 Good morning everybody. This is this week's end compass live. The date is January 27th, 2010. My name is Michael Sowers and I will be your host today. Krista is out this morning. And this is the second of our two, or excuse me, the second of our monthly tech talk sessions. As you can see here, we're not in the usual room. I'm in my office, so the background is a little different. And we actually do have a webcam up and running, so you can take a look at my smiling face here. My camera is a little off to the side, so bear with me if it doesn't seem like I'm looking directly at you. A lot of you requested we had the webcam going, so we figured it out. This is a test run. See how it goes, and we'll go from there. So as I mentioned, my name is Michael Sowers. I'm the Technology Innovation Librarian here at the Commission. Many of you have met me already. And what we're trying to do is kind of a once a month, let's get a little geeky, let's talk to some people doing some innovative technology things in their libraries, and try to answer some of your questions. And I'll talk about some of the tech news that I think you ought to be aware of, some software, things like that. And continuing as I did last month, I have an interviewee on the line. I have Betty Oliver from Beaver City Public Library. Betty, are you still there? Oops, I have to unmute Betty. Hold on. Okay, Betty, are you there now? Yes, I am. Okay, great. Betty, before I tell everybody kind of why I've got you on the line, you just want to take a minute or two, just tell us a little about yourself, yourself, what library you at, what you do there? I am the Library Director for the Beaver City Public Library. I've been here 20 years, almost 21 actually. And it's just a small library, or from a small town of a population of 640. So as you can guess, I am the librarian. You're in. All right. So I'm going to hold something up here. I, back in, I believe it was maybe December, I got the Valley Talk newsletter, which is the RVLS newsletter there. And they had this wonderful little article that I just titled, something new in Beaver City. And it looks like you got some sort of new piece of technology in your library. What did you get? We got a photo kiosk. Okay. And so what does that do? Well, people are able to bring in their digital format and print pictures within minutes here in the library now. Oh, wonderful. So, okay, why'd you get one of those? Can't somebody just go to like the Walgreens of the Walmart or something and get their pictures done that way? Well, yes, they can, but not here in town. Like I said, it's a small town, 640 people. So there is no place here in town that offers this service. So we thought it would be a good service that the library could provide. Great. Was this something patrons had suggested, or did you come up with this? Where'd the idea come from? Well, quite by accident actually. The grocery store manager, the good friend of mine, and he had said that one time that he'd been to a food show and that vendors were there trying to, you know, get people that are in the grocery business to put these machines in their grocery stores. And of course, he does not have the room for one. And so he mentioned it to the library when we had received money from a former volunteer. And so we decided that that was a good way to spend the money. Great. So before I get to like patron reaction and how well it's been working for the staff, given the economy, you probably had to have expected this question, how much did it cost? It cost us $6,000. But again, like I said, we had had a volunteer here at the library for years. She worked well into her 80s, and she passed away last year at the age of 99. And she left the library $10,000. Oh, hey, you know, this is why you want to make your patrons happy, right? Exactly. Yeah, yeah. So a patron can come in, bring in their camera, their camera card, I would think. And do this, I don't know how many people on the call have actually used one of these before. But about how long does it take, you know, what's they stick their card in, what do they have to do? Well, it'll bring up all their pictures that are either on their CD or their card or, you know, whatever media they bring in. And however long it takes them to decide what they want, they can go in and they can edit the pictures, you know, make them bigger, smaller, you know, seep your tone, change the red eyes, just anything that you could do like at your Walmart photo kiosk. And how much? Okay. And how much do the pictures cost? We are charging $0.29 for a four by six, and we can also print five by sevens. And we haven't printed very many of those. So I think they're $1.49 or something like that. Okay. And does the machine take care of all the payment or do they have to come over pay you? How is that working? They come to the desk to pay me. The screen will come up with a, it'll say ask the store associate for a password. So then I go over and type in the password. But at the bottom of the screen, it'll tell me the price. So I know how much they owe, you know, we don't have to stand there and count pictures and figure all that. Okay, great. And so what's been the patron reaction? How has it been going? We got this machine November 7th, and we are open 20 hours a week, five days a week. And I can honestly say that there have been three days that I have been open that has the machine has not been used. Wow. So, so pretty popular. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yes. We, I figured that we have, we have printed off over 1400 four by sixes and about probably roughly 75 by sevens. Well, that, that was my next question. That's great. So, so does the machine keeps statistics for you basically? Or, or is this your own count? It does. Well, I've been doing it on my own count, but there is a, you can go in and do the statistics to from the machine. Okay, great. Have there, have there been any specific comments from the patrons that you can remember that would be fun to share about this? Well, of course, everybody's just happy that they don't have to go out of town to do it. And, you know, I have scrapbookers that, you know, Saturday morning, they're here ready to get started for the weekend. And I guess one of the things that I thought would be was, you know, during deer hunting season, I'd have out of state hunters come in and, oh, gotta have a picture of this buck I just got, you know, and so here it is, you know, they're just happy to have the picture to show around and so that's been neat. Great. Have there been any problems or has it been completely smooth sailing since they went? Completely smooth sailing. We have not had one problem. Yes, really. I believe you. I'm just surprised. Yeah. Well, so am I. I'm pleasantly surprised. I said this machine has just been a wonderful addition to the library. Okay. And a little bit more in the technical end, you have, I'm assuming some sort of service contract with the company. So if it's, you know, breaks or something, somebody will come right in after. Well, the machine was shipped to us on a, you know, a truck delivered here and I unboxed everything and got a little bit nervous when I, you know, looked at the setup machine, you know, for it. And so I gave my daughter a call and she came in and between the two of us, we got it up and we had it running within an hour. So, but as far as technical support, we have 800 phone number to call. We can fax them, anything that we have problems with. I mean, when I talked to this company the first time, I said I would like to have references, of course, and the company is out of Missouri. And so he gave me a couple of different places here in Nebraska that they've sold machines to. So I called both of those places and that was their, their number one thing was that the technical support was exceptional and that if they had to order a new machine that they would go through the same company. So that alone there told me that this was people that stood behind their products. Okay. And one thing I haven't asked you is what, what company is it? What, what brand are we talking about in case other people are interested? It's Mitsubishi and we ordered ours through JR's Ventures out of, let's see, O'Fallon, Missouri. Okay. Great. I mean, so you, you love the machine, obviously. You're glad you put it in. What, what, what, how are you handling, you know, you have a little bit of that budget left over, but what about long-term costs, supplies, ink, paper, how are you, how are you covering that? Well, the money that we take in off of the, the prints, it's just put into a separate fund. And so that money just goes back into buying supplies for the machine or like if we needed any upgrades or repairs of any kind, then that would just come out of that money there. Oh, okay. So it's a self-supporting. Right. Great. I do want to throw it out. If anybody in the audience has a question, if you'd like to do it via audio, just go ahead and give a hand raise and I can turn your microphone on or, you know, feel free to put something in the questions area in the GoToWebinar software. But so it took you an hour to set up, you know, only one problem so far. I'd say this is a success story. Yes, I would agree. Okay. Is there anything else you want to tell us about the experience? You know, any answers to questions I didn't ask? What, what, any other library considering something like this might want to know? Well, it's a very small footprint. It's just two by two feet and four inch or four feet high. So it's, you know, a very small area that you would need to set one of these machines up. But of course, you have to have the traffic flow available for people. So we just put ours in the corner of the library and, you know, it's out of the way of incoming. And so I guess, you know, if you're worried about space, it doesn't take up a whole lot of space. Okay. All right. Let's see. I'm just looking at the article here to take somewhat more of a technical question. Do you, can you, and if you can easily answer this, don't worry about it. What, what formats of the cards does it take? Do you know, or will it take a USB drive? Unfortunately, there's about 30 different card formats. So. Right. What it tells us that it will accept is CD, Bluetooth, picture phones, and USB thumb drives. Wow. Bluetooth and CD even. That's nice. I haven't had anybody use those. Yeah. I don't know many cameras that support Bluetooth, but maybe camera phones. I guess if somebody wanted to, you know, take a quick picture on their camera phone and then print it out. Yeah. You know, I didn't really, I'll tell everybody in the audience, I didn't really talk to Betty all that much about this in advance. And I gotta say, I'm, I'm more and more impressed every minute I hear about this machine. I don't think the service has been that good. The few times I've gone down to Walgreens across the street and gotten photos printed out. There's always something going wrong with the darn machine. So. Well, that's another thing that my customers, my customers have said that they feel more comfortable coming in here to use it because there's not a line, of course. And if there is, you know, it's people you know, but also people that would be too intimidated to go to Walmart or, you know, Walgreens, whatever and try to do it on their own. They will come in here and do it for the first time, you know, I mean, I can step in for it and they're comfortable with that. And so it's getting people more used to technical stuff. Have you found most people, is there a skew between needs help the first time versus just able to do it on their own? You know, you can tell when people are comfortable with it. They'll ask when they come in the door if it's their first time. They'll say, is this, you know, like the machines at Walmart? And I'll say yes, basically. And, you know, they'll just go ahead and start doing it. If they have problems, they know that all they need to do is ask and I can step them through anything. But for the most part, most people are familiar with how things work and can do it on their own. Okay. I do have a question from someone in our audience here. Have you, maybe because of the RVLS article or other promotions you may have done, have you gotten any other calls from other libraries say, you know, asking you about this or? No, not as far as phone calls. I have had a lady come over from Oxford, you know, down that she said, when after she'd used the machine, she said that she was going to tell her librarian about it. So I assumed that that meant maybe I'd be getting a phone call. Great. Well, are there any other questions from the audience? Benny's pretty much answered mine. While we give people a chance maybe to type in a question, give you one more chance to add anything you think people might want to know? Well, I think I've covered everything that I had kind of noted, but I just think it's a wonderful service. For a town this size, you know, it's something that wasn't available before and now it is and it brings new people into the library. Oh, you know, this is why I wanted to talk to you and share this story. I think it's wonderful. I had never heard of a library having one of these before. You know, I kind of keep my ear to the ground with what libraries are doing and I was so happy it was in Nebraska. And just the fact that you saw a need for your community and you were able to pull that off and bring this in, you know, luckily the funds were found, that's probably going to be the big hurdle for most libraries these days. And it sounds like everybody's happy with it and everybody's excited and I just want to, you know, I wish I could come in and print some photos off of your machine. If I ever come through town, I'll try to stop in and use it and contribute to the project. I mean, it's wonderful. It just, I read that article and it just brought this big smile to my face and I'm glad it's working so well for you. So are we and if you're ever in Beaver City, stop by. I will. All right. I'm not seeing any questions in the group. Betty, thank you so much for talking to me. You're welcome to stay on for the rest of the session if you've got the time. Otherwise, hopefully I will run it to you at NLA or come through town when I get a chance. Okay. Thanks for the questions. You're welcome. All right, folks. That was Betty Oliver from Beaver City Public Library here in Nebraska. And I just, I can't say enough about that project. I think it's wonderful. I'm glad they were able to find the funds. I'd love to see more libraries doing that. You know, even if, you know, you've got the Walgreens, the Walmart, the grocery store having something like that in your town, you know, why not offer that one additional service to your patrons? I think it would really be great. And, you know, maybe I don't know. One thing I maybe could have asked her is how much control over the pricing they have. But maybe, you know, if you can even reduce the pricing a little bit just to cover the supplies and, you know, give another reason to your patrons to come on into the library. All right. So it's 10.22 by my clock. I have got some stories I want to share with you. And I actually got some questions that came in. We'd like to try to encourage people to send in some questions. And I got four questions from one person that I think I can answer and see actually if she's Karen. Karen, I did get your questions yesterday and you're on the line. So I'm going to go ahead and do yours first. And Karen, I don't know if you're on a mic or not, but I'm going to go ahead and unmute your mic. If you don't have a mic, you can respond to me in questions. But Karen, are you there? Mike, I'm trying a new microphone. So can you help me? Can you hear me? I can hear you just fine. Great. All right. I'm going to bring up your questions on the screen so everybody can see them here. And I thought they were wonderful questions. I saw them yesterday and I immediately started taking notes after I printed it out and thought I could help out with this. So it sounds like you guys are looking at some upgrades at the library that the city is going to be involved, which I'm sure always adds that wonderful additional level of bureaucracy. And so the first question you had for me here was about a program to completely wipe out hard disks before the city sells off the old machines. Correct. We do have an option. We had an option a few years ago. And I have some PCs that have been set aside and haven't been wiped yet just for backup. But if an option comes up again, I do want to wipe them out first. Yes. Okay. First of all, before I suggest a piece of software to anybody in the audience or listening to the recording, this is important. I've gotten rid of some old computers lately. Generally, in my case, they're so old that I'm recycling them. So I completely yank the hard drive out. I actually have a drawer of spare hard drives. I'm not sure what I'm ever going to do with one gigabyte hard drive considering I have a 16 gigabyte flash drive now. But anyways, but if you are going to donate a computer anywhere, if you are going to even recycle it, if you're going to keep the hard drive in it, you do want to scrub those hard drives completely. You want to make sure none of your financial information is still hiding out there. Just anything you might have ever stored on that machine, because we've all been told just because you deleted it doesn't mean it's actually gone. So on the bookmarks list that we'll link to in the recordings, the URL is up there on the top of the screen right now. It's delicious.com slash traveling librarian slash tech talk plus Jan one zero. The one I've used in the past and the one that always comes highly recommended is called Derek's boot and nuke. This will completely scrub your hard drive so nobody's ever going to get anything off that drive again. Doesn't make it unusable. It just makes it empty. And part of your question was, can I put this program on a flash drive or I'll add a CD around the answer is yes. You download this software, you install it to a CD and then boot from the CD or you can install it to a USB drive. But you do have to make sure that that's a bootable USB drive. And USB drive by default generally are not bootable. So I would just go to Google and search like how to make a bootable flash drive and you'll find some instructions. It's not too difficult. And then you basically you plug in that flash drive or that CD, make sure you can boot from that device. This program comes up, you never even get to Windows. And you basically say, you know what, scrub this drive, give it some time, the bigger the drive, the longer it's going to take. And when it's done, it'll say I'm done. And you shut the machine down, try rebooting the machine just to the hard drive and it'll basically say this hard drive isn't formatted. There's nothing on it. What do you want me to do? So I would highly recommend Derek's boot and nuke. It's pretty bulletproof, pretty very easy to use. So there's your first question. Thank you. You're welcome. Your next question, which I'll bring back up here, is you're currently using Fortress 101. You're not sure you want to stay with that. And you've taken a look at clean slate and deep freeze, also win select. I am not familiar with win select. I am familiar with deep freeze and I am somewhat familiar with clean slate. Basically, it's a toss up. They're all pretty good. I do know that deep freeze only comes as a software product. And I think clean slate, but don't hold me to this, might have a hardware version, which is more of the key style. If anybody had those old gates machines, or in fact, some of you still have those gates machines, where you could physically lock it on the computer if you prefer kind of the hardware version of that. The only thing I might add to this is there is a free alternative called Windows Steady State. It's from Microsoft. We use it here in our computer lab and I've recommended it to many other libraries. Does everything these other software programs do, which is basically lock the machines so that if you boot it up, make all the changes you want, do whatever you want, shut the machine down the next time you reboot, it's back the way you set it up before. It's completely free. I've had no more difficulty or issues with it than any other software I've used. In other words, it's not perfect, but I think it works just as well and it's free. So you might want to take a look at that. And I did provide a link to it on the bookmarks. Okay, now we get a little more interesting. You're considering upgrading to Windows 7, okay, but so you've pretty much decided you're going to get a Windows 7 or still not sure? I would like to move eventually. It's the timing and then looking at all the details and finding out that things like Outlook Express, which is what we currently use, will no longer be available in any other repercussions. Okay, basically, okay, the larger issues of moving to Windows 7 and then with your fourth question, we'll get a little more detail about versions of Windows 7. But I've been running Windows 7 since about day 3. Well, actually I was running some of the beta versions. I've had pretty much zero problems. Of course, I never had problems with this either and everybody else seemed to. There is some older software that won't run on Windows 7. They are few and far between. I think my father just upgraded and he was running like PrintShop Pro version 12, and they're now on version 25. So he had to upgrade that, but it was 20 bucks and he upgraded it. So the first thing I would check is just make sure that any software that would be mission critical, the stuff you can't live without, says it'll work on Windows 7. And basically, if it works on Windows Vista, it should also work on Windows 7 without too much trouble. Without Look Express going away, you're asking me about the options between Windows Live Mail and Windows Live Hotmail. I've played with both of them. They're perfectly good programs. In fact, some people think that the new Windows Live Mail actually worked better than Outlook Express ever did. There'll be a little bit of a learning curve just because things will look a little different and work a little different, but shouldn't be too much of a trouble there. Your big difference between Windows Live Mail and Windows Live Hotmail is where the mail stored, as I see you've kind of noted on your question here. Windows Live Mail, the mail will be stored on the desktop. So you need to have access to that desktop in order to access your email. Windows Live Hotmail, it's hosted out in the cloud on the web, so you can log in from any machine, get to your email wherever you want. That, I think, really is going to be your choice. Upgrading from Outlook Express to Windows Live Mail, you might be able to kind of transfer those files over. If you go from Outlook Express to Live Hotmail, not sure you might be able to move that. You might be able to export it from one and import it to the other. I can maybe do a little more checking on that if you'd like me to, but it's really going to come down to how do you access your email, whether you want to be on a particular machine or you want to be able to get to it from anywhere. Yeah, I did see something about being able to move the Outlook Express mail to one or the other, and I think you're right. I think there was one that it was capable of doing it and one that wasn't. I can't remember the detail. My guess would be is that the Live Mail, the mail that's on your PC, would be able to convert from one to the other. However, I'm guessing in your situation you're going to be going from like computer A to computer B. You're not upgrading computer A? We will be doing a mix of that. Okay. Some we will be upgrading current PCs. Some will get new PCs. My guess would be is that on the ones you upgrade, the process will be simpler. On the ones you move, you might have to again kind of do an export from the old machine onto like a flash drive and then move it over to the newer machine and plug it in and do an import. Well, actually, we do have an exchange server. So actually our mail should all be on the server. Okay. Sorry, I should have put that in the question. Okay. Then I would probably just move to Windows Live Mail. Can you access the server from another machine? Like if you're at home, can you log in and get your email? We currently through our contract with a computer backup software program helper and stuff, they do provide a web mail alternative. Okay. Then from the sounds of it, I would say just move to the Windows Live Mail. It's just the upgrade to Outlook Express and just go from there. Have you heard anything about people who are using the Windows 7 with its, I believe something like a Windows XP shell. There's a way to still use XP programs. Okay. There is in the ultimate, okay. Boy, you see here's where I get into all the fun stuff of the different versions of Windows 7. There's like a basic version. You don't want that. There's a home version, which I actually run myself and that works just fine for 99% of all people. There's that a professional version and an ultimate version. In most cases, the professional version and the ultimate version besides costing more will add features that most public libraries don't need. One thing they will also add, which is what you're talking about, which is called XP mode, which I think comes with ultimate and can be added to professional if I've got this correct. It is really only something you need if you have a very old piece of software that would only run in XP, would not run in Vista, and therefore will not run in Windows 7. There is no upgrade to that software and you've got to run that old piece of software. There are very few cases for that. I would argue if that's like your OPAC, okay, then maybe this is something you want to consider. If it's a game for kids or something like that, I would honestly say, save the money, buy a new game. That's kind of where I would go with there. Dovetailing into your fourth and last question, 64-bit Windows versus 32-bit Windows. Oh boy. There's a simple answer. There's a hard answer. The simple answer is, honestly, I would go with 64-bit version of Windows at this point. The main benefit to 64-bit Windows versus 32-bit Windows without getting into all the technology issues is you can put more RAM in a 64-bit Windows machine. 32-bit maxes out at 4 gigabytes of RAM, 64-bit, I think you can put something like up to 32 gigabytes of RAM in a machine, which is insane, but it can technically be done. This, again, however, is you need to check your mission critical software to make sure that you're not running something that you absolutely have to run that won't run in 64-bit. I can name one piece of software that a lot of libraries use, and that is the OCLC connection client. I know this because my wife does cataloging from home, and we got her a new 64-bit machine, and that software won't install. What we ended up doing was we used the web client instead of the desktop client in that situation, but 64-bit is pretty much the standard these days. You get a Best Buy or something, you're going to get a 64-bit computer. The only other consideration is on your upgrade machines. If you have a 32-bit hardware, you cannot upgrade to 64-bit Windows. You have to have hardware that supports 64-bit, so that's one thing you'd want to check. Chances are if you're upgrading, especially if you're upgrading from something like an XP, you probably can't upgrade to 64-bit, but if you buy a new machine, I recommend at this point, unless you really have a reason you can't, I recommend everybody going to 64-bit at this point. Does that help? That does. Can the network support both 64-bit and 32-bit PCs on the same network? Oh yeah, yeah, not a problem. It's purely an issue of hardware and how much, it's called address spaces, it's how much RAM can be used. The networking will be completely transparent. In fact, to be honest, if you sat somebody down in front of a 32-bit machine, a 64-bit machine, they probably wouldn't even notice. The Windows looks the same. It's all under the hood stuff. Okay, thanks. Did I answer your questions? That was great. Thanks. Okay, great. You're welcome. Okay, I'm going to put you back on mute there. Did anybody else in the audience have any questions based on those questions and my answers? If you want to drop something in the questions list or give a hand raise if you have a mic. Okay, I'm not seeing any there. I'm going to go ahead and close those up. Let's say that. Okay, the other thing I got was from Claudette at Adams Middle School Library. She's not on the call, but I found this very interesting. She basically sent me an email saying, I saw this new bit of technology. What do you think of it? So I took a look and I've got to say I'm intrigued. This is the Epson Brightlink 450Wi and I will kind of get us past this video here. I'll be fine some pictures. This is a data projector and it does a couple of things that I think are really different. First of all, the projector itself is the smart board. I don't know if any of you have ever used these projectors where you project onto a special board that you've mounted on the wall and then you can touch the board and that acts like your mouse and you can bring up an onscreen keyboard and that way, the instructor at the front of the room can actually be at the front of the room touching the screen without having to kind of step off to the side and access a separate computer. Got to be honest, I've never really been a fan of those. I don't know why maybe because I'm not in a classroom all day. Maybe also because they were never really that big. I would like a huge projection and have me stand off to the side then have a little dinky projection and me standing right next to it. Well, the first thing this does is that you don't require the board anymore. You can only or you just project onto the wall and it allows you to touch what you're projecting onto the wall and that will work like a smart board, which I'm just totally impressed with. Second of all, you can get projections up to 60 inches on the diagonals. So you're no longer projecting onto a small screen you've mounted onto the wall. You can project a 60 inch projection right onto the wall and if you look at these images here notice that it has what's called a short throw and this is something I've just learned about in the last couple of days where in order to get a 60 inch projection usually you had to put the projector like in the back of the room you can hang this thing directly above where you're projecting. So it project practically projects straight down onto the wall at just a slight angle so it's only hanging about two feet away from the wall where it's projecting. Again, I was just blown by this as I'm reading through it so basically I got a wall in the front of the room I can mount the projector right in front of the room have it project practically straight down and then interact with that projection right on the wall. I don't know how much this costs. It's one of those contact a reseller if you're interested in purchasing one of these but it's probably not going to be that cheap but I want to play with one. I know we don't have the budget here at the commission to get one of these but it just sounds really interesting and I thought especially those of you who might be at school libraries might be interested in checking this out and I do have like I said a link in my links list. Excuse me for just a moment here. So one problem with being on camera you know you're going to suddenly pay attention to every single move you make. All right any questions on that one? All right let me go through a couple of other stories that I have. Here we have about 15 minutes left and I'm going to go ahead and scroll on down. One of these is a service I don't think I mentioned last month. I want to make sure I mentioned to everybody now and if I did mention it last month I want to mention it again because the offer on this is only good a couple more days. Backupify is a service that backs up content that you're already putting online. So for example I have photos on Flickr, Google Docs, my Gmail, my delicious bookmarks, all my tweets. Now in the case of my Flickr photos I also have them in my hard drive and I burn them to DVD and I back them up somewhere else. My Google Docs I probably have that too but like my tweets, my Facebook stuff, my Gmail I don't necessarily have a backup and what if Twitter blew up tomorrow? What if Facebook blew up tomorrow? What if Facebook decided that they didn't like you anymore and cancel your account? Where did all that stuff go? Well if you sign up with Backupify which I've done I've been using for about a month now they will actually back up that content to another online service called Amazon Web Services and so if you ever lose say all of your Facebook content you can get it all back. You have a backup copy of it and this is going to start costing money come February 1st but if you sign up before the end of January you can actually use the service completely for free. So I'm kind of on a backup kick. My father as I mentioned just bought a new computer that's because his old computer just decided to die. Luckily he backed everything up so he went on to an external hard drive so he was able to pull it all back in to his new computer but you know how many of you are backing up your software and your data and your documents and your photos? By the way did I mention you should be backing up all of your content. Okay a few other services some fun stuff just want to throw this in here. Waldo has been found. Does anybody know that? We all know who Waldo is right? Okay well due to the wonderful street view of Google Maps or Google Street View Waldo has been found at 76 Putney High Street in Wadsworth London and there he is see you never know what Google will find for you next. Sorry just had to throw that one in there I thought it was kind of fun. Ah go back to my links list. Firefox browsers for any of you who are Firefox users I don't know if you've noticed but the new version of Firefox version 3.6 came out just end of last week. It's a good browser I like it I use it here at the office. My other computers I'm kind of using Google Chrome which at the moment is kind of still for the super geeky people but if you are somebody who is not using Internet Explorer anymore which is something I will always recommend is not use Internet Explorer. You might want to make sure that using the latest version of Firefox if you've been using it chances are you have already automatically been upgraded. If you're not sure you can just go ahead and click on help and then check for updates as I'm showing you there on this screen and that will check to make sure that you are at the latest version of Firefox. With that what I might also want to point out is that the portable version of Firefox has also been updated to version 3.6. I don't know how many of you have ever played with portable applications but this is software you can download and install on your flash drive and then take it with you. So what I can do is basically go to any computer whether I'm at a public library at home at work I can pop in my flash drive and should I need to let's say they don't have Firefox they only have Internet Explorer and I don't really trust that I can go ahead and run Firefox completely off my flash drive and leave no traces whatsoever behind on the computer that I'm accessing and I don't need traces as in like I'm trying to hide something but it won't actually install anything on that computer it won't actually change anything on that computer's hard drive but I can run my browser have my bookmarks take it with me wherever I want and there's lots of other software available like that not just Firefox if you go to portableapps.com you can find all sorts of software that you can take with you on your flash drive and I'm gonna talk about two more things real quick here one is a new piece of hardware that I'm totally excited about so I just kind of want to share that the other one is something with Google Reader this I love I am amazed by this this I discovered this I think two days ago three days ago January 25th I use Google Reader to follow RSS feeds but not every website I want to pay attention to has an RSS feed so how do I know if that website has been updated or not for a real life example I have a Sony Reader and Sony has a webpage for my unit where they post updates every once in a while you know not regularly but you know maybe every couple of months every couple of weeks and what I'd have to do is I'd have to use some third-party add-on to Firefox that would check once a day to see if that webpage has been updated and then notify me and then I have to go into that webpage to see what the new material was and it worked but it was very klugey well now what you can do if your Google Reader user is you can subscribe to any webpage so all I need to do is I went to the Sony Reader website I found the URL for the updates for my device I copied that URL went back to Google Reader said subscribe to this page and Google said hey you know what there's no RSS feed on this page however would you like us to keep track of it anyway and I said yes please and so now whenever that page is updated Google will notify me in my Google Reader at just as if it had an RSS feed to it and I think that's totally amazing it's wonderful again it's now I can just pull everything into that one location and keep track of all the websites that I need to keep track of so if your Google Reader user check that out um last but not least this is just a device I'm totally excited about it's called the boxy box and tell you a little bit about my home life I don't actually watch much real TV anymore um one or two things a week I pretty much get 98% of my television off the internet Hulu Netflix iTunes all these sorts of resources and generally what's involved however is uh hooking up a computer to my television which is not necessarily difficult if you have a current television but you know who yeah just what you want one more computer in your house so um you know some of us don't want four or five in their house like I have well there are several different devices out there this is the one I'm looking forward to it's going to be out later this spring uh it's called the boxy box that's what it looks like yes it's a little weird looking but you plug this into your TV it supports Wi-Fi or you can plug it directly into your network and then you turn this thing on you turn your TV to that input and it is a complete interface to online video you can get your Hulu you can get your television through YouTube you can subscribe to video and audio podcast feeds you can listen to music through this thing pretty much plays just about everything so kind of looks like this comes with a little remote which also has a keyboard on it it and this thing is going to cost less than 200 dollars I'm looking forward to this um it might actually replace the computer I have connected to my television worst case it's going connecting to the uh TV in the bedroom because that one's not on the network yet so it's just something out there I don't know if any of you you know actually want to go buy one of these things but just to kind of show you the technology that's coming for getting internet based video onto your television this little box is going to cost less than 200 dollars to pretty much anything you could ever want it to do oh and it works with Netflix too so I could pull in my movies television shows whatever straight from Netflix I'm just totally excited about this and maybe a little too excited but I've already got the 200 dollars set aside I want one of these so that's pretty much um my list we had that wonderful uh interview with Betty Betty I want to thank you again for that I see you're still on the call um answered a couple people's questions so just some new hardware some people pointed me to uh talked about a few uh stories and pieces of software I think you need to be paying attention to um we've got about five more minutes uh in our hour are there any questions out there that either were raised because of something I said or not because of something I said and it looks like we've got one floating around in here um um oh yeah okay this is a loaded question how can I learn more about technology in a timely way maybe something guiding me along the way it seems like I never find the time do you have favorite sites you watch okay um wow well okay here's the loaded part of the question um basically if any of you are or uh have in the past are currently but have kind of forgotten about it or hadn't heard about it we do have the Nebraska learns 2.0 project basically we have one service or site uh a month that we go through um we give you a little reading to do sometimes it's a video to watch we actually write a blog post about it you can get CE credit each month for this um just uh you know search Nebraska learns 2.0 and Google that'll come right up because the URL is completely uh blanking on me for a moment um other sites I favorite ones um I follow hundreds of feeds I follow lots of people on Twitter I I just I keep my eyes and ears open constantly so this stuff just kind of comes to me in some cases um but I'll mention two only because I'm thinking about them because I actually linked to them in this uh week this month's session um one is life hacker um this is not just technology although it's a lot of technology for example you can see up here uh use a pressure cooker for fast healthy meals I this is this is so you could argue a pressure cooker is technology um but it also talks about you know google docs you can now upload anything to it so sometimes it's you know totally geeky stuff other times it's just how to get more out of your life how to do things more efficiently I think it's a wonderful site and you'll get a lot of different tips and tricks um for doing these things um the other one which um I don't remember which link I had it to yes um read write web which had this google reader this is more kind of that social web um twitter rss facebook uh web 2.0 the social web that's the kind of the stuff that they pay attention to and I also read this site pretty much daily uh so those were probably off the top of my head my two total favorites uh at the moment so um any other questions or comments uh again if you have a microphone just feel free to to click the little hand raise icon there and bring that up um or feel free to put a question in the questions area I hope I'm still sounding okay I'm a little bit congested and congested excuse me and uh the talking is making it a little bit worse but um uh you know I think I've I've survived the hour and I'm glad the rest of you have too okay I'm not seeing any uh additional questions floating around uh through go to webinar and I'm not seeing any hands raised so I'm going to go ahead and thank you all for attending and give one last thanks to Betty I really appreciate you calling in and let me talk to you about uh your wonderful new service at your library and uh Christa I believe we'll be back next week uh with the next edition of Encompass Live and I will be back next month with another tech talk thanks a lot bye bye