I have a presentation that I've done a couple of times that exams low-cost technology that can be used for museum applications. At the moment I'm spending some time looking at some new apps to add to the list.
On the list are two video editing programs and two photo editing programs.
What I'm most excited about is a simple little app called Readability. It's a bookmarklet that let's you decide how you want to view a webpage in order to read it (and print it if you like). When I demoed the Firefox plugin Nuke Anything, there was much rejoicing. User could delete annoying flashing ads and happily print their content without the ads wasting toner. But you had to do it one ad at a time.
Now some of you might be thinking who worries about wasting toner. But when you are in the non-profit world, especially during a recession, you are always looking for a way to eke out every penny's worth.
Well Readability is ten times better. It gets rid of everything at once and you get to decide the final format of the content you are trying to read. You get to pick the font, margin, and style. It's still in the experimental stage but the makers have made it so it works with most major browsers. They say it isn't 100% effective all of the time so they are looking for issue reports and comments, but it has worked every time for me. I'm in Heaven because reading on the Internet has just become so much easier.
When people find out my degree is in Museum Studies and I work at a museum, I’m constantly being asked questions like: “What things do I need to look out for in order to protect my keepsakes?” “What’s the worst thing that could happen to my great-grandmother’s wedding dress?” “So my photos are just thrown into a cardboard box, that’s probably not the best thing, right” “I could never afford to properly store my grandfather’s Bible, could I?” The majority of my answers revolve around four things that can endanger your treasures so, I’ve created a little guide on those things and solutions you can start implementing today to help mitigate them. I’ve made it in a worksheet form to really help you think through changes you might need to make. But I also wanted to share a fifth thing for you to be aware of just in this blog post and that’s how materials can interact with each other. The more complex an object is as far as the materials that it is made up of the more complex it c...