Tag Archives: software

News: Education & Technology, Librarianship

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Education & Technology

Librarianship

Are Digital Libraries A ‘Winner-Takes-All’ Market? OverDrive Hopes So | Forbes
“Schools and libraries in all forms are transitioning their spends from providing physical items that are being stored on shelves and branches to digital items — the fastest portion of their growth,” said Steve Potash  in a recent interview. Potash is President and CEO of OverDrive, the Cleveland-based provider of technology for managing and distributing digital content for lending libraries.

Gross: Fifty Shades of Grey goes viral – literally | theguardian
Library copies of the bestselling sadomasochistic romance were found to carry traces of herpes and cocaine.

Have Your Mac Read A Book To You In Mavericks And iBooks [OS X Tips] | Cult of Mac

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Have Your Mac Read A Book To You In Mavericks And iBooks [OS X Tips] | Cult of Mac

For those of you who might want to listen to a book via iBooks, one option is to load an iBook on your iPhone or iPad and turn on VoiceOver.

That can change the way your iOS device works, though, so it can be tricky to the uninitiated.

Now that iBooks is on Mavericks, however, you have another option: get your Mac to read your iBook to you.

If you’ve upgraded to Mavericks (and you should, it’s free and optimized for older machines), you have a copy of iBooks on your Mac. Launch it with a double click to the iBooks icon in the Dock or the Applications folder, and then double click one of your iBooks to open it.

Click your mouse in front of where you’d like your MAc to start reading to you, and then head up to the Edit menu. Select the Speech option in the menu, and then choose “Start Speaking.” Your Mac will read to you in the voice that’s chosen in the System Preferences Dictation & Speech preference pane.

Your Mac will keep reading the book until you choose Stop Speaking in the same Edit > Speech menu, though it won’t turn pages when it gets to a new page. If you want to follow along while it reads (a great option for folks with print or other reading disabilities), you’ll need to click the arrow keys or swipe along your trackpad as you go.

If you just want to have your Mac read a selection of text to you, simply click and drag to highlight that section, and then choose Start Speaking from the Edit menu, or right-click and choose Start Speaking from the More option in the contextual menu.

via Have Your Mac Read A Book To You In Mavericks And iBooks [OS X Tips] | Cult of Mac.

The 5 Best Free Word Processors | Mashable

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We’ve all used Microsoft Word, the most ubiquitous word processor on the market, at one point in our lives. It still proves to be a staple, especially in education, but there are plenty of competitors vying for our word processing loyalty.

If you aren’t a fan of Word, aren’t interested in purchasing a full office suite, or you really just need a new, free word processor, check out the best of the best below.

Includes overviews of:

  1. Google Docs
  2. Textilus – Microsoft Word Edition
  3. TextEdit
  4. Kingsoft Office Writer
  5. Pages

Read: The 5 Best Free Word Processors | Mashable.

If you have OS X my recommendation would be the open source word processor Bean over TextEdit. 

Facebook Is Testing Software That Tracks Your Cursor’s Every Move | Gizmodo

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Facebook’s analytics chief Ken Rudin recently opened up to The Journal about how the social network plans to track user behavior. Long story short, Facebook plans to track it very closely. At the moment, the company is testing software that would record everything from when a user’s Newsfeed is visible on the screen to how long a user hovers over a certain part of the page.

That’s right. Facebook wants to know exactly where you’re moving your mouse. At all times.

Read: Facebook Is Testing Software That Tracks Your Cursor’s Every Move | Gizmodo.

The Internet Archive Opens Its Historical Software Collection To All | Gizmodo, Internet Archive

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Gamers of a certain age will no doubt scream Oh wow, I remember that! as they click through the Internet Archive’s latest project.

The non-profit organization recently launched the Historical Software Collection, with the mission of making old programs accessible (including plenty of games!) that were originally released for platforms like Atari 2600, Apple II, and Commodore 64.

Software itself isn’t new to the Archive, but it’s spent the past couple of years making these programs playable in-browser. So whether it’s E.T. on Atari 2600 from 1982 or VisiCalc on the Apple II from 1979, there’s no need to download a heap of emulators to try them out.

Archiving video games can present special challenges, as David Gibson at the Library of Congress has explained so well. But the independent Internet Archive claims to have the largest software archive in the world, and it should be interesting to see how the next few years work out for them.

Perhaps one of the greatest challenges they’ll face is copyright. Technically, all of these programs are still covered under copyright law. And I have no doubt that the myriad companies responsible for managing the rights to something like E.T. are figuring out if they should intervene. Hopefully, no one will try to pull these programs. But if they do, it will be just one more example of how desperately broken our current copyright system is. [Internet Archive]

The Internet Archive Opens Its Historical Software Collection To All | Gizmodo

Apple releases OS X Mavericks for free | CNET News

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Mac users can have Apple’s latest Mac operating system, OS X Mavericks, for free, the company announced Tuesday at an event in San Francisco.

“Today we’re going to revolutionize pricing,” Craig Federighi, Apple’s chief of iOS and OS X, said. The software is available today.

Apple introduced the system in June at its developers’ conference. The company touted its extended battery life, tabs, and tags, while demonstrating new features in Safari, Maps, and iBooks.

Federighi reiterated the new features at Tuesday’s event. A 13-inch MacBook Air with Mavericks gets up to an hour more of Web browsing and up to 1.5 hours more iTunes movie playback, he said.

He also explained how the system adjusts its memory based on the task. This allows for optimal quality when you’re running a graphics-heavy program — and speed when you’re not. He also highlighted the iBook app, in which photos and videos can pop out of a textbook, and an iCloud keychain, which syncs payment information for online purchases.

CNET’s Jason Parker said in June that the OS is faster and easier to use, and apps have a cleaner look.

via Apple releases OS X Mavericks for free | CNET News.

Five Best Personal Project Management Tools | LifeHacker

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When your to-do list becomes a monster, and an item next to a checkbox will actually take a long time and multiple people to complete, you need more than a checklist to keep track of it. What you really have is a project, and you need a tool designed to manage them. This week, we’re going to look at five of the best personal project management tools, based on your nominations.

Tools reviewed:

  • Asana
  • Trello
  • Microsoft OneNote
  • Evernote
  • Azendoo

via Five Best Personal Project Management Tools | LifeHacker.

News: SCSL Social Media Library Launched, 10 Libraries Receive Grant, New Software Code Library, Favorite Gothic Romance Novels

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South Carolina State Library Launches Social Media Library and Archive | The Digital Shift
The South Carolina State Library (SCSL) has launched the South Carolina State Agency Social Media Library, a new project that will archive all tweets, Facebook posts, and YouTube content generated by the official accounts of South Carolina’s state agencies while simplifying public access to this social media activity via a single online portal at scsocialmedialibrary.org. The portal and the archive were developed in collaboration with ArchiveSocial, a for-profit social media archiving company based in Durham, NC. It follows a similar effort launched by the State Archives of North Carolina less than a year ago.

Ten ‘enterprising libraries’ receive grant | The Bookseller
Ten library services around the country will receive a share of £450,000 designed to help promote business and entrepreneurship. The scheme has been established by Arts Council England (ACE), the British Library and the Department for Communities and Local Government.

Ex-Amazon Engineer Builds Library for World’s Software Code | WIRED
Kumar created a service called Runnable, a means of finding and using all the software “building blocks” that are freely available across the web.

My Favorite Gothic Romance Novels | HuffPost Books
Reviews 7 gothic novels.

Though lighter on the romance, I would add The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield, The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova and Sepulchre by Kate Mosse to the list. Did you know Louise May Alcott wrote gothic short stories? She did! Take a look at A Whisper in the Dark by the author. A collection of gothic novellas no longer under copyright.

Adobe Gets Hacked, Product Source Code And Data For 2.9M Customers Likely Accessed | TechCrunch

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Now this is interesting and worrying. Source code being accessed is a very big deal, especially the company being Adobe. Subversive response to the move to subscription-based cloud services perhaps?? Hijacking code to exploit vulnerabilities…insert viruses…gain access to even more data. Very worrisome.

Article in Full from TechCrunch

“Uh oh — Adobe has just disclosed that one of their servers has been hacked.

While their investigations are still ongoing, Adobe has shared a few details on what they believe could have been accessed and obtained in the hack — and it’s a big one.

From what Adobe has shared so far, it sounds like the hackers had access to encrypted data for as many as 2.9 million customers. While Adobe stresses that the data is encrypted and that they “do not believe the attackers removed decrypted credit or debit card numbers”, that data — encrypted or not — is definitely not something they want out in the wild.

Adobe has yet to disclose how that data was encrypted, so it’s currently unclear just how secure it is.

Meanwhile, it also appears that the hackers may have been able to access the source code for at least three of Adobe’s products: Acrobat, ColdFusion, and ColdFusion Builder. This goes hand in hand with a report from Brian Krebs this morning, who noted that he and a fellow researcher had discovered at least 40GB of Adobe source code available on a hacking group’s private server.

Beyond the obvious business implications of having your otherwise locked down source code floating around in the wild, there are potentially massive security concerns here. Once you’ve got the source code for an application in hand, it becomes much easier to dig up the stealthy lil’ security screw ups that might otherwise go unnoticed. Combine this new potential for big zero-day exploits with the many, many millions of Adobe Acrobat (Adobe’s official PDF reader) installs around the world, and this all starts to get pretty worrisome.”

via Adobe Gets Hacked, Product Source Code And Data For 2.9M Customers Likely Accessed | TechCrunch.

Open Source Solve[d] J.K. Rowling Mystery | The Official Rackspace Blog

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The software…used—the Java Authorship Attribution Program—is open source and freely available on GitHub for download. The academics studied the machine-readable text of Cuckoo’s and compared it to Rowling’s previous novel. In the course of doing so, they discovered a number of linguistic signatures that pointed to the author of Harry Potter. The software is predicated on the analysis of syntax, style and punctuation, but just as importantly on the distinctive use of prepositions and articles. It turns out writers can change sentence length and rhythm and can cater to a new audience, but they’re unlikely to change how they use “around” and “at” and “on.”

Read the full story: Open Source Solve[d] J.K. Rowling Mystery – The Official Rackspace Blog.