Information Takes Over

I have recently treated myself to a slighty more modern phone, and have been revisiting avenues that I went down with the old one before hitting big red technological walls.

Today I have been having another look at QR-codes, and the reader that you can download to your phone.

Why not generate them for your library? It could be a very simple impementation,

• Encode a link (URL) for each subject area (class search maybe) that you have and place them around the library (there is the small caveat that your online catalogue should render readably on a small screen device ).
• Or perhaps have an encoded phone number printed on the datelabel, so that people on trains who suddenly realise their book is overdue can renew by phone. (Not limited to trains of course!)
• Or add them to the bottom of all your posters so that there is a web page offerring more event information or competition entry details.

This is SO easy, and you can make a mobile users life more interesting!

Tell me if you are doing this already?

On Monday I woke up full of plans for the day – only to find my PC wouldn’t boot. Aaargh. A quick look in the BIOS showed – or rather didn’t show – one of my hard disks to be unrecognised. OK – now’s a good time to kick myself for not organising some sort of backup…

So with feelings of dread – I set about trying to see just how much of a mess my hard disk was in. Case open – seemed to be spinning – so something was happening…

Ok let’s try a linux boot CD, see if we can see anything from there… nope.

Ok lets try a parition magic boot disk and see what we get? success, I can see the drive and I can see the partitions. I run a few checks which all report OK. next step then is to get a new drive – then I should in theory be able to copy the partitions into the unallocated space and – fingers crossed – all should be well.

I bought a new disk, got it home, opened it. Doh! should have read the label on the box more carefully, I had a SATA not a PATA drive (I had never noticed that IDE had been renamed!). Took it back, got the IDE drive, popped it in the machine, fired up partition magic and – after several hours copying the partitions the data is all there and good. Now I just have to write a new master boot record for the drive and all will be well.

Oh yeah, and I had to set a flag in windoze registry to allow LBA-48 so that windoze would see all 320GB of the new drive.

I notice with enthusiasm, that the Talis Platform Bigfoot API documentation has been released.

Must clear my schedule… now, where’s my text editor…