Librarian, library technologist and part-time digital preservationist. Somewhat interested in Telidon art and old computers.
he/him/they/them

Work: https://www.durno.ca
Not work: https://jdd.freeshell.org/

Last Notes

- reply

I'd totally recommend RetroFloppy, he's great to deal with and his work was first rate, fully recovered almost every disk we sent him. I had tried to set up an 8" drive to work with the kryoflux but I failed. It was easier to apply for a small grant to pay for the recovery work.

2025-03-28 17:43:58 GMT

- reply

Thanks! Really glad you liked it

2025-03-28 17:15:33 GMT

And on a happier note, I'm pleased to share an article I co-wrote with John Aycock and Alexandra Tenney on recovering data from Canada's Telidon (videotex) system, recently published (no paywall) in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing:
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10927689

2025-03-28 16:36:12 GMT

Question for my academic librarian peers: is any serious conversation happening in any notable venue right now regarding the privacy and security implications of situating Canadian library user data in platforms run by US corporations? Seems to me we should be updating our risk assessments, particularly given the current administration's targetting of universities, libraries, students and faculty. Oh, and our existence as a sovereign nation.

2025-03-20 19:16:30 GMT

- reply

Yep, the folks who developed Hot Potatoes went on to found our renowned Humanities Computing and Media Centre (HCMC). At least one of them still works here I think.

2025-03-20 19:06:02 GMT

- reply

Just cracked the shrink wrap on that one to look at the contents. What made it faculty-specific was it included a guide on how to publish departmental websites in HTML, with templates. Oh, and some locally developed interactive teaching software ("Hot Potatoes").

2025-03-20 18:43:48 GMT

- reply

In 1998/99 the University of Victoria was still distributing this kind of stuff, but (like UofA) on CD. The most interesting bits are parts of the UVic website of the day, the applications (Netscape, WS_FTP, LView) are pretty vanilla.
https://mastodon.sdf.org/system/media_attachments/files/114/196/227/743/716/860/original/a1e0a4e3882f933b.jpeg

2024-12-23 06:42:06 GMT

- reply

Oh my gosh, just noticed the “Wee Book Inn” bookmark. That might have been where I got my copy of Haldeman back in the 70s, I sure bought a lot of other books there. It makes me unreasonably happy to learn they’re still in business, after all these years.

2024-12-23 06:13:50 GMT

- reply

Wow, that looks like the same edition as the one I read back in the 70s. Really should give it a re-read at some point

2024-10-07 22:01:09 GMT

Presenting the results of the first Telidon computer graphics workshop held at the University of Victoria in 40 years ...
https://telidonart.ca/emu202410/