it up. So that's Gulliver's Travels. It's now resident on my device downloaded from the LibraryBox. And I can read it wherever I want. So what I... What is on my LibraryBox is a series of copyright, right? Public domain works. So I've loaded it full of roughly the top 100 books from Project Gutenberg. So that when I walk around at conferences, I have people downloading books from me. Or when I take this out into the world, I can be a portable download spot for books for anyone who happens to have a device, like a mobile phone. It works with Android, iOS. I have not tested it with the new Windows operating system, Windows Phone 8 Service Pack 8 phone. I don't know exactly what it's called these days, but I haven't tested it with it. It works fine with computers, right? Anything with a Wi-Fi signal, more or less, because it's acting just like a web page. It's delivering the content just exactly like any other web server would. So the idea of having a digital library that people can use to download books to their mobile devices and have that library in your pocket and be able to build that library for $40 and a little bit of time seems like it could have a lot of legs to me. That seems like something that the use cases are, I think, varied and interesting. Any questions about the use or about how it works with various devices or anything? Yeah, we've gotten a couple questions coming from the audience, and I've always got my own. So Joey is asking, can any Wi-Fi router be used, or does it specifically need to be that one? Yeah, you can use any Wi-Fi router that will run the OpenWRT software. So the PyroBox project, the fork that I'm using, the kind of branch that I'm using, that really a fork, the branch that I'm using, uses OpenWRT, which is an open source firmware replacement for a variety of routers. And technically, it should work. The LibroBox customizations should work on anything that runs OpenWRT. That said, this is the least expensive option that I found. The TP-Link MR-3020 is the least expensive way to do it. There are in other, I'll show you one other piece of hardware that I've got. There is another piece of hardware that is also made by TP-Link. The 703N, I'll put it right there. It's even smaller than the MR-3020. It's a little thing right here. It theoretically runs OpenWRT, and I am working to kind of make sure that PyroBox version 2 runs on it as well, so that we have a couple of different versions. But for me telling you, it will definitely work. This is the hardware that I know it will definitely work on. Yeah, and when we get to my story, I think we'll talk about that. We'll talk about code and how you actually make this work in the first one. Yes, absolutely. I'll just clarify. What you're doing to the router is basically like, if you were to take your computer, wipe the OS and install a completely different operating system. That's what you're doing with the router. You are installing a new operating system on the router. Yes. I'll kind of anticipate where Joey was coming from, is that, well, what if I've got a spare LinkSys sitting in the back room that we haven't used in a while? Theoretically, I might be able to do it on that. It wouldn't cost anything. But it's also going to be a bigger piece of equipment. Yes, and the kind of, again, the LinkSys that you have setting, the spare LinkSys is probably going to run off of standard power, which for lots of use cases is probably fine. If you just want a library box setting somewhere that you have convenient plugs. Yeah, and that's actually a follow-up question that Joey just had too, was can it be plugged into a stationary location and be used as a self-service digital library? So I know your purpose of doing this, Jason, was similar to the pirate box, portable, small, take it wherever you want to, but this question is, well, what if I just have something that isn't that tiny little portable thing? I can just set this up permanently somewhere, and absolutely you could using the same concepts for everything, yeah. Absolutely, absolutely, yeah. No reason at all that that wouldn't work. All right, and actually, okay, good. We got a couple other questions here coming through. Rachel is asking two questions. I like these. Can you search the content on the box, and is there any way to get usage stats back out of it? Not yet. No, the current version, version one, as I'm calling it kind of cheekily, because that means that there will be a version two, right? Version one is very bare bones. It is literally a device, you know, a download this file device. One of the most often requested things that I have people ask about is some form of statistics, right? One of the benefits is that it's completely anonymous. There's no logs kept, there's no record of who connected or when they connected or anything like that, which is, I think, from a library point of view, positive. But people do want to know whether or not it's being used. So one of the things that I am planning on and working toward version two is some form of simple statistics for how many times things have been downloaded. Still want to avoid the privacy issues and recording IPs and all that. I don't want any of that to happen. But for the purposes of simple, you know, Jane Eyre was downloaded five times. That I think can be done. And that's an upgrade that I'm hoping is coming. And in version two. And searching. Searching is harder but also possible. That's actually the first time anyone's asked me about searching it. And after it, it doesn't seem like it would be that hard, although search means you have to have an index and indexes have to live somewhere. Right. You would have to see how that gets architected on something this rudimentary. And I'm sure you're willing to let anybody help you write code. Is it, I mean, Jason, have we lost you? Jason, can you hear us? Oh, yeah. Hello? Okay, I think we got it. It's cleared itself up. Oh, boy. Okay, folks, we're just going to pause for a moment here. And let's see if we can get the line to clear itself up. Okay, Jason, you want to try again real quick? Okay, we're not getting reports of people, audience having issues. So at this point, we're going to guess kind of the sound is that Jason's end, so we're going to let him pause for just a moment and maybe this will clear up. One of the questions that's outstanding that I think I can pretty much answer again from Joey is what other types of media can be stored on the library box. As I understand it, I've tried to set one of these up myself. You can pretty much put anything you want on the storage. The USB device plugged into it is basically your hard drive, your storage. And so if you want to put MP3 files on there, if you wanted to put eBooks in this case is what Jason was doing, I don't see any problem with that. And if we get Jason back cleared up on the line, he can correct me if I'm wrong with that. Someone is also asking about DRM issues. There is no DRM on this device. So there's no DRM server. There's nothing to check DRM, things like that. So you would want to put content on it that is DRM free. And again, I'll let Jason clarify if that's an issue. Jason, how are things cleared up? It sounds a little better now. Yeah, there we go. We're all clear now. So let's try that again. That was a little bit of internet static. So yeah, you were right on both counts. Anything that can be served digitally theoretically could be served by this. As long as there's no DRM to impact the ability for the person to open it. So the server is as simple a web server as it can possibly be. And my guess is there's not a whole lot of room. I've not looked into it. There's not a whole lot of room in there to kind of leverage something like Adobe and Adobe Digital Rights Management Server in there. So it is DRM free material. But I have served audio, video, music, et cetera, off of it without any issues. With just a few people connected, as a matter of fact, you can actually stream both music and movies off of it. I put Night of the Living Dead on it and had people stream Night of the Living Dead to their phones from the box. What Wi-Fi signal is this device running? It's an 802.11 in. Oh, it is in? All right. Well, you can stream pretty well off of that. Yeah, it's 802.11 in. All right. One more question outstanding here, which might get us into maybe you showing some code or the process as much as you can for getting this to work. Since the media is stored on the USB stick, how is it that it knows to get the media off the USB stick? And my simple answer is it's in the code. That's actually the simple answer. But I'm happy to talk a little bit. I think that's probably a good jumping off point for the like, how do you build one, right? So, all right. So let's, you start. So to build a library box, you start with a, you unbox your, again, for purposes of the, for my purposes, you unbox an MR3020. Unbox the little $40 TP-Link router. The first thing you have to do is actually create a pirate box. Library box is a set of customizations to pirate box. So it's kind of the three big steps, three big steps to make lex. The first is you flash the router with the NWRT firmware. So the first thing that you would do is get your router, box your router, download the open WRT. There's actually a link right on this pirate box page, which is linked right off of the main kind of library box, library box page, so if you download the open WRT firmware and flashing the firmware is, I will say, very straightforward. There's a button in the interface to the box that says upgrade firmware. You point that at the open WRT firmware that you downloaded, connect your box to the computer, throw the firmware on there. It reboots, and sorry about that. Sorry about that, guys. I forgot to unplug my phone, which I'm doing right now. It happens to the best of us. It does. So busy setting up my fancy camera. Anyway, so you flash it with open WRT. That's the first step. So the first thing you do is kind of, it's not exactly the same, but you're jailbreaking the box, right? You're creating a space where you can do other customized programming. You put open WRT on there. Open WRT is a Linux-based piece of firmware, so it kind of changes the box into a tiny little Linux box. And if you're at all familiar with the underpinnings of Linux, the rest of this will seem a little more normal. If you are not, it may sound a little Greek, but again, if you can follow steps cleanly, I think you can do this except you, Michael. Thank you, Jason. I will explain what I did once he gets through this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know, I know. So you flash with open WRT, so that sets the stage. Then you go through the process that's outlined here on the Pirate Box page to load Pirate Box onto it. And it's a, what, a dozen steps, 15 steps, something like that. There are some command line things you have to do. You can see some code in here. You actually have to get in and modify some files and save some files. Again, it's not terrifically hard. It's just technical and detail-oriented. So you go through the Pirate Box install. And when you finish with the Pirate Box install, you move over to the library box code. And there are really only two files. There's two files that are different from library. There's customization to the interface, basically. There's two files, one called droopy, which is the Python-based web server for the open WRT firmware. And then Pirate Box, which is the Pirate Box setup file. Just a, I'll actually show you Pirate Box. It's a set of settings that define, this is the Pirate Box common code. It's a set of settings that define pieces of interface of Pirate Box. So I've changed Pirate Box common. I've changed droopy.py, the Python-based. You can see, again, code, code, code, code, code. To alter the interface to what I wanted it to do for libraries. Set up Pirate Box. And then you replace two files on the box, one droopy and two Pirate Box. And you do. And you've got. So normally, I've done this a few times. It takes, you know, if you set aside a couple of hours, two hours. It's not, again, it's fiddly, but it's not terribly difficult. The one thing that can go wrong is what went wrong for Michael. And I will let Michael explain what went wrong for him. Oh, boy. Okay. So, you know, I only have blamed Jason for this. No. So I'm, for anybody on the line who's looking at this code and looking at these steps and going, oh, boy, you know, that seems like a bit much. I am not a coder. I do have a rudimentary understanding of Linux, of the command line. I do have a Linux box at home. So the commands it was telling me to issue were understandable. There's some FTP involved. There's some Telnet involved. There's some text editing involved. But you know, if you can do that sort of stuff, following the directions is not bad. You don't have to edit all of that code that Jason was showing you. That's Jason's job. I saw Jason demo this at computers and libraries in March. And I went, I'm going to go do this. So I bought one of these routers for 40 bucks. I bought a battery pack. I don't know. It was a different one than Jason's, but I think it was like 60 in my case, which I still have. And that still works great. And I'm glad I own it because it works on my phone too. So I sat down and I started going through these instructions. The installing the PyroBox instructions, I thought worked a little better if I did it on my Linux box instead of on my Windows box and or on a laptop instead of a desktop. And I'm not sure why, but that helped. But at a certain point, I had gotten PyroBox running absolutely fine. Then I went to customize it to library box and I was following Jason's instructions. And at one point, I wasn't able to do exactly what Jason said. So I kind of did the whole, you know, if it doesn't work for us. I don't remember exactly what I did, but I created my own little workaround. And darn it, I got that thing installed. And this is the one and only time I can say of all the projects like this I've tried, I did end up bricking the router. I now have a $40 box that doesn't do anything. But, you know, it can happen. I mean, we don't want to tell anybody that, you know, it can't. But I will admit, I did something that was kind of outside of the instructions. Now it turns out, Jason, correct me if I'm wrong. Library box had, or excuse me, PyroBox had created newer software that didn't work with your custom code and I installed the newer software. Therefore, that's why it didn't work. And instead of talking to Jason first and saying, what did I do wrong? I went ahead and tried to fix it myself and completely blew it up. So, you know, when we say it's 7 out of 10, it's 7 out of 10 because, yes, there's command line. It's also, you really have to follow the instructions carefully. Yeah. Yeah, if you definitely don't want to deviate much. And, yes, the version, at this point, the version that LibraryBox is built for is an older version of PyroBox because PyroBox is under active development and I just can't keep up. Version 2 of LibraryBox will be using whatever the newest version of PyroBox is at the time. So, Jason, we will leapfrog forward. But for now, yes, it is an older version. Okay. So, here's my question for you. Have you updated your instructions to point to the older version of PyroBox to make sure we're downloading the right one? Yes. Okay. As a matter of fact, as a matter of fact, I have. Yes. This is why only half-blame Jason in that he just said, go get PyroBox. So, I did. And I got the latest version. And, you know, that's what happened. All right. Good. Thank you. I linked to the version that is appropriate. So. I will be doing this again. It is possible to screw it up. So, yeah. Yeah. All right. Go ahead. No, absolutely. Absolutely. It is possible to screw it up. And I will say I have. Like, I have been going through it. Skip to step. I've not totally bricked it. I've been able to go back and recover. But you do have to focus and pay attention while you're doing the steps. Right. I have one other question that's come in. It says it looks as if the count, the code is downloadable. You don't need to retype it. You don't need to copy paste. You can just download the code files directly. Correct. Oh, yeah. Yes. Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. They're freely available on GitHub. You can download the files and do what you will with them. So. Jason, this is the one part in the picture you have up here right now that I really like about it. I was going to. I had. I think we just glitched on the sound again. I'm sorry. Oh, no. No, this is one thing that I really like about it is that the. Okay. Carved out better. Yeah. You're sounding good now. Are we sounding okay? Oh, yeah. Okay. Okay. This book to actually store it in. I think that's that's pretty cool. Yeah. What was and I don't know what book is that or what I needed. I needed a home. Yeah. What book was it? It was the March of Democracy volume one. The March of Democracy volume one by James Truslaw Adams. Just curious. Yeah. I'll say when I was still was a it was. Go ahead. I was just going to say that yeah, it was a it was a discard. It was a dupe that we were discarding here in the library and it was the right size. That was really the only driving factor. It was the right size. I was going to say is as I was attempting to put mine together and I will still do this one day. I think that this show will get me to buy another one. Try again. I had to spend a couple of hours trying to figure out the exact right book that I wanted to use to put this in. And I think I was going to go with an old copy of Future Shock. I thought that would. Oh, very nice. Yeah. Very good. Very good choice. Yeah. The packaging certainly right is it helps. It is certainly not necessary. I have just thrown the battery and the library box in my in my backpack and walked around with it. But the book, you know, putting it inside the book adds a certain je ne sais quoi. So here's kind of the big question for you, Jason. And anybody else has questions, you know, feel free. We've got time and some questions in and you kind of touched upon this. I think it kind of the end of your first part, but okay. So what's what do we do with it? What do you do? What do you do? Okay, so I'm going to I will answer this with a story. So I've logged about this a couple of times on my on my blog on Jason Murphy.net. The real kind of turning point for me and understanding that what you could do with this when I when I first built it, my thought was this is awesome for places that don't have the Internet, right? And we certainly all of us probably know in our communities somewhere where there are people that own cell phones, but don't have the Internet. This is a pretty common thing even in this country, but it's like doubly common right around the world. And I was contacted by I've been contacted by librarians that serve Native American reservations, right? Where the patrons have cell phones but no Internet. This is a mechanism of distributing digital files to them that just works and you know it's easy. I've had people talk about putting these in their in their bookmobiles, right? So as you drive around and deliver books to different places, people can also get digital books as as you do. I've had people contact me about using them in in in Africa for distribution of things way off the grid. But the one that really touched me the request of the story that really touched me was a teacher of English in a country that I am he asked me not to name, but in a in one of the countries that is significantly less free and significantly more controlling of their information than than than here in the U.S. and he was teaching English to these these lower or ability of lower income level people and in this country the the information scarcity only affects those without the economic advantage to overcome it. So if you're if you're middle class or above, you're making enough money that you can afford to buy you know VPN access or something that allows you to get the information that you need regardless of the governmental control of the of the of the internet. But you're in the lower income bracket and the people that most need to learn English most need to learn to you know to have some education. They don't have the economic ability to bypass this information wall and he you know he contacted me and said I've been using pirate box for this but people don't trust me like that pirate box doesn't seem safe and library box is exactly what I need and what other people in my position need to be able to provide these these students with you know educational materials that they simply kids of the government and that was the story that was the the the use that made me go okay I get how powerful this could be if it was done well. So that actually has driven all of the work that I've done so far on version two which is mainly there are you know I'm looking at bells and whistles to make the interface better except that the the big kind of what I want out of version two is to make the installation kind of push button so that there isn't this kind of three steps and twelve steps in step two that you have to do in order to get it working what yes please yeah I'm working on it what I'm what I'm trying to do with version two is make it so that it's a kind of a single bundle and you can you know put it on the box and then have a working library box I'm I'm I'm trying to find coders that are willing to help me with that because I I I get code and I clearly done a little bit but that level of customization is a little beyond me I need I need somebody with a developer brain to be able to help me with it I'm I'm trying to find someone now that that's willing to dig in but that the if I could provide the code that would let those educational moments happen right the the the the power of why of this project is that it isn't connected to the wider Internet and that it allows the delivery of files to people who need them even when there isn't the ability to get them off the off the wider Internet and it's anonymous so the the there's no kind of trace being left in areas where that might be a problem so that you know I'm that inspired me to keep working on the project I mean when I did it was like oh cool look neat trick and then I put the code out and I was like yay but then when I when I when I got this email from and spoke with this with this this English teacher in in this foreign country I that made me kind of look at it in a different way so I'm I'm I'm working on it trying to find some people to help me but I think it has some possibility to be a really interesting a really really interesting way of getting information to people who need it so yeah I I love when I ask a question and get an answer like that I wasn't expecting at all that's spectacular thank thank you for that that actually gives me a you know I was kind of at a yeah that's kind of cool stage and I think my you just convinced me otherwise on this and I wish I could code at that level I you know um yeah it it it totally it totally changed the way I was looking at the project I was like oh you mean this could actually like do that okay yeah you know the the the the the secondary hardware that I that I showed you the the smaller cheaper one right the smaller version of the TP link that I've got on the on the screen now this is actually from in the East Asian market it's in the in the in China Korea few other markets Taiwan in this little box costs about $12 American in in those markets which is the reason that I'm trying to you know make the code work on it what what what what did you pay for once you had it like shipping from Taiwan and stuff that's a little more than that but a little more than that but again right like you know this is $40 here in the US this is you know $12 US in in in the rest of the world and for $12 if you know if I can if I can make the code work and get you know make a $12 library that a teacher can use for all of their instructional materials that's just that's that's cool yeah that's pretty cool it's pretty cool we have one one question outstanding here which maybe you can I well just ask you because you know the version numbers at this point the question directly is if I install library box version one on to pirate box zero point five point one would I break my router or would there just be off UI to yes I don't know about breaking but it almost certainly wouldn't work because the pirate box point five point one is the version number I believe it's point two point four yeah point two point four is the last version that I've been able to confirm of pirate box the library box customizations work so you have to go back to the older one yeah so you have to yeah you have to use one of us here it's not even significantly old yeah I did two point point two point four was the current version in January February so they've iterated to point five point one or point five point two since then and the the most recent version of pirate box which is point five point one point five point two is does have a lot of neat other features and things that I think library box could actually use so the the next version is going to be based on that code base but but yeah you don't want to use the most you don't want to use point five point one you want to use point four point two for your library box playing yeah supposedly there are like recovery instructions as Jason's mentioned and I trust me went through those and I there's one last set of recovery instructions where I might be able to unbrick my router but it actually involves opening it up and soldering things and and I figured with my skill set I'm just better buying another $40 router so I would be right there with yeah Michael yeah um okay and Tyler adds just wanted to add that the WR 703 and which is the smaller blue one oh he found it for $23 ship to the US oh well okay so there you go but the code doesn't work yet well this it's one of those situations where theoretically it should I just have not been able to do it yet okay so um right now you want your mouth now it's how comfortable are you with not following the directions exactly or trying to fix yes okay exactly yes the other the other downside to using the the the blue one the 703 in is that when you when you launch it and you you have to go through the original the initial open WRT steps the interface is all in Chinese or Japanese so it's a little harder to figure out exactly what you want to be doing but you can do it if you try and Tyler here who just mentioned that is says that they do have the same hardware components and he's willing to maybe help out look into it so here's the question how can people who are interested in helping get a hold of you great there is the two two things if you go to the main library box page jason griffy dot net slash library box I've got two links one at the very top one is discussion and that will link you to a Google group that is slowly gathering members we've got maybe a dozen members now but more are more coming along where people are I'm hoping going to start sharing news and uses and hacks and whatever about library box so a Google group that you can join a little listserv then there is right next to discussion there is a link that says contact and that will get you my email which I should have clicked but oh well all right so that'll get you that'll be direct yet okay and and last question also coming in from from the audience there have you considered putting these together and selling them complete with sticker directly I I have I have considered this I I am I will say I am investigating the possibility of doing a kickstarter for them that if if I can get the code to where I think it needs to be if the that this is this is branded hardware right this is a TP link MR 3020 it's produced by company etc etc I am willing to bet that if I can get the code where I need it to be that I can find a late a white label manufacturer for the boxes that would get them to me for significantly less than $40 each if that is something I can make happen then I am thinking about that and and to clarify this is completely outside of your day job right I mean this is this has nothing to do with my day job I did all of the coding the website everything totally off this actually this webinar is the only thing I've done for this project during my day job so so yes this is this is an outside project yep but so so certainly in in your copious amounts of spare time right is this yes yes this is the copious amounts of spare time eating eating all of my brain cycles for a few months now and yeah so between the coding and the thinking about how to make this something people could buy you know if I think that if I could find a way to make these purchasable for $40 or $50 I think that I would find more than a couple of people that might want them so fine me up because I know I've already got that much of my time yeah that's I mean that's you know so so I'm looking at that but you know bringing hardware to market not exactly a trivial undertaking yes so so we'll see how quickly that may or may not happen all right well Jason I again we want to thank you for being on the show and and demoing this I think we've got you had a lot of questions come in for for average episode I think we're above that and encouraging me that I'm going to try this again in a month I have other things to ahead of the line but I think I'll definitely get there maybe by internet librarian I'll have a working excellent so thank you this isn't officially a tech talk but I do have one other story I want to share with folks and Jason I'll just start by asking you a question before we take control is are you using to factor authentication on your Google accounts you know I okay so I'm gonna I will say one more thing about library box really fast and then I'll answer that question one more thing is there are libraries actually using it like you know actual libraries actually using it and I'm going to look it up because sorry I'm I should have I should have made sure I knew exactly where this was before I before I got on but while he's doing that too I'll throw in that we don't have these links in the show notes so yeah the Lake Forest library Matt near if the late one of these that they are a lot they built a library box and are using it to distribute art in the community so their artists are contributing things digital things that they want distributed and then they are in turn putting it on library box and distributing it to the to the to the patrons at festivals and things so they've got some really cool stuff so Lake Forest library if you want to look that up and throw that in the show notes so to speak they're doing some cool stuff with it I had two factor authentication on for a very long time and eventually it just bug me to the point where I turned it off okay so I do not have two factor authentication on I did however disconnect all of my max from find my Mac yeah okay so you know what I'm talking about here so so we'll use that as our segue thank you again Jason that that was wonderful we're going to go ahead and take presentation back here for just a few more minutes thing before we go on what we're talking about is there was an article in Wired magazine the last couple of days and this is this one right down at the bottom of the list here how Apple and Amazon security flaws led to my epic hacking this is a wired author who got his accounts hacked between his Apple ID his Amazon account in the Google in all sorts of other things not because somebody guessed his his lame password but because they just were able to gather enough information online get access to through social engineering some information was able to then call Apple and get his password changed and because of that they were able to then get to his Google account and his other accounts and basically ended up wiping his hard drive wiping his Twitter account wiping his iPhone all sorts of things there's there's morals here about backing up your data there's morals here about picking good passwords I'm not trying to make everybody's super mega paranoid here but this story is actually making the people who are usually a little paranoid anyways super mega paranoid one of the things you can do and this is one of the other articles here that I have because I don't want to talk about how to pick a good password yet again but if you are a heavy Google user there is something called two-step authentication which at the most basic level once you turn it on if you log into your Google account from a computer that you've never logged into before it will ask you for an additional piece of information for example since I've set this up yesterday the first time I log into Google from a new machine let's say I'm on the road somewhere and I use a hotel computer it will send me a text message with a special code that I then have to type into Google before it lets me in the idea being is that I have my password something I know but I also have my phone which is something I have that's two factor authentication I will agree with Jason on principle it can be a pain especially if you use a lot of different computers on a regular basis but it is something I think you should should read these three articles that will post in the show notes something to seriously consider and you know kind of the days of maybe just having picked a good password assuming you have may be coming to an end so just something I want everybody to be aware of this is a story that's been breaking in the last couple of days so I just want to take this opportunity to mention it. I think that the even more important part about this is not it is there's lots of things you can do to help things be more secure in these articles mention them but an important part about this is as he says in the Wired Art of Glory Row explaining exactly how all this happened and that's what Michael mentioned and I think maybe some people do not know what this means the social engineering that just meant that this hacker guy called Amazon and called Apple and convinced them with what he said to them over the phone to over the phone give him this guy's personal login information or to change his login information and passwords that's social engineering that's there's nothing you can do about that there's no issue with Apple and Amazon also having security lack of security there they've already made changes Apple has already announced that we're now telling everyone on our phones you never give out that information over the phone it's just a done deal never again so I think even that just as important as what you can do to secure your stuff is back up everything because social engineering you can't do anything about someone being convincing and say oh I am so and so and oh my gosh my grandmother this happened to her and I need your help and can you please please please there's nothing you can do to stop that but you can protect and not lose as this man did a year's worth of pictures of his daughter growing up yeah back up everything do that that is what you you can definitely do that and that is what you can help to protect yourself from any of this that could possibly happen to you I don't want to scare crap out of you with that but that's something you can't do anything about and but you can do things to keep your stuff safe even if they do manage to get your information and wipe your computer and kill your phone and whatever you at least have everything that was on your stuff on your devices somewhere else separate not linked to all that and your stuff is still there and I just got to get your other then it's a real more it's a pain but it's not a loss convenience not a personal devastating possible and I just pulled this a book here this book up here the art of deception by Kevin Mitnick who was a who's a well well known previous hacker who used social engineer if you're interested in the concept of social engineering and what that means I would highly recommend this book so I'll just I'll just throw that out there thought of it while Kristen was talking so I think that's it for today yep okay well thank you very much for attending the show this morning thank you to Jason everyone who was here and had all your great questions this session was recorded so it will be available to you later today tomorrow to for anyone who attended you can watch it again you can share it with all your friends whatever we these shows all of us live shows are free and open to anyone to watch live shows or the recordings and hope you'll join us next week when if you want to go and cook on that our topic is renew yourself your library and your career and we will have a Michael Porter online there he is with us from Seattle Seattle who is the CEO of library renewal which is a group an organization that he's created with some other people to help research and help libraries dealing with the offering electronic content out there trying to get that more organized and grassroots type thing so library renewal is something that he's working on very very passionately about getting e-contents and libraries be able to use it but he's going to come on and talk to us about that and about use getting ahead in your career renewing yourself and getting more involved what can you do at your job to just keep getting things going and change and motivation I think there is kind of his he's a very he looks very motivated in that picture I think I he's I believe he was somewhere Hawaii or somewhere I'm not exactly oh yeah yeah yeah so Michael Porter will be this next week so you can join us for that and you can see there as well if you want to we do have a Facebook page for encompass live so you can follow us there and we announce all of our shows there any updates to things recordings and everything else down there so if you do want to you can like us on Facebook that's it for today then thank you very much and we will see you next time bye bye