 Good morning, and welcome to Encompass Live. My name is Michael Sowers. I'm dual-hosting today. Krista Burns is still on vacation for the holidays out in New York, and I'm back here in the office with our monthly tech talk. So it will just be me, and I do have one guest who's actually three doors down for me in our offices here at the commission. And welcome to this kind of dead week, as many people call it, not a lot of people at work, not a lot of people in the library, still a lot of people out on vacation, so we've got a small group of you attending this morning. I've got some things to talk about with eBooks and some other security issues that have come out, and maybe some other software and websites you might be interested in taking a look at. So we're going to kind of keep today pretty loose and have a little bit of conversation. As always, if you have any questions and you are attending live, please feel free to submit those into the questions area of the GoToWebinar software. I will be looking at those, and I will do my best to answer any and all questions that you have as we are going along today. And so what I want to start with is talking about eBooks just a little bit, share a little story with you. If you're in a library, chances are you're going to see an increase in patrons coming into the library with eBooks after the Christmas holiday. In fact, I know that will be happening in at least one town back where I grew up, Brockport, New York, because we got my 13-year-old niece a nook for Christmas, and getting that all up and running for my brother was an interesting experience. They didn't want her to be able to just buy books from Barnes & Noble, which is what the nook is connected to, so they didn't do that for her, but they did want her to be able to check books out from the local library, which does have the overdrive eBooks. And so getting that set up was a bit interesting. I spent some time doing some technical support with my brother on the phone. There was software called Adobe Digital Editions that he had to download and install. Then it turns out the account didn't work for that software, and that was because in his case, the clock on his computer was a little too off from actual time, so the software didn't want to work for him. Then once they got that running, the software didn't want to recognize that the nook was an actual device connected to his computer, so he got back on technical support with Adobe again, and it turns out he had to browse the nook as if it was a flash drive and delete a folder off of the device. Then that worked. And then maybe as an insult to injury, they finally got onto the library website. They went to check out a book and my niece's library card had expired. So they ended up in Google Books. She got some classics to read and was happy, but it was kind of a stressful hour or two just getting everything up and working. So I'm sure in his case, luckily, he either called me or he got on chat with Adobe, but in some cases the libraries are going to be calling you for help. Hey, I got this new device. I'm trying to get a book out of the library. Help me out. So who I do have on the line with me here is our own Susan Nicely at the commission. Susan, you there? Yep, I'm here. And I kind of wrote Susan into doing this the last minute this morning because she's the person who deals with overdrive here at the library commission. We are a library too. So Susan, maybe if you could just briefly kind of give us an idea of what overdrive is and how that relates to libraries here in Nebraska. Well, here in Nebraska, we do have an overdrive consortium set up. Omaha Public Library has its own overdrive account and Lincoln City Libraries has its own overdrive account. So they are independent entities as far as their overdrive sites go. But we did work with the smaller libraries in the state that were interested to set up a group. So we actually have, we're up to 63 libraries now. And I was thinking about this when you were talking about increased demand after the holidays, Michael. I just, right before I went for coffee, I had a call from one of our libraries that's not a member of our overdrive group. And she wants to join. They, I think, voted on it last night because all of a sudden after Christmas they've been overwhelmed with demand for e-books. And we actually have to get all of her paperwork into overdrive by tomorrow, I think, to sneak her in during the January setup period. But there's an example of a library who's really scrambling to meet the need right after Christmas. So we've had the overdrive audiobooks for several years now. And then we just got into the e-book business back in July. So we've started dealing with the whole question of what kind of e-book readers can people use with overdrive. And then just in December they introduced a couple of apps that allow people to download both e-books and audiobooks to some of their mobile devices. And so that's also thrown new permutations into the whole mix. Yeah, I know. My wife and I both have droid phones and droid devices. And we both successfully, it took a little work, but successfully have downloaded both e-books and e-audio books onto our phones. So yeah, I know what it can take to get that done. Focusing on, let's focus on the e-books, the text, instead of the audiobooks. And then there are apps for your iPod, iPod, iPhone, iPad, all the i-devices and the droid devices. The e-readers, the kind of e-inc or LCD devices beyond what I just mentioned. Which devices will work with overdrive and maybe more importantly, which won't? Well, the obvious one that won't is the Kindle, which of course is very popular. And I know we knew that the libraries in our overdrive group knew that lots of their patrons were probably going to be getting e-book devices over Christmas. And so overdrive did send out sort of a e-reader device cheat sheet a couple weeks before Christmas. And so we got that out to all of the libraries and they really used that to try to educate their population. That if you want to be able to use the library's e-books and check out e-books from the library, these are the devices that you should consider. And beware of the Kindle if you're planning on checking out. So hopefully, I know our libraries were really working hard to at least get that message out so that people didn't have expectations of checking out books on their Kindle. So that has been the big educational mission of the libraries the last couple weeks. Yeah, that's the one thing I've told people. In fact, when my brother talked to me a few weeks before Christmas, he's like, I know I've heard about all these devices. Which one should she get? And the moment I said, well, if you want to be able to check out library books, don't get a Kindle. And he was like, oh, okay, I won't get a Kindle. Now, I mean, I'm not anti-Kindle. I don't want anybody to think that. But that's what it basically boils down to if you want to use library books through overdrive. And I'll throw in here that's not the library's fault. That's not necessarily even overdrive's fault. The Amazon has just said we don't want to play in that venue. We don't want to play in that sandbox. Well, sure. And that's a business decision for them since they obviously want you to be able to, they want you to buy your books from Amazon. And this is my personal feeling is I ended up getting the Sony Reader because I wanted the option of, I may purchase books in the future, but I also want to be able to check out books from the library just like I do in my real life. I'm a big library user so, you know. Exactly. In our case, my niece, she ended up with a nook because that's kind of what the library was encouraging and she volunteers at the library. And we figured, you know, it'll work and there are people on staff who can help her out. So that was good. It's sometimes technical support from several states away is not as easy as it might sound. So what sort of questions, if any, Susan, I realize, you know, we've obviously seen the demand and enough that at least one library is signing up here at the last minute with the new group. And that's great to hear. What sort of other issues other than we want to participate, have you heard from libraries in, oh, I don't know, the last 72 hours? Well, I think, you know, we haven't actually gotten any tech support calls since Christmas, which surprised me. But we did, we were getting them before Christmas, particularly with the release of some of the new apps. What's becoming clear to me is that there are so many different permutations now in terms of what kind of file are you interested in, what kind of file is the book that you're interested in, what sort of device do you have, what sort of computer do you have. We did have an interesting situation. And this was a matter of all of the PRs. Now you can download eBooks directly from Overdrive to your iPhone or iPad or whatever. So that's the message that you take away. But we had someone contact us and she had checked out a WMA title. She was trying to download a WMA title onto her iPad. And it was a matter of going back and really carefully reading the information on the, you know, they've got Overdrive has a page now that links off of our Overdrive website that talks about their new iPhone apps. And going back and reading it carefully and it specifically said, you can download both ePub, eBooks, and MP3 audio books directly to your device. So what that means then is that you cannot directly download PDF eBooks or WMA audio books to your device. So that was the first clue to the problem she was having. And, you know, we looked at the actual book in our Overdrive catalog. And it did say that the WMA title would play on the iPad. But then we got into the issue of what kind of computer she had. And she had a Mac and you can't download WMAs to a Mac. So, you know, based on her particular situation and her permutation of the kind of file she was interested in and the kind of computer she had, she could not get that WMA file onto her iPad. If she'd had a PC, she could have downloaded it to her PC and then transferred it over. So, you know, there's about two or three different variables in here that, you know, affect the success. So to me it's just really a matter of, you know, each individual situation and really working through all of the different pieces. That's one example. The other example that I guess Katherine here at work bought her husband a look for Christmas. And so he was trying to download books, but there's been so much buzz about download directly to all of these devices that he was thinking, they were thinking naturally that they could download directly from Overdrive to the Nook. And that doesn't work with the reading device. You do need to download it to your computer using the Adobe Digital Editions and then transfer to the Nook. So, you know, again, there's so much buzz right now about download directly to your, you know, portable devices that sort of bleeds over and is now starting to confuse people about their eBook readers. So it's just a time when there's a lot of people getting new devices. There are new capabilities which are good, but it means that we all have to sort of slow down and really read the fine print. Yeah, I went through that exactly with the Nook at Christmas in that. Yes, it has Wi-Fi and yes, you can go to the library's website and you can check out the eBook. But when it comes to the download, I literally tried it. I tried to download it directly to the Nook and it said downloading not supported. And again, we had to set it up with my brother's computer and pull it through that way. So you could get all the way to checking it out, but you need that desktop computer or laptop to get it onto the device. You know, if you want to now download directly from Barnes & Noble and pay for it, hey, that then the Wi-Fi works great. But those library books, you need that PC in between the library's website and the device. Now, I have actually been really impressed with Overdrive tech support. Typically, they don't work with the general public. They work with the librarians. And I know many of our Overdrive librarians contact tech support directly. But some of them contact me and I contact tech support. And tech support is very good. And what I try to tell librarians, because they don't always get, you know, it's hard to get all the information you need from the patron always right up front. I always just counsel them to counsel their patrons to be patient. If they can be patient, you know, it might take a couple back and forths, but tech support is usually able to figure out what's going on. And, you know, if there is a solution, they're able to find it. So I think it's just a situation where everyone's going to be patient and we'll get them set up. Yeah, well, my brother had that with a 13-year-old Christmas night. Right. And, you know, some people tend to be more patient than others. And all I think we can do as librarians is try to counsel that and not... If we don't seem stressed out, then that'll calm down people who want things to work right away. Yeah, and he ended up doing online chat with Adobe's technical support because he was having a problem getting even that middle software installed and he said that they really helped him out well. And, you know, he then called me for a little bit of follow-up, but he said they... So Adobe's technical support, I guess, was pretty good, too. We do have a question and a comment that have come in. Stanton Public here in Nebraska has said she's interested and can she call you this afternoon to maybe get in on this? Sure can. I have to get... And again, I'm just hoping everybody's going to be in the overdrive office that needs the paperwork, but we can sure try to get it... You know, in the past they've said if you get it in before the first, they can get you into this next setup period, but we're obviously cutting it pretty close, but yeah, she can call. So, Laura, who asked... Yeah, you may want to, as soon as the show is over, call. Call Susan. Don't wait for this afternoon. It sounds like every little time can help. And someone else here on staff who was listening in says Lincoln City Libraries has developed a tutorial on how to download Overdrive to Inuk. So I'm guessing that would be probably off of Lincoln City Libraries' website. And even though they're running a separate overdrive account, the instruction should be the same. Right, it should be, yeah. The URL of the website you go to to get the material would be a little different depending on the library you're connecting to. And I did want to comment. This was nice to hear. Katherine's husband was actually at Barnes & Noble, and he asked the Barnes & Noble Nook salesperson. And I've heard them promoting the fact that the Nook works with Lincoln City Libraries Overdrive. And he knew the answer. He knew that they had to download the PC first and then transfer. So that was kind of nice. We've got the Barnes & Noble staff doing some library tech support too. Oh, that's good. Well, I guess the bottom line from the sounds of it is be patient. We'll get it to work eventually. It just might take a little time. But everybody I've heard from, including myself in my experiences with this stuff, is once you get over those hurdles, it just works. But you've got to get over the hurdles in the first place. Right. Once you figure out what's going to work for your setup, most people are thrilled with it and love it. And she's not using the eBooks, but my 77-year-old mom is totally addicted to the Lincoln City Library Overdrive audiobook. So she's got quite the system going of holds and books on her MP3 player and figuring out when to delete one so she can move another one over. Great. Yeah, that's my other comment. Everything I want is already checked out. I'm going to put it on hold. Right. Just like the print world, Michael. Yeah. Well, yeah, but they usually have multiple copies. Let's not go there. All right. Anything else you want to throw out there, Susan? I don't think so. It seems like it's been a real positive experience. And I know we had all of our Overdrive libraries were concerned about the demand, and so we just did a big purchase on Christmas Eve of eBooks, and they were available the next morning. So we may not have the most popular eBooks available to check out, but we do still have a good number. All right. We're paying attention. Send your requests. Yep. All right. Well, thank you, Susan. I really appreciate this. You literally were walking back in the office from getting coffee, and I kind of put you on the spot, but like I said, I really appreciate it. And thank you very much for your assistance with this topic. No problem, Michael. Okay, great. Okay, I'm going to go ahead and meet Susan here, and she will probably stay on. So if you've got any other questions, just go ahead and send them through. And if we can't answer them during the show, we'll definitely get you an answer back. Okay. So there is my interview for today, and what I'm going to do next is just talk about some other news, websites, issues I think you all might be either are maybe interested in or should be interested in. And I've got my list of bookmarks here, which we will definitely post with the recording, the URL to that. So let me start out with that last month. I talked a lot about some security issues, specifically Wi-Fi security. And in the past, I've talked about passwords. And guess what, folks? We're going to talk about passwords again. I won't take too long on this, but something happened just a couple of weeks ago, which may have affected some of you. It definitely affected me, and so it's worth having a short conversation again. There is a company out there called Gawker Media, and they run a lot of very popular websites and blogs, Life Hacker, Gizmodo, Consumerist, and a bunch of others, I09, which is related to science fiction, and just those four I read on a daily basis. And to leave comments and actually participate on these sites, you do need to sign up for an account and pick a password. Well, they got hacked, and all of their password files were stolen and posted online. So this kind of just suddenly freaked everybody out, and they sent emails to everybody saying, your password might have been compromised. Please change your password. Well, somebody may think, well, I don't use any of those websites, so why should I care? Well, you may have used those sites once many years ago, and that password is out there. So I want to show you two things that they released based upon this. One is this website called Did I Get Gawker? And literally somebody has taken the password file, and you put in your email address and ask, Did I Get Gawker? And in this case, the answer should come back, yes. In other words, the password I used for any of their websites did get released into the wild, and if I haven't already, which I have, I should change my password. Here's the key. If you use the password in the same place, if they have the password for the Gawker sites, they might have your password for somewhere else. I keep bringing in my niece, but I told her when she got her note that she was going to have to sign up for an account and the words out of her, and she'd have to pick a username and password. And the words out of her mouth were, oh, that's fine. I use the same username and password for everything. And I froze for a second, and unfortunately at the time it was not appropriate to sit her down and try to explain to her why that was a really bad idea. I think I'll be sending her an email or talking to her dad about this, let dad have a conversation with her. But don't use the same password everywhere, because if somebody gets it from one place, then they might be able to use it for another place. The other related website to this, which got to continue that password conversation again, is people went through and actually analyzed what passwords people were using, and here are the top 50 passwords that people were using to log into Gawker websites. And notice that over 3,000 people use the password, one, two, three, four, five, six. Almost 2,000 people use the password, password. Life hack was actually the name of the website. Consumer was the name of another website. Gizmodo was the name of another website. Are any of these your passwords? I love you, Sunshine. Almost 500 people use the same exact password, Sunshine. Not a good password, folks. Hopefully I'm not telling you anything you don't already know, but it's a reminder. Pick good passwords. Don't use the same password for everything. And if you are going to use the same password over and over again, please use a different password for your bank account. That's really, I cannot stress that enough. Okay, another big story from the last month is delicious. You'll notice I here am using delicious for my bookmarks. And two or three weeks ago, everybody had a total freakout over delicious because Yahoo had who owns delicious, as you can see right over here in the upper left, had an internal staff meeting and somebody released a PowerPoint slide from that saying, guess what, we're going to get rid of delicious. Instantly, everybody totally went nuts. They thought delicious was going to be deleted, you know, in the next 24 hours. All of the bookmarks that they possibly could have kept in delicious over the years, I have something like 45,000 or 4500 maybe. Bookmarks here in delicious, what are we going to do if delicious goes away? Well, delicious isn't exactly going to go away in the foreseeable future. The page I have link for here is basically Yahoo's official response to the news that they're going to get rid of delicious. And ultimately what they're saying is, yes, we want to get rid of it, but we're looking to sell it. We're not going to just delete everything immediately. This raises several issues. You know, we rely on these third party services to store our information. The question becomes, what happens if that service goes away? So, one of the things you can do, and I will point out and as mentioned in this article, is if you have content in delicious, you can export that content. Log into your account, go into settings, there's an export command, and you can download all of your content. There are then other articles out there, you know, what are the alternatives I've been playing with one called digodeigo.com. I'm not sure I'm completely liking it, I'm still playing around, but I did successfully export all of my content from delicious and imported into Digo, Digo, I don't know how to pronounce it. So, this is just something you want to keep in mind. If you have original content that's stored in the cloud, you might want to keep a local copy of it somewhere. Related to that, speaking of content in the cloud, I want to talk about Flickr for a moment. I upload content, photos to Flickr, photos and some videos. In fact, I've probably got, I think, 26 or 27,000 photos on Flickr. I also have all of those photos on my computer at home. I have them on a backup drive, and I have them backed up to an online backup service in the cloud, so if my house burns down, and all my computers go away, I haven't lost all of that content. Some people, though, I know, have uploaded photos to Flickr and haven't kept local copies, and so this delicious going away content, concept, made me think, well, what about all those folks who have uploaded content to Flickr and haven't kept local copies? Well, something I have found is a way that you can actually back up your content through, or from Flickr. In other words, you've got in Flickr, you want to download it back to your computer. And there's this wonderful utility called Flickr Edit. It allows you to do a lot more things other than actually just downloading content. You can batch edit, you can download parts, you can add tags, do all sorts of things that you can do in Flickr, but you do it kind of through this separate interface. And it's a Java-based program, and there's a launch button here. I've actually pre-launched this before, so if you give me just a sec here, I'm going to go run this off of my desktop. You don't have to install anything as long as you have Java installed on your computer. It does take a few seconds to load up because it is a Java application. Excuse me. And let's see here, load up. There we go. And so, for example, I can now... I've already logged into my account. I've connected this to my Flickr account, and I'm going to click on Refresh Sets here. And what this is literally going to do is it's going to go into my account and see what photo sets I have created. I think this worked before. Oh, and all sets. There we go. Okay, so I loaded up my sets, and let's see, I want to see what's in this set. So I click that and click... Show Set. Excuse me. I just literally learned how to use this software two days ago. And it shows me what's in my set there, and I can select all of them. I can back them up, so it will download them to my computer. I can right-click on any one of these, and I can edit the data that's set to it. I can set as my photo. I can comment on photos. One of the things I found really interesting with this software is it can actually go in and I can say, what are all the images that I marked as favorites in Flickr? So these are photos by other people. And I can have it pull all those down, and then I can select them and make backup copies. Okay? Really, really handy software. If you've got a lot of content in Flickr, you want to make local copies of it, you want to make backups, you might want to take a look at Flickr Edit. And shut that down. Back to my bookmarks list here. Okay, some other services. Let's kind of keep talking about the cloud here just a little bit. Another interesting service that I ran into earlier this month is called Spoon. Now, in the past, I've talked about what are called portable applications. The idea is that you can actually install a piece of software, say, on your flash drive here, take that flash drive with you, plug it into a computer, and run the software that's installed on your flash drive. Handy, very useful. I have some utilities. I did some troubleshooting for my folks on their computers, and I actually had some software installed on my flash drive. Didn't want to install it on their computer, just plugged that in, ran it, off I went. Very simple, very easy. But maybe you don't have your flash drive with you. Okay? Maybe you want to run a piece of software that isn't already installed on a particular computer. Maybe you want to run a piece of software and you aren't allowed to install that software on a particular computer. Well, Spoon gives you a lot of options for this sort of situation. Okay? I'm just amazed at this and this idea of software running from the cloud in this case. In this case, a flash drive isn't even involved. Okay? Now, there are literally hundreds of applications in here. These are just the ones that I've connected to my account already. Okay? I have here Skype, Handbrake, Chrome, okay, the browser that's in there. In fact, let me go ahead and I'm just going to go into the library here real quick and see what's available. So, let's say that you are on a computer that only has Internet Explorer installed and you really want to run Firefox. Well, what I can literally do here is, in fact, they even have old versions. Here's Firefox 2. Well, I can go to Firefox version 3.5 here and I'm going to load this up and I'm going to say, okay, do I want to add it to my apps for later or do I want to launch it now? I'm going to go ahead and launch now. Now, normally I would maybe use Chrome as an example, but I'm already running Chrome, so I want to run it multiple times here. I'm going to click that and if you look down here in the bottom right, it says Buffering. It's going to load this up in about 10 seconds, a little bit longer. It's thinking about it. And here we go. Firefox is running. It is a generic installation. It's not going to necessarily remember my bookmarks or my settings, but I've literally run Firefox from the spoon, completely portable. Any computer, run Firefox, no installations, not going to leave anything behind on the computer, it just runs. I go back to my applications. There are games. There are browsers. I have here OpenOffice is available, so let's say you use that. Skype. You want to allow patrons to use Skype in your library, but you don't want to install Skype. You don't want to have to keep it up to date. You can have it running via Spoon. You can tell them to sign up for a Spoon account, add Skype. All they've got to do is log into Spoon, run Skype, runs on the library computer, they close it up, it's gone, hasn't done anything to the machine. This, I think, takes portable apps one step further. You don't even have to bring Flash Drive with you. You can just run it off of the cloud. I'm very impressed with this. Taking this one step further, something else has happened in the last month where I'm kind of jealous. I tried to get a friend of mine online this morning who actually has one of these devices. Unfortunately, he was unavailable at the last minute. This is the CR-48. I don't know if anybody has heard of this. This is the new Chrome notebook. It is a generic black notebook, but it runs the Google Chrome operating system. You can actually apply, if you see here over on the left, to get one of these. I've applied. I haven't received one. I'm jealous of the people who have. It's a testing notebook. This is non-production yet, but it's coming, and the idea is that literally all this computer does is connects to the internet and runs the Chrome browser. That's it. Nothing else. I'm running the Chrome browser now. That's what you see here on the screen. Imagine a computer where all you've done is you turn on the computer, it boots up in about 5 to 10 seconds. You log in, you have complete access to the internet. You don't really install anything else. You just have a browser and anything you can do in the browser is what you have available to you. Think about that for a moment. It's designed to say use Google Docs to do your word processing because that's available on the internet, but you'd rather use OpenOffice. Well, use a notebook like this, connect to Spoon, and run OpenOffice instead. This is a very, very interesting device. It uses Wi-Fi. It uses 3G cell phone connections. Just connect to the internet, off you go. I'm hoping that if they sent me one, I will definitely do a session on this. They don't send me one. I know a couple of people who have actually gotten one. I'll try to get them on a future tech talk and be able to get them to talk about the experience with this device. In case you haven't heard of this yet, I just wanted to go ahead and introduce it to it. The other thing kind of related to Spoon, also related specifically to this Chrome notebook is that now there is a Chrome web app store. A lot of people have been introduced to apps through the iPhone, the iPad, the Android devices that are out there, the idea that you download a program right into the operating system. Well, what this is, is this is the web store for the Chrome operating system, but also the Chrome browser if you're already running it. And again, the idea is that these are all services that run over the Internet through the cloud. You're not actually installing anything on the computer. And if I actually open up a new tab here in my browser, you will actually see I have installed some web applications already into my version of Chrome. And some of these are really interesting. There's a Google Books app. Ceasemic is my Twitter client. Let me just show you the NPR application for a moment, because this is pretty darn slick. This is not going to the NPR website as you would normally go to the website. This is an actual specific application designed to run through Chrome. And as you can see here, we've got a very different sort of interface. You can add things to a playlist. You can play that particular item. We kind of have this scrolling horizontally. We have scrolling vertically. It's just a completely different experience from going to the regular old website. There's an open up particular one. Like I said, I can tweet it. I can email it. I can add it to Facebook. I can add it to my playlist. I can play it now. I can pull up particular stations, pull up particular programs. So I'm like, what are they talking about on all things considered? And then I can just pull that up. And I've added it to my playlist. And then I can pull up my playlist. And I can start playing my content. So this is all done using HTML, CSS, JavaScript. This is not software you install beyond the browser itself. These are actually web applications that are being used through the Chrome Web Store. So, you know, if I've mentioned before, if I haven't already convinced you to play around with Chrome, please try playing around with Chrome. It's pretty slick. And if you can't install Chrome, log into Spoon, run it through Spoon. There's also a portable version that you can run off your flash drive if you want to. Okay, I've got a few more things I want to talk about here on my list. So we might end up ending this one a little early. Let me see here. We're looking down my list. Okay, a few other odds and ends. Just kind of fun things that I found that you might want to take a look at. If you are running Windows 7, there's a login screen that you get when you first boot up the computer. If you have an account set up and it's kind of this bluey, wavy sort of background and you might be thinking to yourself, you know what, that's kind of boring. I'd like to change it. Okay, so there is a piece of software out there I've been playing with on my home computer, which one was Windows 7, called the 7 Logon Changer. What this will do is it will allow you to browse both Flickr and Picasso and your own photographs and change the logon screen image to the photo of your choosing as opposed to the photo that comes with Windows 7. It's just kind of fun. It's interesting, but the reason I kind of throw it out there is, you know, in a library situation you've got maybe a really nice photo of the library or an image that has the rules for using the computer and you want that to be the login screen on the desktops when patrons come in and use the computers. This might be a way to pull that off. So just create a photo, get it to the right size for your desktop and load up the software and change that login screen window. But let me stress, it does not work in Vista. It does only work in Windows 7, so if you aren't running Windows 7 yet, you might want to save this for a later time. Another fun piece of software I've been playing around with, it's just you know, it's both silly and interesting all at the same time. Something called Arrow Weather, this will work both on Windows Vista and Windows 7. You install it and what it will do is it will kind of change the look and feel of your desktop based upon the weather in your location. So the colder it gets, the bluer the interface to Windows gets, the hotter it gets, the colder it gets. You can do this based on weather conditions, you can do it based on temperature and you can even enable what's called a night mode. So at night everything kind of darkens a little bit on your desktop. It's purely for fun. You know, I got to have some things in there that you just kind of throw out. So you know, change your desktop based on the temperature outside. Why not? That screenshot there. We've got the time going to show you one more thing that kind of brings us back full circle with the whole tech support thing, especially if you're one of those folks who are the family tech support but can't always get to the computer that needs help. I did literally get this question from another staff member here yesterday in our office and that is we're looking for a piece of software so we can log into Dad's computer and fix it without actually going to Dad's computer. There are lots of things out there. There's Windows remote desktop. There's other services out there. There are things called virtual private networks that you can set up but ultimately what most people want is something that's free and easy to set up. And I found it and I've been using it for about six months now and I figured it's about time to share with everybody else. It's called LogMeIn.com Now there are pay for versions of this. There are different levels where you can get extra services, things like that but basically you can sign up for a free account. I'm going to go ahead and log in. Make sure I remember my password correctly here. And that worked. And it shows me the list of computers I have access to. Here's my Dad's desktop. Here's my laptop which is currently not turned on. Here's my home desktop. Here's the home theater PC in my house. Here's my wife's desktop. Here's my mother's laptop. Another laptop I have here on my desk in the office. Here is Sarah's desktop computer and Sarah's laptop computer. She's my wife's 17-year-old who's currently away at college. And you can see here that some of them are turned on. Some of them are turned off. And literally all I need to do is if they're turned on I click remote control. We'll do this to my home computer. It will connect. It will ask me for the password for that particular computer. And basically I can't do much here because I am using the free version but most importantly what I can do is connect to it. And I've actually used that Windows 7 log-on screen changer so you can see there's my log-on screen with a different background book. I go ahead and click log in because I've already given it the password that I used for this desktop and here I have the desktop for my home computer. And I can completely control this as if I was at my home computer. I can run Windows updates. I can run scanning software. I can surf the internet. I can do anything on this screen that I could do is if I was sitting right there at that computer. When I'm all done I'm just going to go ahead and lock that computer back up and then I click disconnect and it disconnects from that computer and takes me back to my list. Now, how do you get this to work? Well, the very first time you do need to actually have physical access to the computer you want to connect to. So in this case back while I was home for Christmas I went to my dad's desktop I logged into my LogMeIn account. I clicked add computer and what that's going to do is it's going to install a little piece of software to that computer. It's going to connect it to this account, list it here and then when my dad calls and says can't get the computer to work. I can't do whatever it is I need to do. I just bring this up, click remote control and I go ahead and go ahead and log into his computer and off I go. He has full control. He can prevent me from doing that if he wants to. I can initiate a chat session with him to say I've got some time to work on your computer. Save your work so I can do things. I've run system updates for him. The computer has rebooted. I've waited a couple minutes. I've come back to this screen and I can log back into his machine again. If you do any sort of remote tech support, even at the library I would say you might want to set this up for some computers and it's probably the simplest to install, the simplest to use remote access software that I have found. If they charged for it I might even pay for it. It's completely free so why not take advantage of that. That being said we are a little early but that is my list of stuff that I wanted to talk about today. Some of you are here. I haven't seen any other questions come in but if you've got one I can happily hang around. If you've got any other questions about anything you've heard about technology wise I will do my best to answer those questions. If you've got one, now is your opportunity. You've got me cornered here for a few minutes. Just go ahead and type that into the Q&A area and I will happily help you out to the best I can. While we are waiting to see if anybody has any questions or you can raise your hand too if you want to do that and ask via microphone. Happy to let you do that. Go back to my list here and see if I missed anything that I really want to talk about. Oh, yeah if you have a question go ahead and type it in. While we are waiting for that I will bring this up. This is a blog post from Steven Abram who is very interesting I've met him, I know him well great guy sometimes he's a bit provocative but he and I are in complete agreement on this one and for years now I've been taking photos of signs in libraries and posting them on Flickr and sometimes it's started some discussion but he basically has a plea for early 2007. Basically do an audit of the signage in your library. Walk up to the front door, pretend you're a patron and read every single sign you have hanging up and ask yourself what perception of the library does that give your patrons? Are the signs pleasant? Are the signs full of no's or yes's? Do they say please? Are they signs that say here's what you can do or are they signs that say here's what you can't do? Do a sign audit and if nothing else do you have too many signs? Are the signs in very small print? I've seen rules of conduct signs in libraries that are literally an 8 point type and it's a 2 foot wide by 3 foot high piece of paper. Just take a look at your signs see if you might be able to improve them for 2011. Make that one of your library's New Year's resolutions basically. Alright. Not seeing any other questions except for one from Pam. Thank you. I'm glad you enjoyed this. How can you get access to this at a later date? Because you are here and registered you will get an email that does link to the recording. We do put all the recordings of all of our sessions up. They are on our website. The simplest thing you can do really is to just type Encompass Live into Google. The very first hit that comes up will be our calendar of forthcoming events and if you see here there will be a link labeled Encompass Live Archive Sessions. Just go ahead and click on that. All of them are available. They will be available in video. We also podcast all of these in audio. We will also provide links to all of the stuff that we talked about in each session and the PowerPoint slides when appropriate although they will not be PowerPoint for this one. See no other questions. I will just also point out that we have a few upcoming events in January. We have a session on January 5th on emergency preparedness for public libraries. I think that would be of interest to anyone, even those of you not here in Nebraska on January 12th. We have a session on internships coming up and then my next tech talk will be on January 26th and the current plan is I do have an interview lined up that has not been finally confirmed so I'm not going to give you a sneak peek but we will put that in the description so watch for that in the next week or two. Once again, I want to thank everybody for attending. Thank you very much. This was really fun and have a great week and have a happy new year and hope to see you again on a future session. Thanks a lot. Bye-bye.