Caroline Jedlicka and I recently published a paper in the Journal of Web Librarianship called “Creating a Homemade Mobile Augmented Reality Game in a Community College Library: An Open Source Approach.” This link will get you past the journal’s paywall. For me, the standout message of the article is that you do not need a […]
Author Archives: Mark Eaton
Thanksgiving challenge, bots edition
It is getting to be time for my annual post about the Thanksgiving Challenge. Previous editions of this post can be found here, here, and here. Basically, the challenge is to spend the entire Thanksgiving long weekend coding by yourself. I’ve already covered the questionable productivity benefits (and very real mental health downsides) of doing […]
Cmus
I’ve been using cmus to listen to music lately. It is rather glorious software. To see what I mean take a look at this screenshot: It runs in the terminal and has weird key bindings. To get it running I had to build it from source. It lets me play music off my hard drive, […]
SpringyCamp
This week, Carrie Jedlicka and I presented at SpringyCamp, the annual Springshare conference. Our talk was called Creating a Fun Library Tour with Augmented Reality and LibGuides! If you have a Springshare login, you can watch the video here. It was fun, although I was nervous because there were ~300 people there! Carrie handled it […]
Fediverse relays
Fediverse relays have historically been a bit of a dodgy undertaking. In the past, when I’ve tested a relay, it was a largely unmoderated firehose of random stuff from the network. Unmoderated fedi is often particularly unpleasant; so much so that I could never really stomach it for more than a few days. But I […]
Transformative
Recently, I posted about my commitment to read one academic article per day. It’s now been just over a month that I’ve been doing this, and I have to say, it has been transformative. I feel a whole new level of engagement with my work and my discipline. This has also prompted me to read […]
NASA hackathon
The last hackathon I attended was quite a while ago. It was at MIT, which was fun, and I think the theme was bookish. I really enjoyed myself. My coding skills at the time were enough to contribute, but not so much that my team was really counting on me. I met some interesting people […]
Neovim as a word processor
I recently posted about using Lua to configure my neovim setup. This has been altogether a big improvement. One thing that is easier is having separate .lua configuration files for each file type that I work with in vim. At first, this seemed useful for minor quality-of-life improvements, like setting differing default tabs for Python […]
Committing to reading one academic article per day
This post is a bit of a departure from the library technology stuff I usually post about, but I feel that it is very much core academic librarianship, so probably relevant to some people here. I was listening to this interview with Eleanor Colla, where she talks (among many other things) about committing to reading […]
Lua
I’ve liked the idea of the Lua programming language since reading about it in Coding Places: Software Practice in a South American City. After reading that book, I put some effort into learning a bit of Lua syntax, but never really followed up beyond that. It seemed potentially useful but I didn’t really have the […]