Menachem Mendel

Today’s promo at Macupdate is the fantastic Devon Think Pro. It is a great program and I urge any Mac users who are in need of a quality program to organize information to check it out.

Posted on September 22nd, 2008 under Computers. Comments: None

Yesterday we got back from a nice vacation on Cape Cod just before Shabbat. During the week I read an excellent book on the history of the CIA, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. It documents how torture, lying, incompetence, and other related activities has been the bread-and-butter of the CIA [...]

Posted on August 30th, 2008 under Computers, Miscellaneous. Comments: 1

For Mac users out there, you have 14 hours left to buy the MacHeist Bundle. For just $49 you get some great programs. Among the programs included are DevonThink Personal, iClip, TextExpander, Write Room and Cha-Ching. If you need more than one of these programs this is a great deal.

Posted on June 24th, 2008 under Computers. Comments: None

Microsoft’s Live Search Books is officially closing its doors (closing its links/portals?). It seems that they couldn’t make enough money to justify keeping it around. See more about it here. Hopefully centralized platforms such as the Internet Archive will get a boost from this.

Posted on May 25th, 2008 under Computers, Internet, Online resources. Comments: None

I have written before about the problem of privacy in the Internet Age, and things are just getting worse. Over at the informative NYT’s tech blog Bits there is a disturbing post describing how ISP’s (Internet Service Providers) are thinking about possibly monitoring your internet traffic and supplying advertising based upon your internet usage [...]

Posted on April 29th, 2008 under Computers, Internet, Technology. Comments: None

Two more things from the Internet Archive:

1. Dibre ha-riboth [microform]. Matters of controversy, a rabbinical disputation between Zerahiah ha-Levi and Abraham ben David. Published from a manuscript (unicum) in the possession of the Jewish theological seminary of America (here)
2. A Jewish Calendar for Sixty-Four Years (here- It was printed in London and is from 1838. [...]

Posted on April 11th, 2008 under Computers, Internet, Online resources, Technology. Comments: 2

As is apparent to anyone who tried to use the links in my recent post on books digitized by Microsoft’s Live Search, accessing digitized books that have been posted online isn’t always very successful. One step towards making it easier is Internet Archive. Internet archive was founded “with the purpose of offering permanent [...]

Posted on April 11th, 2008 under Computers, Internet, Technology. Comments: None

For those who want to read more about Large-Scale Digitization Initiatives (LSDI’s), there is a recently published white paper here. The summary can be found here. The paper discusses such topics as digital storage quality, access to digital collections, the commercial aspect of many LSDI’s (see more here) and the impact of digital [...]

Posted on March 3rd, 2008 under Computers, Online resources, Technology. Comments: None

Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences has voted to make available their research to the world at large in an open-access framework.
To assist the University in distributing the articles, each Faculty member will provide an electronic copy of the final version of the article at no charge to the appropriate representative of the Provost’s Office [...]

Posted on February 13th, 2008 under Academia, Computers, Internet, Technology. Comments: None