At 2:12 PM +0000 11/7/97, Mark Vang wrote:
>Dear Museum-L'ers,
>
>A client of mine has set up an Internet kiosk in a local library.  The retail
>trackball they specified was decimated the first day of use.  If you use an
>industrial strangth trackball in exhibits which you feel performs well, please
>send information on manufacturer and cost.
>
>Additionally, if you have experience with software used to restrict Internet
>access at public access Internet stations, please let me know what software
>you would recommend, or which programs you would recommend against.
>
Mark,

As for an industrial strength trackball, you may want to contact one of our
people in the exhibits department. Daniel Weismann purchased an excellent
trackball a few years ago, although there were some problems with it
working on a Mac and a standalone version of a MacroMedia Director program.
In that case, the cursor was allowed to travel far off the right side of
the screen and a simple mouse click would let the user dump the program and
go to the finder, which is not good.

Daniel's e-mail is: [log in to unmask]

As for a program to restrict Internet access, it depends upon HOW
restrictive you want to be. If you want to restrict users to one site,
there is a program called WebWhacker that goes out and downloads files from
pre-specified sites then runs the files from a local directory. We are
looking into some of the push technologies that would allow us to serve
computers in exhibits from a local server. I am familiar with Pointcast,
although there are several others out there such as Castanet and Channels.

john

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
John Chadwick, network administrator
New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science
1801 Mountain Road NW
Albuquerque, NM 87104
[log in to unmask],     http://www.nmmnh-abq.mus.nm.us
phone: (505) 841-2843 FAX (505) 841-2866 Cellular (505) 264-4460
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=