Solutions and services for business and home computers

I found this post by Craig Mod linked at Daring Fireball. Very interesting and something I’m very curious about. The potential of the iPad to change our reading habits is nearly as interesting to me as how much easier it might be for some of my clients to use  than their computers.

A quick link to an Apple support page showing keyboard shortcuts – including startup.

A cardinal on the feeder last weekend seemed a good opportunity to test the 24x zoom on Amy’s camera. Here is the result:

A cardinal on our feeder.

After trying all summer to install the opensource ILS software Koha on our library’s Mac Mini, I finally succeeded in getting it installed on a Debian system I set up on a computer kindly donated by a client of mine. And even better, I was then able to import the records exported from our old library software. Pretty cool. But there are a few issues with the import and apparently I need to use a program called MarcEdit to clean up the Marc file. Trouble is, MarcEdit runs natively under Windows. To run under either Linux or Mac OS X, I need to install Mono on the Mac, or both Mono and/or Wine on Linux. Neither of these seem straightforward. I think I’ll run MarcEdit on the XP machine at the library.

And then I need to figure out what format the Patron file is in. But really – it’s getting close. Pretty neat stuff.

This is cool stuff. Largest ever hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold found in Staffordshire, UK.

VPN stopped working between two Symantec Gateway Security 360 routers. They both stopped recording any VPN stuff in the logs at the same time too. Puzzling.

Finally got a fax server working after uninstalling and then reinstalling the fax service. The problem was that the server realized a call was coming in, but would then say (in the logs) that “the incoming call cannot be answered as a fax call”. After the reinstall and reboot the server picked up calls just fine. Whew.

Struggled today to find the cause of a client’s browser choking on certain web pages that contain javascript. Not all pages with javascript fail to load but, for example, http://www.nytimes.com did. The problem occurred after upgrading to 10.5.8 and Safari 4.0.3. And, related or not, Mail gets no further than “downloading 1 of 31 new mesages”. Hmmm.

This fall I’ll again be teaching Adult Ed courses at Camden Hills Regional High School. Tim Dresser, the Director of Adult Ed, has asked which courses I’d like to teach. If you have any suggestions for courses you’d like to see me do, please email him and the link above. Let me know too and I’ll be happy to discuss it with you.