By Jen, on February 12th, 2013
Next installment in the “How I use my technology” series, let’s talk about managing links and reading.
Between my professional RSS feeds and my personal ones, I read a sort of scary (no, edit that, it’s not ‘sort of’) number of blogs, accounts, and other resources online. To be precise, that’s currently 98 feeds in my professional account, 153 in the personal account, and somewhere north of 250 accounts between Dreamwidth and LiveJournal (there’s overlap there, and I’m not going to bother to count exactly how much)
Now many of those don’t necessarily update all that regularly (at least half of the above update somewhere between once every couple of days and every couple of weeks, and very few update multiple times a day.) But that’s still a lot of stuff to sort through.
I read very fast, which is handy. And I skim even faster.
Anyway, as you might guess, there’s a lot of interesting stuff that comes my way, and I use a couple of different tools to manage it. It took me a good while to figure out, though, once I moved from using one computer most of the time to using at least 3 different devices regularly, and sometimes four (my work computer, my home computer, the iPad, and the iPhone. I mostly don’t read webpages/etc. from the phone, but every so often…)
Continue reading Managing links + reading
By Jen, on January 26th, 2013
I’m spending a lot more time on instant messenger chat than I used to. And I have to admit, I really enjoy it.
Continue reading IM chat
By Jen, on January 19th, 2013
Picking this up again. (Hi. Life. Other projects. Yeah.)
So. I have a bunch of email addresses. And a bunch of email. To be precise, I currently have:
- 2 emails I use for personal stuff
- 3 emails on various professional stuff that is not my actual work email
- a small handful of ‘utility’ email addresses that I use for site signins, etc.
In practice, all of these dump into a single Gmail account, because in practice, I may be accessing my email from four different devices or so, and Gmail is the best solution to that. However, I would like to have a backup, and I would, ideally, like to have my email better cleaned out from all the random stuff that I really do not need to archive. I’m slowly working on that, courtesy some new tools from Gmail that make it easier to find unlabelled emails (or large files, or emails from more than X years or months ago…) However, since there’s 23,000 emails in my Gmail, give or take a few, this might take me a while.
Continue reading Email
By Jen, on December 31st, 2012
Next round in “how I use my computer”, how I read things. Much of what I do on my computer is fundamentally text based (I watch movies, and I do play with graphic design, but at least 80% of my daily use is basically words.)
- Things I read on my computer: Lots of web-based things. A couple of online web-based forums. A lot of blogs. Webcomics.
- Things I mostly don’t read on my computer: ebooks (I generally read those on the iPhone, and sometimes on the iPad). Newspapers/magazines/etc.
Tools I use:
Web browsers:
These days, I do most of my web stuff in Chrome, for stability, and because I’m using a number of other Google products, and there are places where the stability/response/etc. is a bit better in Chrome. (It is not uncommon for me to have 15ish GDocs tabs open at once, for example.)
Tabs I usually have open at home include:
- Gmail (I’ll discuss email more in its own post)
- My Dreamwidth circle page
- My LiveJournal reading page
- The reading page for the online project
- And then usually a couple to a couple of dozen other tabs, depending on what I’m doing at the moment.
I do still use Firefox, but mostly for Netflix (which only supports Chrome on PC, not Mac). I do find there’s some benefit in having a separate browser for streaming video – if the browser hangs, or gets cranky if I reload the page after a long idle (pretty common for me: I go through seasons of TV shows, and often leave it paused overnight part way through an episode) it’s easier to quit without worrying about the rest of my tabs/open comments/etc.
I use a small handful of extensions to make my life easier.
- minimalist which removes various elements from Gmail and Google Reader.
- Do Not Track Me - a privacy extension. (I’ve been reasonably happy with it, but I should probably do another round of checking in to see what’s new in that area)
- LJ new comments which makes it easy to browse new comments in threads at both LiveJournal and Dreamwidth. (There’s a good explanation over on the dw_nifty community.) Installing it is a little fiddly: I have the best luck in Chrome installing it in Tampermonkey.
Reading tools:
I’m going to talk more about how I manage things in my RSS feeds in its own post, but I’ll note here that I use Instapaper as my first step to keeping links that I want later. My toolbar bookmarks inclue the “Read Later” bookmark for it, plus the “popup with tags” bookmark for Pinboard. For actually managing my RSS feeds, I use Google Reader.
By Jen, on December 22nd, 2012
I spent the last two days watching my computer be a 45 minute drive away according to FedEx, but it turned up this morning!
So, the first thing that I do with a new machine is set up all those small things that make life manageable. Plus all the individual little touches. Then setting up the basics of the dock, and the apps I use most frequently, and then the bookmarks for the browsers. (You can click through for larger versions, and I’ve got closeups of the dock and menu bar below.
Before:
 Before
After:
 new computer – after 
Continue reading Background tools and basics
By Jen, on December 21st, 2012
Professionally speaking:
I am the Information Technology librarian at a small liberal-arts-college-model campus of the University of Maine system. Part of my job is “Make the technology in the library work”, but part of it is “Be aware of tech things, so we can do awesome stuff with them eventually.” This means that being familiar with a bunch of random things, various ways to do stuff, big topics of various kinds is to my benefit. (Even if I weren’t interested, which I am.) We use GoogleApps, Microsoft, and I’ve got the full Adobe Suite on my computer. Plus a wide range of other bits and pieces.
My home tech life involves a lot of the following: (I will come back and talk about all of these in detail later, promise.)
- Email. Individual emails. Discussion list emails. The many and varied reminders and “someone left a comment on your post” and so on emails that fill our lives these days. I have 7 different email addresses that pour into a single Gmail account, because I regularly access my email from 3 different devices, and it’s not uncommon for there to be about 100 threads in email in a given day for me (many of which are skim + delete)
- Reading stuff on the Web: I use Chrome for most things these days, along with Instapaper, Pinboard, and a few other things to help me manage it. I’m active on Dreamwidth, LiveJournal, and one web forum these days, with periodic pokes at other things. (I have a Facebook account, but spend very little time on there, and I keep wishing I could make Twitter work with my brain.)
- The massive online collaborative project previously mentioned (we do most stuff via email, Gdocs, and chat, plus the actual posts that make it up, which are on Dreamwidth.)
- IM chat (which I do through Gmail, though I’m contemplating a different client now I’ll have more screen space.) I usually have a couple open with various friends throughout the evening.
- Writing: currently a bunch of non-public stuff, but I am about to dive into the long-term non-fiction project again, really. I use Scrivener, which I adore and will talk about at length later. Also SimpleNote
- Watching streaming media – Netflix, Hulu, etc. – generally while knitting. (Depending on my other plans for the evening, this is usually 1-3 hours most nights, with other online stuff, IMing, chatting, etc. interspersed. Because I like making progress on my knitting.) While on the topic, I use the iPad for patterns and the iPhone for row counting. (We’re just going to admit there’s going to be a “tech I use for knitting” post in here, right?)
- Music: both my iTunes library (for permanent stuff) and Spotify (which I use primarily for playlists at work, trying things out that I might like, and for topic-specific playlists where I don’t want to invest tons of money in the subject yet. I listen to podcasts via the iPhone and headphones while doing household cleaning and related chores.
I am much more on the ‘using tech to do other things’ side of the line rather than ‘play with the tech for the tech’s sake’, but I have periodic splurges of doing bits of graphic design work, CSS and various web design work, playing with audio files, and very occasionally dipping my toe into learning to code.
Things I’m mulling over in particular:
- a suitable non-Cloud backup of essential email (there’s a bunch of stuff that if I lost it, meh. There’s a bunch of stuff I’d actually love to archive just in case I ever need it, but get it out of my Gmail so my searches are more manageable. Finding a low-demand method of the above is tricky. Since any practical step on this first involves sorting through about 1o,000 email messages in archive, I keep putting it off. Since it only gets worse the more I do that, I should stop doing that.)
- backing up things currently living on GDocs more seamlessly.
- continuing to improve my workflow for ‘here is interesting link’ -> ‘let me put that somewhere I can find it’
- a better workflow for reading sheet music on the iPad (and playing from it!)
- some general usability tools
- better recipe management
- doing more with Evernote (in particular for ‘books I want to read’ type stuff.)
- a better schedule for doing app updates, podcast/etc. updates, etc. on the iDevices. (The current one is “whenever I vaguely remember”, which can be annoying.
By Jen, on December 21st, 2012
Of course, just after I did the last one, I ended up finding a bunch of seasonally relevant ones, so here, bonus.
Seasonal:
Libraries and related topics:
Science:
- The Discovery Channel has announced footage of live giant squid! (The link comes from Deep Sea News, and the author talks about whether one can trust the announcement – apparently, yes.)
- Bad Astronomy also explains the awesome Cassini photo of Saturn I linked last post.
By Jen, on December 20th, 2012
To put the “Ok, so what am I doing with this new computer” into context, it’d help to know what else there is:
My geeky stuff:
My work computer is a Dell laptop, running Win7, and a variety of software, including the Adobe Creative suite. I mostly live in my web browser, Word, Excel, and forays into various Adobe products, but less than I did before most of our website management moved into WordPress from Dreamweaver. Our IT policy is that we can use work machines for reasonable personal use, but in practice, it lives on my desk (plugged into a widescreen monitor) unless I’m at the reference desk or on my fortnightly evening reference shift. (However, if I ever *did* have a trip where I really wanted a computer, not the iPad, I could easily bring it.)
At home, I have:
- My primary computer (since 2009, this has been a MacBook, it is about to be the new iMac). It lives on a small rolling desk by my couch, and I often have a small black cat within arm’s reach when I’m home. (Not the best ergonomics ever, but awesome on the ‘reach out and get purred at’ quality of life scale.)
- An iPad 2 and a keyboard case (now my primary portable device: it doesn’t do quite *everything* I would want in a primary device, but it’s manageable even for a week-long trip.)
- An iPhone, which (as I’ve commented to various people) is less phone and more “portable computer that fits in my pocket that occasionally makes a phone call.” I am really not a phone person.
- A Time Capsule, which stores my backups and also purchased digital downloads (movies, TV series) that are not in active use. It is also my wifi router.
Other bits of tech:
I should note here that I don’t own a TV and haven’t since 2005. (This has been largely for space reasons: I watch things via Hulu, Netflix, and various other streaming tools.) But part of why I’m excited about the iMac is that watching something while keeping an eye on my IM windows will now be much easier.
I will eventually get a USB DVD drive, but this past week is the first time I’ve stuck a DVD in my computer in about a year.
Names:
I believe in naming my technology. And sometimes renaming it. Here’s my about to be naming scheme:
- the Time Capsule: alexandria (really, what else do you name a storage device if you’re me?)
- the local wifi network : musica humana (the term for human-made music in discussion of music of the spheres)
- the new iMac: diapason (the term for a perfect octave, in Pythagorean ratio discussion of music.)
- the iPhone : diapente (the term for a 4:6 or 2:3 ratio in Pythagorean ratios of music, a fifth.)
- the iPad : diatesseron (the term for a 9:12 or 3:4 ratio in Pythagorean ratios of music, a fourth.)
You might notice a relationship between the screen ratios on the last two devices and their names. They’re imperfect, but amusing.
By Jen, on December 20th, 2012
Awesomely gorgeous:
- I got to see my very first real aurora last month (living in the rural north has benefits!) It was not nearly as flashy as the following link, but it was still stunningly amazing. It does mean I’ve been clicking on aurora pictures even more than usual, though, and I particularly liked this post from Phil Plait over at Bad Astronomy with a time lapse movie made from aurora still shots in Norway by Nicholas Buer. Click(and as Phil says, full-screen) if you need 2.5 minutes of beauty in your day.
- Also, the 21 best astronomy images of 2012.
- (And the one a friend sent me on Wednesday, a gorgeous image of Saturn. And the Milky Way and a lighthouse. Look, I like pictures of stars and planets and stuff, okay?)
Books:
- If you are looking for something to read, the MeFi wiki index of questions about books is extremely comprehensive.
- The power of the books you read at 12.
- I’m not sure if this goes in books or culture, but how do you deal with fantasy agricultures (specifically, how do you grow wine in a country with seasons as messed up as Westeros?)
- Why we need comfort reading.
- Curious George’s great escape. (I half knew some of this, but it’s an amazing story.)
Copyright, so complicated:
Community and culture:
- AskAManager had a recent conversation about class – what things you need to know to work in a white-collar environment that may not be obvious if you’re not familiar with that kind of setting. It’s a sort of imperfect discussion, because the topic is So Big, but as someone who works with people from a variety of backgrounds, I think it’s a good start.
- Ann Patchett on independent bookstores. Specifically, starting one.
- I keep chewing over Anil Dash’s “The Web We Lost” in the way that makes me think there will be more writing from me about it eventually.
- Vienna Teng’s draft of the hymn of axciom – fascinating both for the content, and for the fact that technology makes this kind of sharing possible.
- TEDx and Bad Science: there’s a fascinating article from the TED folks about how to vet for bad science in TEDx talks – interesting both for the specifics, and for the general “how do we talk about evaluating stuff”. Bad Astronomy talks about it a bit more, too.
- 250 year old codes. Society of the Golden Poodle. Secret societies. What more do you want out of a story?
- Also in the history department: a Ponzi scheme for flappers.
- The Lying Disease: truth, lies, and the Internet.
- How Pompeii perished (and the misassumptions about the nature of geology that pervade our ideas about it.)
- The history and implications of the Zapruder film.
Technology:
Seasonal:
By Jen, on December 19th, 2012
I have a new iMac on its way to me. I am one of those people who believes philosophically in starting a new electronic device as a tabula rasa, rather than just automatically transferring everything to it. However, that also gives me a *great* excuse for writing about what I’m using, why, and whether you (oh few readers) might care, and getting back into regular posts here, really, truly, honest.
(Also, in writing about this in less public spaces, I realised that it’s 28 years since I got my first computer – an Apple IIc, in 1984. That number is sort of scary.)
Things I intend to talk about:
- What devices I use for what (and why the iMac this time: my current home machine is a MacBook)
- Software I use all the time, and why
- Stuff I turn out not to use (and thoughts on why)
- The huge question of cloud vs. not-cloud vs. storage vs. backup.
- How this fits into libraries, and tech literacy and all sorts of other things.
- (Do you have other topics? Tell me in comments or whatever other form of communication seems likely to work.)
In other news: (in no particular order)
- I have a links post in draft, and expect to push it live sometime Thursday or maybe Friday.
- I am doing a presentation at LibTech 2013 in St. Paul. LibTech is pretty much my Platonic ideal of a conference: they cap at 450 registrations, so you can actually talk to people, the presenters are people doing actual stuff with real info about what works and what fails, and I have reliably come away having learned a lot. I already had plans to be in Minnesota that week for a visit, which is convenient.
- My presentation is called Accio Data: Managing collaborative projects with free tools, and uses a Harry Potter transformative works project I am gleefully involved with as the case study, because we are managing all sorts of complicated data for that. (I’ll also be talking about the people part of collaborative work, especially at a distance.)
- I also expect to be at Computers in Libraries in DC in April (that’s my official professional conference of the year). If you’re going to be at either that or LibTech (or know someone who is that I should talk to), please do tell me.
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Hi, I’m Jen Librarian, infovore, and general geek, likely to write comments about books, link collections, and other thoughts related to how we find, use, and take joy in information.
I'm the Information Technology Librarian at the University of Maine at Farmington, the small liberal arts college model campus in the University of Maine system.
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Favorite topics + posts
Also, 14 Things a digital literacy series at UMF's Mantor Library blog.
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