Cyberpunk Librarian

Hyperlinked History is back with a new episode in the continuing online documentary series!

Join Daniel Messer, The Faceless Historian, and go on a journey from the depths of space right into your own computer. Along the way you’ll play a game, read a mystery, and get a little bit mystical. It’s a circus of history and you’re invited!

Check out the latest episode.

Update: I just confirmed that the video issue on iPods is fixed, so you can now sync the video to your iPod, iPod Touch, Nano, or whatever else works through iTunes. If you’d like to go that route, feel free!

Twilight, though an international bestseller, isn’t faring so well in Strathfield, NSW. School administrators and librarians at the Santa Sabina College say the book is too racy for school children to read and have even gone so far to hold seminars on paranormal romance. Librarians have removed the book from the shelves of the school library.

The head librarian, Helen Schutz, says “We wanted to make sure they realise it’s fictitious and ensure they don’t have a wrong grasp on reality.”

More from The Daily Telegraph.

Hyperlinked History is back and in living colour! (Most video is nowadays.)

The first episode of Hyperlinked History is available online and on iTunes for your viewing pleasure! This time, join the Faceless Historian as he takes you on a tour of history from an Indian mathematician to modern aircraft. You’ll meet slightly insane geniuses and get a little electrified as you lift off with Soaring Numbers.

Note: I’m told that iTunes is having issues syncing the show to iPods. I’ll see if I can figure out what’s going on. However, the show plays just fine within iTunes, so you can still watch it that way!

Science fiction author Spider Robinson is well known for his Stardance series about the art of dancing in low gravity. Spider’s wife, Jeanne, is a dancer and they evolved the concept together.

Sadly, Jeanne Robinson has an aggressive form cancer. She will need chemo soon and, contrary to popular belief, Spider’s career as a science fiction author doesn’t lend itself to glamour and fame. Financially, they’re running on fumes and could use some help.

Boing Boing has more details as does Spider’s blog. If you can help, I know a bunch of sci-fi fans who’ll be very grateful along with the Robinson’s themselves.

Sadly, I think we know that Hollywood is going to do something like this eventually. Still, when you see it in a comic form, it makes the idea funny.

Next up, Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, starring Vin Diesel.

Perhaps this should be posted within our libraries? Maybe even make some bookplates?

We’ve all seen stories about people, um, getting lucky at the library. Many of us have tales to tell about such a thing.

It’s nice to see someone else found a different kind of luck when they checked out a library book.

CDs, tapes, external drives, off site back up through Amazon S3; all of these are viable options for backing up precious data.

But what about paper?

Crazy? Well, not really. A programme called PaperBack will take files and render them as code on standard paper. Simply print and file. To recover files, scan the paper. Still, what’s the advantage?

Well, one big one is that technology comes and goes. We had ZIP drives, tape drives, and all kinds of stuff before now that aren’t used anymore. Meanwhile TWAIN, the standard protocol for scanners, has been around for almost two decades and isn’t likely to go anywhere soon.

Sure, you wouldn’t want to back up, say, your ILS database like this. But how about important circulation data? Passwords for those days when an act of god wipes your data centre from the face of the earth? You could send updates to rural areas with limited internet access. And in the end, it uses a medium that’s been with us for thousands of years.

When I first conceived the idea for Hyperlinked History and the whole Faceless Historian thing, I wanted it to be an online television show. At the very least I wanted to make an online documentary series with video, music, and the whole bit. So I shot a couple of test things and edited them together. Then I deleted that crap because it was terrible.

A year later, I have skills and equipment I didn’t originally possess. So I’m excited to announce that Hyperlinked History will be moving into the realm of online video!

The opening of the show is available online as a sort of teaser/trailer and you’ll be able to keep up with the programme both here on LISNews and on the Hyperlinked History site. Episodes should start going online around the end of August, so stay tuned!