JASPER

The DOAJ has announced JASPER – preserving open access journals forever, a new project. They’re not immediately going to hoover all DOAJ-listed journals into a mountain-covered mega-server, though, and in Phase One an editor has to ask to be included…

The criteria for eligibility for Phase One are that:

– your journal is indexed in DOAJ
– it does not charge any fees of any kind
– it is not archived in a preservation service

Please email preservation[@]doaj[.]org to register your interest in being involved or to be kept up-to-date with developments.

In the tab lab…

Power-bloggers may be used to making a folder of Web browser bookmarks containing 30 or 40 on-topic sites or forums that have no RSS. Right-click on this folder, “Open All” and they all spring open in new tabs. Then you quickly flick through and close each tab, if there is nothing new to see. Only takes a few minutes. Also useful for keeping an eye out for rare used books, vintage gear, 70% sales and the like.

But it can be annoying to rapidly click through these tabs only to find that… some tabs have not loaded or only partially loaded. Not because you don’t have the bandwidth or the PC RAM, but because the site has some kind of “visitor not present, is probably a bot or a scraper” thing going on. No visitor on a current tab = no main content block loading.

In which case the following UserScripts may be of interest…

* Block Visibility Detections.

* PreventPageVisibility.

* And if those don’t work, Idle Detection Bypasser… “gives a fake active response” when the Web browser is queried by the site for tab focus/activity.

Added to JURN

Buckingham Journal of Language and Linguistics, The

Journal of Science Fiction and Philosophy

Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art

Volupte : Interdisciplinary Journal Of Decadence Studies

React

React, an interesting new academic development in visual search. It works on the reverse-search principle: pick a picture, and see similar pictures in the results.

The prototype limits results to a couple of the UK’s larger national digitized art collections (National Archives, the V&A) and leavens these with the Edinburgh Botanic Garden for some flowers and curious pods and suchlike. An AI assists the “does it look like this…?” sorting.

Paper to HTML

The Allen Institute for AI has a new prototype Academic Paper to HTML converter, as an online service.

There are of course already polished online services such as a IDR’s PDF to HTML5, but they limit the number and size of uploads.

Such conversions can also be done on a desktop PC via QuarkXPress 2021, which does quick pixel-perfect HTML5 conversion natively and (if you wait for a Black Friday discount) can be had for about £180 on a perpetual licence. Its direct competitor Adobe InDesign is subscription and needs a further expensive plugin (also subscription) to do HTML5 output. Many old-timers will throw up their hands in horror at the name ‘QuarkXPress’, but it’s no longer your grandpa’s creaky old DTP software.

How to turn off the new file-picker widget in Opera

In the latest version of Opera desktop Web browser, a widget pops up whenever you want to upload a file to WordPress or a service. It adds an extra distraction and a ‘dismiss’ click, on the way to seeing your actual Windows Explorer view and your target file. This unwanted pop-up-like widget is going to become very tiresome. So let’s turn if off…

1. Go to Menu | Settings.

2. In the top-right search-box, search for “Show pop-up with clipboard and recent downloads when uploading files”, or just a fragment such as “pop-up with clipboard” will do it.

3. Turn this feature’s control-button off, via the blue button-slider.

That’s it. Exit the browser’s Settings, and your Opera browser should be back to normal.

Pinterest, begone

New and useful for picture researchers of various types, a UserScript to “Hide pinterest.com in Google Images” search results. Uses a simple ‘if result contains pinterest.com, do not display’ CSS method. The script is easy to tweak and as such it could be adapted for other image sites that you find are verbose/useless (e.g. Alamy and its ilk), without the need for a full-blown URL blocker add-on.

Why kill Pinterest? Because it poisons search-engines. 70% of the time you can never actually get to the image shown in the results.

UserStyle to UserScript Converter for Windows

Stanley Lim’s free UserStyle to UserScript Converter as a Windows .EXE file. Version 1.5, 2017. Download, unzip, drill down to ..\CSStoUserScriptConverter-1.5\CSStoUserScript\bin\.. and run.

My test-convert of a two column layout I cooked up a while back. Works fine. Although the column-splitting method used may be Opera / Chrome specific, as well as the conversion.

eTools is especially useful now that DuckDuckGo searches turn into irrelevant mush 60% of the time.