Monday, December 22, 2008

2:42:42 PM     Upcoming Events at HPL Get Ready for New Year's December 30 2:00 pm Fun projects to help kids celebrate New Year’s Eve: Horns and noisemakers, Kid Art Calendars, Fortunetelling Party Balloons and more. Please call the Youth Services Department at 231-722-7276 x 230. Gratitude Steel Band January 8, 2009 The Gratitude Steel Band will present “Jazz Around the World”. They provide a musical adventure that lets people experience hands-on participation. This free concert will be held at the Muskegon Museum of Art and is supported in part through a grant from the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs and the Michigan Humanities Council. For more information call 231-722-7276. 1:30:46 PM     Digital TV Switch for Analog Cable and Low Power Stations Last week I blogged about the digital television transition and I'm back on it this week with a new development. To keep this simple as possible, let's summarize what we have stated so far. Most over the air broadcast stations will transfer from analog to digital-only broadcast on February 17, 2009. If you have a digital TV, you will be able to receive broadcast channels over-the-air. Those of you with analog TV's will need a converter box to get the digital stations over-the-air. You can this letter to Congress, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, who represents 90 percent of cable companies, told Congress that cable companies were halting their transition until March to avoid customer confusion. It seems that in some instances analog cable subscribers using analog TV's will need a different converter box, which will be supplied through their cable company. In the letter the cable companies say they will provide this converter equipment for free to subscribers with analog TV's from March to June. Remember that NCTA does not represent all cable TV providers so you should contact your cable company for details on your particular situation. As a commenter pointed out last week, not all broadcast stations will have to transfer to digital-only broadcast on February 19. There are four classes of broadcast TV stations: "full-power," "low-power," "Class A" and "translator" The latter three, which are for local programming and extension channels that rebroadcast "full-power" station programs in remote areas, do not have to meet the digital TV transition deadline in February. The FCC will be establish a deadline for them in the near future and the coupons for the digital TV converter boxes stop going out at the end of March. They recommomend you play it safe and get a coupon. - Jake [Gov Gab: Your U.S. Government Blog] 1:28:07 PM     WhichBook Will Help Fill Your Reading List [Books] . WhichBook is a web-based book suggestion engine. Unlike the site What Should I Read Next?, WhichBook doesn't ask for a list of books you have already read. At WhichBook you use a series of sliders to indicate how much of a given element you want in your reading. Looking for funny happy sex? Peg the sliders for each to the maximum and see what WhichBook kicks out. Lists of books are generated and displayed on the right side of the screen for your browsing. For readers in the UK there is a "borrow" button in the upper corner which will link you into the public library system in the UK. Strangely the designers of the site seem to have missed out on an enormously profitable and useful feature: they could have easily linked the titles of the generated books into the Amazon.com system making it easier for people to read more about and buy the books. For another book recommendation service that uses writing styles as opposed to reading list comparison, check out BookLamp. WhichBook [via Eat, Read and Be Merry] [Lifehacker] 1:24:08 PM

© Copyright 2009 Jocelyn Shaw. Last update: 1/2/2009; 2:24:07 PM. Photo curtesy of Marjorie O'Brien