Category: ‘puters

viewer mail: gaming in libraries & deepfreeze

Posted on by jessamyn

I got this from a reader. I know when I am out of my league but I bet some readers here will have good insight and/or advice. If you can help out my librarian friend here, please leave a note in the comments.

Do you have any thoughts/comments re: on line gaming in the public library? You know, I thought we were all set with installing Deep Freeze on the machines–sure, let the anyone download anything, restart the computer and “poof” it’s all back to it’s original state.

But then the YAs started playing “Gunz” and our new Dell is flipping out –multiple windows opening, can’t even type in a web address, cannot get Deep Freeze to “thaw”.

I feel frustrated–I really don’t want to be this negative librarian posting “no gaming” signs, albeit in a positive manner.

Any experiences along this line? Whaddya think about allowing anything to be downloaded? I really am questioning Deep Free’s strength at this moment.

man using library wifi after hours gets laptop confiscated

Posted on by jessamyn

This story about a guy being busted for using public wifi is making the rounds and, like the recent scrotum story, has a lot of possible ways of interpreting events. Short story: guy gets busted for using public library wifi when library is closed, gets laptop confiscated for up to a week. Longer story is in the details.

  • Guy in question has been asked to not use wifi in residential neighborhoods and so moved himself to outside of the library. Police officer might have a grudge, or a point.
  • Library wifi is normally turned off after hours but they have been waiting for a technician to “install a timer” (hint: look for off button, works just as well)
  • The police officer took the laptop to inspect it to see what the guy was downloading but since the library director is on vacation, they’ll be keeping it until the director gets back. They claim to be putting together a warrant to search the laptop.
  • The use of the word “addicting” adds nothing to this story and seems immaterial to it except to stir things up.
  • The police officer claims there are “requirements” to use the wireless, but that is not elaborated on in the story nor is that information available on the library website.
  • No one from the library has commented on the story as of this morning, except they’re quoted to explain how the wireless works, but it’s already around the blogosphere.

So, what to make of this? Is there a law against using wireless that’s made publicly available? Is it okay to confiscate someone’s laptop for a week while you put together a warrant to search it? How much responsibility does the library have to implement technological solutions to enforce their policies (if there is in fact a policy, which is totally unclear from this story)? How much weight does the police officer’s assertion that the guy was “feeding off something that we know the city of Palmer pays for” carry legally? Is this guy really going to face criminal charges? I’m sure there is more to this story and it may make what we know of it make more sense, but for now I’m left scratching my head.

I install wireless access points for libraries and I make the various levels of access crystal clear to them (want a password? want a new password every day? want to turn it off at night? want to limit downloading? want to block certain users? want to make the network invisible?) and let them make their own choices. These are all hardware/software problems, not social problems and certainly not legal problems. They may become legal problems if we shirk responsibility for maintaining and understanding our own technology, but can we please not let it get to that? [link o’ day]

heavy meta parking lot

Posted on by jessamyn

I like books because they tend towards linearity and being one little knowledge parcel of something. However more and more when I read (latest book: Book of Lists, 90’s edition) I have a little index card that I use as a bookmark — card catalog card, actually — that I make notes on. The notes often turn into Google searches, del.icio.us links, MetaFilter posts and emails to my Mom. My books become more than themselves by being dissected and shared.

So, this has been the theme for this weekend, a weekend that had me teaching my Mom how to use Greasemonkey scripts to show more photos on her main Flickr page. I also taught her how to use Grab to do screen captures, how to take long shutter photos with her camera and why del.icio.us is considered “social.” She even discovered she had fans on del.icio.us, what fun! Three other things that sprang up, regarding the meta level of things.

  1. Flickr Machine Tags – tagging is great, but most people agree that some sort of structured taxonomy complementing a folksonomy is a stronger and more useful way to make information findable. Enter machine tags. Also known as “triple tags” they add an almost faceted layer of classification to Flickr, but still in a totally “roll your own” way. So, for example. I took a picture of my Mom. She is also a Flickr user. In the past, I could add a tag that said “Mom” or “Muffet” (her user name) but there would be no way to explicitly link her Flickr identity to the Flickr picture of her except with a clunky HTML link which makes sense to a human reader but isn’t super clear to a machine. If you check the picture I linked to, it has a new sort of tag flickr:user=muffet which you create just like a normal tag, but it has parts to it. Right now it’s the Wild West as far as what you can build into machine tags — see hoodie:color=orange there aren’t really any standards or even accepted practices, but there are a lot of people doing a lot of talking and it’s an exciting time to be into taxonomies.
  2. Ed “superpatron” Vielmetti and I have been sending del.icio.us mail this evening. This diagram should explain everything.
  3. Back to books for a second. How great would it be if, while you were reading a book, you could have a graphical representation of the places talked about? Well, one of the rocket scientists over at Google Book Search is building just that sort of tool. Their post Books:Mapped explains a little of how it works. The about page of the book on Google Books will have a map, if one is available. Here is an example from David Foster Wallace’s book The Girl With Curious Hair or perhaps more dramatically The Travels of Marco Polo.