Magda Carneci & Dan Hayon: A collection of smells



Powerful statements indeed!

This mornings first book .

You could soon find the book in our shelves (NTNU Library, Dragvoll) at the following dewey number: 968.4049

Posted with LifeCast

UIUC Library Learn Videos

Some libraries use YouTube to promote general information to their users. Not at all a bad idea. Take a look at University of Illinois libraries and their learning videos here.

Library 2.0 network on Ning

The Library 2.0 network on Ning is the brainchild of Bill Drew. I have a my page on the Library 2.0 network but haven't used it much lately. I am planning to try and use it more often to see how it could fit into my work. It's easy to be judgemental before you have even tried something and seen it's true potential that's why i have decided to try and seek out the true potential of the social network of Ning.

My profile you will find here, expect to see "radical" changes in the near future.....

African Studies Journals in Wikipedia

Now African Studies Journals is available in Wikipedia.

This has two big advantages:
-the list of African Studies Journals is now available for a wide audience
-the list can be expanded and improved by anybody with knowledge about e-journals on Africa.

To quote Jos Damen (African Studies Centre, Leiden The Netherlands www.ascleiden.nl):

This is not a definitive list: it is work "under construction". The list will be expanded (ISBN etc) and updated in the future. It would be nice if all African Studies Journals would get their "own" page in Wikipedia, like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aequatoria and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Affairs

At the coming meeting of the European Librarians on African Studies in Leipzig (3 June 2009 at http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliotheca_Albertina ) more information on this project will be distributed.

iLibrarian - A Guide to Twitter in Libraries

A very good introduction and overview of different Twitter services. The guide is a good help in starting to use Twitter in the library.

Libraries on Twitter

On the blog "Circulation just another librarian blog" by Lindy Brown I found a list of U.S. libraries on Twitter (updated 5/15/09).

Oz Os Desktop Linux

Oz OS it's an Enlightenment (e17) Desktop Linux, built on a minimal Ubuntu base distribution (currently 8.04 "Hardy Heron"). It's has a great look and functionality. I have tried it through Suns Virtualbox. The number of pre-installed applications is quite minimalized. The menus looks great and also the rest of the desktop.

Wolfram Alpha

The search engine finally got released today. Try it here. Different Wolfram Aplha downloads here.

Fedora 11 Leonidas -Coming soon.....

The new Fedora linux distribution called Leonidas is arriving in 16 days. One of my laptops is eagerly awaiting the update. I have tried several Linux distributions and landed on Fedora for my "old" Dell Latitude D430. The speed is quite an issue and that's the main reason why I picked Fedora and not other Linux distributions.

Your own Linux distribution....

Create your own Linux distribution with Revisor or Suse Studio. Read more about it here.

Goodbye privacy. Welcome to Lifestream.fm

Stream your life!

Lifestream.fm is a media and social aggregator that will keep you and your friends informed about what you're doing online at a glance and in realtime. With Lifestream.fm you can put all your profiles and activity from your favorite web services all on one page, making it easy for your friends to see your newest bookmarks, your favorite videos, your tweets, photos you've uploaded, your newest blog posts, and more.
[text taken from the introduction to the service from Lifestream.fm]

Swine Flu Pandemic

Not everybody has worries about the Swine Flu....

"Poor Man's WiFi"-Give it a try.....

"Poor Man's WiFi". I really wanted to give it a try when I saw all this wonderfully homemade Wifi antennas. Some of them actually delivering a impressive gain of ~24 dB.

Upgrading to Ubuntu 9.04 and problems with ATI Radeon HD 2400XT

ATI Radeon drivers and Ubuntu is certainly not a dance on roses. After the NTNU IT department installed dualboot with Windows Xp and Ubuntu 8.04 on my work machine everything went smooth, no problems at all, but the problems came when I wanted to upgrade to 9.04, the xorg.conf file had manually been edited and ATI radeon drivers had been downloaded and installed from the native ATI driver site. No support from the NTNU IT department, but I already knew that, I had to admin my machine by myself the day I decided to switch to dualboot, or to say it plain and simple, the day I moved to Ubuntu and Linux.

My screen never came to the Ubuntu boot up screen, meaning that the solution was to edit the xorg.conf file from the command shell prompt.

nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Put this lines under the heading "Device"
Indentifier"Radeon"
Driver"Radeon"

Save with CTRL + O and leave with CTRL + Q

If it doesn't work at first try add the command:

aticonfig --initial

Now Ubuntu 9.04 works with the awful ATI Radeon HD 2400XT drivers.

I hope this could be to any help for other people struggling with the same problem.

Ubuntu 9.04 jaunty jackalope

A huge speed boosting. The boot time is much quicker and everything else is running quicker too.
I love the feeling. It was installed and running smooth and wonderful 20.15 this evening.
That's what I love about linux and Ubuntu it's stable and without having to wonder what the hell is happening, it just do the work and is functioning.

BBC podcasts

BBC has a great selection and variety of available podcasts. The African continent is higlighted in
Africa Today and This Week in Africa

Rss Feed of the two podcasts:

Africa Today

This Week in Africa

Amendment 138 (now am. 46)

On Tuesday, April 21st at 20:00, the ITRE report of the Telecoms Package, rapported by Catherine Trautmann, will come to a vote in the ITRE (Industry, TRansport, Energy) committee.

It may reintroduce amendment 138 (now renumbered amendment 46), a crucial safeguard of user's rights on the Internet, and protection against the media industry private police and retribution called the "graduated response" or "three strikes" schemes. Am. 138 was approved by 88% of the European Parliament in first reading, on September 24th, 2008.

Pirate Bay verdict- The four accused in jail

The four accused in the Pirate Bay trial is all sentenced to 1 year in jail and to pay back 30 million Swedish Kroner. The swedish newspaper "aftonbladet" is mentioning that they have to pay back 10.822.500 swedish kroner to the filmcompany 21 Century Fox and 5.579.325 svenske kroner to Mgm and Columbia.

Pirate Bay Press Conference on Friday 13.00 CEST

Today the verdict in the Pirate Bay trial will fall, comments on the verdict will be announced on a digital streamed Press conference at the Pirate Bay site on Friday the 17th of April some minutes before 13.00 CEST (12pm GMT). The verdict would not mean much for the actual torrent tracker sites but, they will live on, but for the people behind Pirate Bay it could mean that they risk being in debt for the rest of their lives.

The author Paulo Coelho is giving his support to Pirate Bay, he has even said: “I am openly supporting their site. I even volunteered to travel to Sweden to discuss the case of open contents, but I never got a reply from them,” [TorrentFreak.com].

New generations are used to share and distribute music online. Given the fact that we have fewer and fewer record shops where we could buy music, and very poor amount of titles in stock in their catalogues it's obvious that the recording industry/record industry has failed to distribute music digitally in record shops online, one of the few exceptions is iTunes, earning a huge amount of money and giving the artists the money they deserve for their artistic work.

Why sites like Pirate Bay and other big tracking sites is succeding is that they could offer a wide variety of music and films, something for every taste, you have to have in mind that not everybody likes Britney Spears, mainstream pop and rock. etc.

A lot of those people genuinely interested in music, like myself, buy music in record shops, mostly online, having more well stocked catalogues, Shadowland (Storgata, Oslo) and Staalplaat (Berlin) or Second Hand boutiques in the physical world.

Those artists not having a major record deal, not having a huge distribution network behind them see the sharing culture online as a nice asset and way of promoting their music in a cheap and easy way. They go from the status of being unknown to beginning to get recognized.

The big recording companies is unhealthy businesses pumping out crap music not worth listening to. Why are they entitled to call what they make culture and art, it's music for the corrupted masses, teenagers with no ideas and thoughts of their own is tempted to buy the music because of heavy commercials promoting the music in every channel available.

The big recording companies is paying to get their artists to be reviewed and mentioned in newspapers etc. Who is standing up for the independent artists, those worth mentioning with an artistic integrity?
I have reviewed music for more than 10 years but the commercialist aspect of the music industry sickens me.

The Pirate Bay trial and outcome is important. Finally we get a "healthy" debate about the distribution of music.

I am not taking sides in the torrent tracker debate but think it's healthy to get a new and fresh start on how to distribute and share music. We have to face the fact that we have something called the internet with a waste amount of oppertunities.

Pirate Bay is just one of many distributors of copyright material. What about:


YouTube
Metacafe
Mininova
Vuze
Seeqpod
Spotify
Streaming independent radio in general
Etc.

Or those programs (clients) making it possible to use the torrent tracking technology:

Bitcomet
Bitlord

Or built in torrent tracking in the Linux UBUNTU, Fedora OS distros like Transmission, Ktorrent etc.

It's really a complex picture with no easy solutions, putting 4 guys in jail won't silence the ongoing debate.