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, or the cars 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.

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?

New category for posts: ‘Regex’

A new category for posts on this blog, Regex. I’ve gone back and retrospectively tagged old posts with it.

We need a simple cheap way to offer PDF ‘snippet’ search and purchase

A WordPress plugin is needed that lets small publishers and copyright-owners easily and cheaply offer a Google Books-like experience. This would allow public searching across a set of uploaded PDFs, but the actual PDFs would not be made public.

The only thing being served from search would be Google Books-like snippets of text and page. Something more or less like this in terms of the elements… snippet, issue title, cover thumbnail, page thumbnail with snippet location highlighted…

A typical use-case would be, for instance, a set of 50 hobbyist magazine back-issues. Cheese Making and Makers magazine, 1990-2002, that sort of thing. Old, but still valuable in terms of the wealth of information. The rights owner is not a huge mega-publisher, and may indeed have inherited the rights on the death of a family member. All they want to do is ‘scan and sell’, as simply and cheaply as possible and without recurring costs other than the web-space.

Searchers, having satisfied themselves via search snippets and a TOCs preview that their discovered magazine or journal is of obvious use to their specific needs, could then buy a bundle of the back-issues.

There must be a great many niche, trade and ‘vernacular’ sets of back-issues out there, that might be winkled out into public availability if such a simple secure tool were available.

Cleared for launch…

Hurrah! After numerous support emails and hassle, my new jurn.link domain has now been ICAAN verified within the 15-day verification period. It should now stay online for the foreseeable future.