Music Library Association Publications

21 ebooks, newly free online via the Music Library Association Publications section and hosted on Archive.org. Including the 2002 Scarecrow Press guide to Music Inspired by Art.

Release: PDF Index Generator 3.2

PDF Index Generator has a new version, 3.2. There’s a video on what’s new for this relatively easy back-of-the-book index creator. Which I use and which I’d say is the best-of-breed below $100. It’s the first release for nearly a year, and adds among other things…

* ignore accents (e.g. cafe and café)

* disregard punctuation in words (e.g. the olde spelling of were-wolf vs. the modern spelling of werewolf, or Paris and Paris!)

* the user can automerge found words “if they exist in the same page only”

… and more, plus bug fixes. The 32-bit is still available alongside the main 64-bit, and it still supports Windows back to XP. No change in price or the one-time purchase.

Note also the code…

Block the auto-suggest dropdowns in Scholar

Block the auto-suggest dropdowns in the Google Scholar search-box, if they’re not useful for you. These are for uBlock Origin…

A dated idea

How about an AI to automatically date a vintage photo, by the cut of the dresses and hats to be seen in it, and/or the cars and vehicles to be seen?

Display the total time for a YouTube playlist

My Web browser UserScript for displaying ‘YouTube playlist time’ has stopped working today. But inexplicably the old broken UserScript, which I kept installed but de-activated, now works again. Even though it hasn’t been updated. So I guess Google must have reverted some code on YouTube.

No longer working: YouTube Playlist Time Length

Working: YouTube Playlist Time

Of course, Google might switch things back again. If one UserScript fails to work, try the other.

Update: Sept 2022, it’s now YouTube Playlist Time Length that’s working again.

Google I/O 2022

Four items which caught my eye at the recent Google I/O 2022…

* Google Translate adds 24 new languages, including… “Lingala, used by over 45 million people across Central Africa”.

* Google is expanding fuel-saving routing suggestions for Google Maps, offering suggestions in places not previously covered.

* There will be end-to-end encryption for SMS on the coming Android 13.

* Virtual payment cards for Android and Chrome, by this summer. Presumably going beyond Google Play, and (my guess) probably requiring the new end-to-end encryption to activate.

Google Searching Tags Box

A new UserScript Google Searching Tags Box. For repeat searches, add tags to the Google Search main page. The code looks clean to me, and it should work, though I couldn’t get it working at all. Even with element-blockers turned off and the page force-reloaded. But this problem might just be due to a cache that’s reluctant to refresh.

Another way to add a frequently used search modifier — such as site:www.yoursearchybigsite.com — is to use a right-click snippet added via a Web browser add-on. I use Paste Email, which can be configured to paste any snippet of text from a right-click of the mouse.

A new large-scale study of academic search databases

A new large-scale study of large academic search options, 30 of which are publicly available to be searched. Yet even among these “openly accessible systems” searchers will…

not find that open discovery — the search and access of scholarly content via freely available resources — is possible.

Sadly they did not test JURN, presumably because the required “query hit counts” could not be mined from results in an automated way.

Of the tools offered by large publishers it was found that the…

journal [discovery] platforms of the large publishers still have open access rates in single-digit percentages … open discovery is still very limited

More on JP2s in Windows

I updated my 2017 Freeware: JP2 thumbnail viewer for Windows post. Some users need guidance on getting the IrfanView “Thumbnails” view open, to see a folder of thumbnailed .JP2s. So that’s been added.

I also took another look for a solution more native to and seamless in Windows, and tried three options. But with no luck on any. These are now detailed at the foot of the post. It appears that there is still no viable way to have Windows Explorer show .JP2 thumbnails.

.JP2 is important as the main hi-res format for the Archive.org site.

Put a Python in your Web browser

Embed Python scripts in HTML with PyScript…

embed Python programs directly in HTML pages and execute them within the browser without any server-based requirements

What could possibly go wrong?