A few days ago the manga Library Wars: Love & War came across my desk at work. And yes, librarians are the heroes and we are armed to the teeth.

The manga is based on the light novel series Toshokan Senso by Hiro Arikawa. The novels also gave rise to another manga, an internet radio series and an anime series.

What are we fighting for? Well, what have we always fought for?

In the near future, the federal government creates a committee to rid society of books it deems unsuitable. The libraries vow to protect their collections, and with the help of local governments, form a military group to defend themselves–the Library Forces!

Check it out, I’m sure you will enjoy it. Meanwhile, I’m off to brush up on my rappelling, just in case…

I’ve previously mentioned the importance of librarians having the skills to repair their own tech hardware and the Maker’s Bill of Right’s. Now we have the ability to better enact those rights, thanks to iFixit.

iFixit provides free repair manuals for a variety of technological devices, allows people to share their own experiences, provides access to the required tools, and encourages people to recycle.

How did iFixit start?

We started out fixing an old iBook together. There were no instructions on how to do it, so we started the way everyone does: the hard way. We tinkered. We fiddled. We broke some tabs and lost a few screws. But we fixed it!

We attempted to fix some other laptops but had trouble finding parts. So we bought a broken computer on eBay and stole parts from it. Then we decided to start selling the parts ourselves, and iFixit was born.

But that’s not the whole story. All of our customers still had to do things the hard way, just like we did. Easy-to-use repair instructions didn’t exist — yet.

So we wrote some instructions the first chance we got. And we posted them online, for free. For the first time, it was easy for someone with no technical background or experience to take apart a Mac. Our step-by-step instructions were enabling people to repair Macs they wouldn’t have been able to repair on their own.

We thought the instructions would be useful to our customers — and they were. But it turned out that they were useful to a lot of other people as well! We’ve heard repair success stories from forensic detectives, field translators, and even kids. From New York to Alaska, Tibet to the Faroe Islands, people have used our guides to fix their stuff. They saved money, they kept their Macs out of landfills, and they did it completely by themselves.

So if you ever break the glass panel on that new iPad, now you know that you can fix it yourself.

The organization Inside Google, launched by Consumer Watchdog, has had a version of their video Don’t be evil playing thirty-six times per day on a jumbotron in Times Square to gather support for a “do not track” legislation in Congress. This legislation would prevent companies like Google from gathering consumer’s personal data.

Read more about the reasoning behind the video and Google’s response at Inside Google.

While I’ve written about the impact of culture on technology before,  I was amazed by this information graphic from Information is Beautiful which maps various culture’s perception of color. While we often hear of the aesthetic importance of colour in web design, it is good to be reminded of the role of  colour’s cultural meaning and how it impacts use.

For more on culture and web design, check out Intercultural Communication on Web sites by Elizabeth Würtz, published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. All of the articles from this journal’s themed issue on Culture and Computer-Mediated Communication are available online.

We all have to create and remember passwords and the temptation is to use the same one repeatedly, even though we know this isn’t a good idea!

An interesting solution is provided by PasswordCard, a free application that allows you to create and remember complex passwords. How does it work? Well…

Enter PasswordCard

A PasswordCard is a credit card-sized card you keep in your wallet, which lets you pick very secure passwords for all your websites, without having to remember them! You just keep them with you, and even if your wallet does get stolen, the thief will still not know your actual passwords.

How does it work?

Your PasswordCard has a unique grid of random letters and digits on it. The rows have different colors, and the columns different symbols. All you do is remember a combination of a symbol and a color, and then read the letters and digits from there. It couldn’t be simpler!

Make sure to read the precautions and frequently asked questions for further details on how to keep your passwords safe.