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Reading the NYPL monthly newsletter this morning, I saw what looked like a great new service: MyLibraryDV. From the newsletter:

Download classic films, Hollywood hits, lifestyle programs, and more — for free! All you need is your NYPL library card, high-speed Internet access, and MyLibraryDV to access more than 1,000 movies and TV series, including favorites like Antiques Roadshow and America’s Test Kitchen.

Well, that, and a Windows machine, or an Intel-equipped Mac with BootCamp, Parallels, or VMWare Fusion:

Can I use a Mac with the service?

The Download Manager for MyLibraryDV is a Windows .exe file that can only be installed on computers running Windows 2000 with SP4 or Windows XP with SP2, which enables you to run Windows Media Player. You can use a Mac to operate the Download Manager and view videos if you have an Intel processor and Windows 2000 with SP4 or Windows XP with SP2 operating system installed and running. Macs without this capability will not be able to install and use the Download Manager.

So the answer here is “not really,” though of course you can make the case that a Mac running Windows does it better and more stably than a PC. (Ask me sometime about the epic struggle it was to burn 3 Word docs to a CD on a Windows laptop yesterday. Why people put up with this stuff is beyond my comprehension. Well, besides “they have to.”) But anybody with a G* is out of luck. NYPL, you’re better than this. Really.

Technorati Tags:
libraries, mac, nypl

More on the oversimplicity of “Digital Natives” etc. (The Googlization of Everything):

As Henry Jenkins writes, there is so much interesting stuff going one out there among age groups, among members of communities, and across oceans that flattening out everyone into “generations” or “natives” and “immigrants” is just false and useless.

It also has real-world implications. Once we assume that the kids out there love certain forms of interaction and hate others, we forge policies and design systems and devices that meet our presumptions. By doing so, we either pander to some marketing cliche or force an otherwise diverse group of potential users into a one-size-fits-all system that might not meet their needs.

Also see the first comment for the predictable “it is TOO” take on things, replete with the usual ageist assumptions and based mainly on hypotheticals and anecdotal evidence.

Technorati Tags: culture, digitization, geek, libraries

Colors:

Colors! is a simplistic digital application for Nintendo DS based on modern painting-

techniques developed for drawing tablets in programs like Photoshop. By taking

advantage of the pressure sensitivity of the DS touch-screen it becomes a perfect

portable digital sketch-book.

A reason I might want a DS, though apparently it requires some hacking to get this to run on a DS. I’d been idly thinking about getting one for things like Brain Age and the new “visual training” game Flash Focus. I’m not really a gamer, but Nintendo really seems to know how to get people like me to play their games.

Technorati Tags: nintendo, ds, puppy, puppy

I was one of those Mac greybeards (though I lost the Classic fetish, natch; I don’t enjoy spectacular crashes) whose formative word processing time was spent using Microsoft Word 3.1, maybe the best Mac word processor ever made. Mac Word has gone the usual MS application route of feature bloat, making the easy excruciating, and Total World Format Domination (including what appears to be the deliberate trashing of backwards compat in the newest Windows versions; is this actually true?)

So I was an early convert to Nisus Writer, which in its Classic versions offered some heady geek-level features (Perl for macros! Regexp!) but still could just straight-up open up a vein. I’ve followed them over to Express and now Pro, but there is one goddamn feature that’s keeping me from ditching the Big Bankcode Font W for good.

That is Track Changes. I desperately need Track Changes. We collaborate the living hell out of a document here at MPOW, and that means we TRACK CHANGES. To within an inch of a file’s life.

Nisus has been promising this feature, or least acknowledging the lack thereof, for a good couple years now at least, by my reading of their support forums. I’d like to see it move up on their priority list. I don’t want to have to buy YET ANOTHER Mac wp. Mellel didn’t do it for me, NeoOffice does some nice stuff but is heir to the death by a million small cuts that is OpenOffice on the Mac, and I don’t want to spend my sucker early adopter iPhone Apple Store credit for iWork (or is it iHardlyWorking?) Come on, Nisus, move it up.

Technorati Tags: mac, ms office, Nisus, office, word

Just updated the site to 2.3.1, a bugfix release. In the process, though I did backup the db, I managed to wipe out both my plugin and theme directories. So I went looking for an AdSense plugin, and found out about WP widgets. I could basically just make my own damn AdSense widget, which I did. However, when I reinstalled the simpla theme, I discovered that it isn’t widget-aware, but then also discovered that someone else had already made a widgeted version. So everything is pretty much as it was, and more easily maintained too, I’m hoping.

dot unplanned » linklog: for jbm: Today’s No. 1 Gmail support question. Why don’t I have IMAP in my account?

Oh yeah? Here’s your support question:

I don’t even want your stinky Google-fected IMAP. Ha. Oh, all right, I do.

Technorati Tags: gmail, google, imap

Technorati Tags: adsense, google

Something I’ve been waiting for a long time: package tracking as RSS feeds. Adagio Teas, who I order from frequently, are making FedEx tracking available via RSS:

Technorati Tags: cluetrain, rss, tea, vrm

My iPhone is not unlocked, but I had installed Installer.app and a couple applications, though the only ones I was using with any regularity were iFlickr and Erica Sadun’s SendPics. I installed it last night, after making sure to sync up first. Partway into the “Preparing iPhone” progress bar, the phone went dark and then popped up the yellow triangle/”Please connect to iTunes” screen, which I took as a sign that things were not going well. A few minutes later I got a -1005 (iirc) error message from iTunes. Even with a backup, I still always get that frisson of fear when something like that happens.

Fortunately, at that point I just restored. I lost some photos that I hadn’t imported - somehow I had gotten the dumb idea that photos were imported without pressing the damn import button- but otherwise I’m back to normal, if less my iToner ringtones and Installer.app.

The iTunes WiFi music store is pretty cool. You could easily drop a lot of impulse money on it. Not that I have, of course; I just bought a couple things in the interests of investigating the interface. The store gives Apple a little bit of an edge in this market again; right now, you can’t buy from Amazon MP3 on your iPhone or iPod Touch. If I were Amazon, I’d be figuring out a way to do that.

Technorati Tags: apple, installer.app, iphone

Seen this morning whilst goofing round in Google Book Search:

Technorati Tags: digital libraries, digitization, google books, libraries