Teen Blog

Here’s the hard truth: your password, well, it’s no good.  Does it include a word found in the dictionary, a name, a date, or even numbers that look like letters (e=3, I-1, o=0, etc.)?  Yup, no good.  Do you use the same password for some or even all your websites?  Tsk, tsk.  The practice of password cracking has never been easier thanks to a number of landfall events for hackers, namely the release into the public of numerous huge password databases from hacked websites and the development of more advanced and specialized tools. What’s worse, the security of your password isn’t always wholly dependent on you but on the websites you use.  I know it’s hard; you have trouble remembering your passwords, etc., and I’m sorry, but in today’s world those excuses just aren’t acceptable.  Practicing good password hygiene isn’t a suggestion if you want to survive online, it is now a requirement.  Please read on!

You wouldn’t know it by the state of things, but Adobe Reader isn’t the end-all, be-all of PDF.  Standing for "Portable Document Format," PDF is a file format used to maintain the uniform appearance of a document no matter what type of hardware or software is being used to view it.  You will see it used frequently for government documents such as IRS and court forms, job applications, ebooks and more since it looks the same everywhere.  Adobe may have created the PDF format, but they made it a free-for-all file format in 2008, resulting in software for reading and creating PDFs that rival Adobe’s own.  

You might be asking yourself ,“Why would I want to switch from Acrobat Reader?”  Over the years Adobe Reader (once known as Acrobat Reader) has become a horribly bloated program that takes entirely too much space on your hard drive and, in my opinion, an unacceptable amount of RAM to use.  It’s slow to load and slower to use.  Furthermore, Adobe is constantly releasing updates for the program; it seems like every other time I turn on my Windows 7 computer there’s a notification for an Adobe Reader update, and I’m growing tired of it.  

Leave it to Cory Doctorow, author, blogger, and technology activist-extraordinaire, to weave a story that successfully blends coming-of-age woes, homelessness, national politics, copyright law, cooking, gadgetry, love, overcoming homophobia, civil disobedience, film-making, mashups, public speaking, the judicial system, beer and coffee brewing, cryptography, and oh so, so much more into a wonderfully geeky, heart-wrenching, page-turning bang-up novel that people of all ages should read.  This book is full of such big, exquisite ideas to learn about that you’ll be Googling your fingers off through the entire story and I mean that in the best way possible.  You will learn reading Pirate Cinema and you will love this as much as you love the characters. 

What do you dare to read?  If you are a teen, the Central Rappahannock Regional Library system wants to know.  Teen Read Week is coming and in support of this year’s theme, “It Came from the Library!,” we’re asking teens to nominate the scariest book ever written on our Teens@CRRL Facebook page or our Teens.Librarypoint.org Goodreads page.  In the next few days, we’ll narrow the list down to five titles and starting October 14th teens can visit our website and vote for the scariest book.  Unfortunately, I’m too old to participate, but if I could here are the titles I would choose.  

Open Culture is one of the best free cultural and educational media sites on the Internet. The website was founded in 2006 by Dan Coleman, who is the Director and Associate Dean of Stanford University’s Continuing Education Program. Though Open Culture is not affiliated with Stanford, it seems to be well suited to providing intelligent, relevant information. In keeping with the theme of relevancy, Open Culture can be followed on Twitter, Facebook and you can subscribe to the site to receive regular updates through email as well.  

There’s a new author working in the library. Elanor Kindred, who can be found in the circulation department at our England Run branch, has been writing fantasy stories since she was a child growing up in Stafford County.  Through the years, the stories have become longer and more refined until they have emerged as books, two of which--The Immortal and Bound by Blood--are now published. Written for a young adult audience, they are set in parallel worlds both magical and not. The Immortal finds Lask Somadar, leader of an enchanted realm, pursuing a villainous beast into a land ill-prepared to deal with the griffin or his army.

Free.  Everybody likes free.  I mean, what’s not to like about free?  It’s free!  Free, free, free - use the word often enough, however, and it begins to lose its meaning.  “Free special offer (some rules and restrictions apply)!” “Free entree (with purchase of equal or greater value entree)!” “Free ski trip (after we badger you into investing in a timeshare over the course of an eight-hour 'seminar')!”  Free just isn’t what it used to be, and nowhere is this more evident than the world of electronic games.  Users are steeped in phrases like “free-to-play” and “freemium” to a degree that free really does start to sound like a four-letter-word.  Free they say?  Nonsense, we say.  Let’s take a look.

Technology can be frustrating, confusing, and downright irritating to some.  For others, it’s the reason to get up in the morning.  Whatever your stance, you can count on the Central Rappahannock Regional Library as one of the region’s prime sources of technology assistance.  With our Training on Demand classes and our eBook help, you can get a lot of bang for your no-buck!  We help with learning PC, Internet, Email, and other beginners topics including Microsoft Office Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Publisher, and even Access.  We can explain to you the ups and downs of the different eReaders and their respective eBook stores, not to mention how to use those devices with our free eBooks!  And now we’re gearing up to offer you even more technical content on Librarypoint with our revamped Tech Answers page!

On September 12, 2012, Apple announced the release of the new iPhone 5. For some avid Apple technology fans, there is no doubt. They must immediately upgrade to the latest version. But if you’re like me, the decision is a bit more complicated. The more I learn about the features of the iPhone 5, the more my geeky side wants to play with the new toy. However my practical side says that in spite of the fact that my iPhone 4 is now technically two generations out of date, it is only two years old and still does everything I want it to do. Apple’s website has a handy chart that compares the features of the iPhone 5 with the iPhone 4 and 4S. But I find that lists of specifications don’t really convey the true impact of the changes. So I did some research to try to understand what the changes mean in real terms.

If you’ve never managed to make it all the way through this “great American classic,” NOW is the time to give it one more go! Wait, don’t click away! Hear me out! I’ve tried at least three times in the past to read Moby Dick & always get bogged down after a few chapters. All that whaling! All that boiling down of blubber! And, what is Ahab’s problem anyway?! So I’ve never “gotten” Moby Dick & never finished the book. I always abandon the Pequod, Ishmael, Ahab, & the gang and leave them floating in the middle of the ocean somewhere.

But NOT this time! You may have heard recently that writer, Philip Hoare, is leading a "big read" of Moby Dick, or, in this case, more like a “big listen.” He’s offering a chapter per day in free downloadable audio. There’s a different reader and a different artist’s illustration for each chapter.  I know about this because I have been reading, not a chapter per day, but a PAGE per day, of Moby Dick since August 9^th , 2012, and writing a blog about it.  So, several people who’ve been following my blog have told me about the big read project. “This guy stole your idea!” they say indignantly.