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Category Archives: JURN tips and tricks

Block the Google Doodle from search-results pages

15 Monday Mar 2021

Posted by David Haden in JURN tips and tricks, JURN's Google watch

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Google is trying to creep its Google Doodle visual-messaging, often unwanted and usually distracting, into the top-left corner of the actual search-results page. Block it in the Web browser with the UBlock Origin addon, and this simple filter command pasted into your custom ‘My Filters list’…

http://www.google.com##.BA0A6c

If your Web browser insists on adding http:// to the www. bit of the above address (and thus making it a clickable link) then remove this from the copied line. It should look like this…

There’s also a No Google Doodle UserScript, to remove the doodle from the main landing page.

One-click to remove a verbose site from Google

11 Thursday Mar 2021

Posted by David Haden in How to improve academic search, JURN tips and tricks

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One-click to remove a verbose site from Google Search results, a new UserScript. Preset for Wikipedia, but the URL can be easily changed to be any verbose website. It should ideally be a website that you usually regularly want to remove from search results, but sometimes want to keep. The script is thus more flexible than a regular list-based site blocker.

It works by re-running the current search, but only an instant after some regex has cunningly inserted the command    into the URL.


Also, yes, I’m aware that my ‘add JURN as a link to Google Search’ UserScript has stopped working. Google has re-labelled the divs on the text links just below the search box. A similar script that allows the current search to be passed to Scholar has also stopped working, as have several similar menu scripts. I’m waiting for one of these scripts to update, and thus to show me how it needs to be fixed.

Twitter to Nitter

28 Thursday Jan 2021

Posted by David Haden in JURN tips and tricks, Spotted in the news

≈ Leave a comment

There’s a useful and unique new UserScript. In search results, always redirect the links on Twitter hits to Nitter. Useful if you’re not a Twitter user, but may occasionally want to peek at a perhaps-useful Twitter hit in search.

If the main Nitter is being “rate limited” by Twitter, there’s another script that’s a Nitter Instance Switcher and offers a link to a random mirror site.

A full Instance (mirror) list is here at GitHub, if you need to find a few fresh ones.

Sweep away the breadcrumbs

23 Saturday Jan 2021

Posted by David Haden in JURN tips and tricks, Spotted in the news

≈ Leave a comment

Got nasty breadbrumbs in your Google Search, again? An update to the free UserScript Google Search restore URLs (undo breadcrumbs) fixes that, restoring full human-readable URL paths in your search results. Having URL paths visible is vital for instantly detecting and blocking spam, something which Google’s mega-mind AI seems unable to learn to do. After a while, the experienced searcher learns to spot the half-dozen common types of spam URLs. An obvious example…

A garbled hash forms part of the URL + an .it domain + a movie ‘download’ offer = definitely robo-spam and likely dangerous too. Why is it even in Google Search, and for search terms that have nothing to do with Thundercats?

Seamless height-maps for the whole world

31 Thursday Dec 2020

Posted by David Haden in JURN tips and tricks, Spotted in the news

≈ Leave a comment

Seamless and free height-maps for the whole world, now at Tangram Heightmapper. It’s very easy to use. Once you’ve dived down to your location, and exported such a map, these height maps can be imported into 3D software. There they can then be used as the basis for making new elevated terrain maps, and as pretty as you care to make them.

How to use…

1. Go to Google Maps. Find your chosen location, and position it. Copy the current Google Maps URL to Notepad.

2. Now use this Google Maps URL co-ordinate data to craft a new URL for the Height Mapper. An example Google Maps URL would look like…

../maps/place/Your_place/@53.0220219,-2.2297826,12z/

Therefore the needed Tangrams Height Mapper URL would be…

https://tangrams.github.io/heightmapper/#12/53.0220/-2.2297

The #12 appears to be the zoom-level, with #13 zooming the satellite down another mile or so nearer to the ground. It appears to correspond with the ,12z bit of the Google Maps URL. It thus seems someone could easily cook up an URL-converter UserScript for Google Maps, but for now it needs to be done manually.

3. Paste your newly-crafted URL into Tangrams Height Mapper. Allow time to load. Once you’re happy, press “Export” to get the heightmap in PNG.

If needed, zoom-in further and grab multiple adjacent sections for export, then stitch these with the free Microsoft ICE. Although this does not appear to add detail. It just makes the final image larger.

4. View in your chosen 3D landscape software by loading up your new height map. For a quick look, the Aerialod freeware is simple and will do the trick.

You will then likely find the height map has “terraces” (aka “stairsteps” or “steps” or “zippers” or stepped “waterlines” or “tidelines”). These look like the tiny lines following the contours of a drawn map. These are not actually drawn-on contour-lines, but rather the unwanted artefacts of the relatively low-resolution heightmap. If you want high-resolution heightmaps you generally have to take out a mortgage to afford them.

Seen here in Aerialod, this “stepping” effect is actually not unappealing when rendered crisply. Though here with a bit too much of the Minecraft game about it. You can hide this effect somewhat by switching Aerialod to display in ‘Poly’ or ‘Surf’ mode, but these modes make the terrain look like a plaster-cast and seem far from ideal.

5. Most will then want to find a method of smoothing these tiny terraces, but without removing too much detail from the real bits of the terrain. Sadly it appears there’s there’s not really any way to do that, without smushing the other details, other than to cover the terrain with a satellite map or apply textures.

One simple free option that I find works for mesh export is Height Map to OBJ. This gives a smoother 3D mesh as it exports, though also regrettably smushing fine details, rather than trying to smooth the height-map pixels first. It’s old but, like most good Windows freeware, still works and it will get rid of the ‘terraces’. Just note that the height maps you feed it must have exactly square dimensions. On import of the resulting OBJ into 3D software you will may have to re-set the scaling, to something like 700% on the Y axis.

With a vastly steeper learning-curve, TerreSculptor is now free and will also import a height map and export an OBJ.

Time for YouTube

13 Sunday Dec 2020

Posted by David Haden in JURN tips and tricks

≈ Leave a comment

There are two useful YouTube addons for wrangling YouTube, without needing the services of some third-party online outfit in Whereizitagin.

Youtube Playlist Total Duration is a UserScript that shows the total duration of the playlist. Useful for those who need to know how long a software-training or hardware-setup playlist will take to view. Tested and working, but note that you must re-load the page to see the correct time for the playlist.

Got a slow presenter, and need your learning playlist running a little faster? The Chrome browser addon Any Youtube Playback Speed does the job nicely, and with fine increments on a simple slider. Again, tested and working.

Small changes re: time and speed, but both are very useful.

How to resize pages in a squished PDF

25 Wednesday Nov 2020

Posted by David Haden in JURN tips and tricks

≈ Leave a comment

Sometimes you get a PDF where the page is “squished”, as seen here…

Bad, some dunderhead saved the pages with slightly wrong proportions and didn’t notice.

Good, as it should be.

It can also happen when ebooks files are being bulk converted to .PDF files. It’s often especially noticeable where there is artwork with faces. The slightly “squished” or “stretched” result is locked in a PDF file and is difficult to change. It’s no use trying PDF tools that only scale a page proportionally, or simply crop the page, or will re-print from U.S. Letter size to UK A4 size etc. Because you only need to change each page along one dimension, not along both.

There are three or four online tools for fixing this in a PDF, though that’s not much help if you have a 200Mb PDF and a very slow upload speed, or are offline. Or have 50 such files to process. Or if your business has a mission-sensitive document you’d rather not sent to Whereizitagin. The full paid Adobe Acrobat can also do the repair though in a clunky way, from Adobe Acrobat DC (2015, not to be confused with Adobe Reader) onward, via fiddling around with Preflight and following a convoluted recipe.

Are there any fast Windows desktop options? I found and tested three working possibilities, one free.

1. The free and trusty Irfanview can open PDFs (with the free Ghostscript and free plugins pack installed). This combo can together open and page through PDFs. Irfanview can even resize the first page in an unconstrained way, so you can work out what your re-size dimensions need to be. Sadly it can’t then flow this resizing over to all subsequent pages. Instead it can at least automatically save out all the pages as .PNGs or .JPGs, then you’d open their output folder and batch resize them with Irfanview. Then you’d re-compile them back to a .PDF file, or zip them into into a Comic Book .CBZ file.

2. Apex PDF Page Resizer did the job easily and perfectly, although it’s expensive at $20 via FastSpring. Over-priced, for a one-trick-pony that won’t be used too often. There’s a 30-day trial with only a light watermark.

3. Advanced PDF Tools at $38. Twice the price it should be, but it does the job after a quick bit of fiddling with the settings. As you can see here, you scale the Page Content by a % and then pad in pt’s to accommodate the added width or height. It’s a bit more hit-and-miss than Apex.

As you can see, you’re getting many more features than Apex PDF Page Resizer. But the very fast output speed and exactly the same file-size in output suggests it is working in much the same way as Apex, probably via a .NET Windows GUI that gives a pipe into several key Ghostscript switches.

In both, the settings are then run across all pages, and a new repaired .PDF is swiftly saved out. It strikes me that such a relatively slight change could be one way of detecting a leaker in an organisation. Give each person a .PDF copy with very slightly widened or lengthened pages, such that each imperceptibly changed .PDF is unique to one person.

I looked hard but could not find anything with a GUI for Windows that hooked into Ghostscript’s resizing and scaling switches in the same way as the above two, but for free. pdfScale: Bash Script to Scale and Resize PDFs using Ghostscript came closest (see the scripts at the end) and may interest some.

If you just want to crop pages to a user-defined rectangle, including instances where you have several columns on the same page, the free Briss is well recommended.


(If you have a related problem, a PDF that shows the curved pages of a book as photographed from above with a hand-held camera, see my recent How to auto-correct curved book pages post)

How to delete search-box auto-suggests in the Opera browser

13 Friday Nov 2020

Posted by David Haden in JURN tips and tricks

≈ Leave a comment

Well, here’s a handy trick for users of the Opera Web browser, and possibly of any other Chrome-based browser. Do you have a lingering and slightly annoying search-box autosuggest, which occurs on non-search websites? Such as on one of your WordPress blogs…

If so, then it’s no use searching in Opera’s Settings | Advanced | Privacy | Autofill. Only things like home mailing addresses and passwords live back there.

What you do is move your mouse cursor down to highlight (but not click) the offending suggestion, when it occurs in normal use. Then it’s hands-off your mouse, to press SHIFT and then DEL (delete) simultaneously on your keyboard. This removes the offending suggestion.

Get an RSS feed for any YouTube channel

31 Saturday Oct 2020

Posted by David Haden in JURN tips and tricks

≈ Leave a comment

YouTube has removed the ‘Export RSS feeds list’ option from your Subscribed Channels List. It used to be that it was at the foot of the page. The link to this feature is now nowhere to be found.

For the time being the RSS feeds are still there and working, however. A standard subscription URL is in the form of…

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCralF3lNmSNYFaFtul5apuw

.. and a handy bit of UserScript reveals the current YouTube RSS feed URL is in the form of…

http://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCralF3lNmSNYFaFtul5apuw

Therefore, you go to your Subscribed Channels List page, and there use LinkClump (or similar) to copy out just the channel URLs and then in Notepad…

Search: /channel/

Replace: /feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=

You then have a list of RSS feeds for your subscriptions.

Working Excel spreadsheet: Take a list of home-page URLs, harvest the HTML, extract a snippet of data from each

11 Sunday Oct 2020

Posted by David Haden in JURN tips and tricks

≈ 1 Comment

I’m pleased to present a free ‘ISSN harvester’ for Excel 2007 or higher.

What you need: You have a long list of home-page URLs, one per line. You want a small snippet of data captured from each HTML page. The target data is not in any kind of repeating HTML table or tag, and could be anywhere on each page.

Usage: A long list of home-page URLs is pasted into the first column. The sheet then checks each URL in turn, and also extracts their HTML source into an adjacent cell. A formula in the end column then looks at the captured HTML and extracts the first instance of “ISSN” and any 70 following characters. Where no result is found, the formula leaves a general label as a placeholder.

Download: ISSN-and-data-checker-working.xlsm

Works in Windows and Excel 2007. May require the user to have Internet Explorer installed. Tested and working fine on an 800+ URL list. Each URL just captures the loaded page, not the entire website.

It should be adaptable to capture any snippet of data, just vary and replace the formula. Theoretically, you could also add extra columns to capture other data from the same HTML, such as “i s s n” or “eISSN”.


Credit: This is derived and expanded from the free “Bulk URL status checker in Excel sheet”, which checked a list of home-page URLs for 404s, and also rather usefully extracted each page of HTML to a cell while it was about it. I would have had no idea how to set up that ‘HTML per cell’ bit, without his working example. That spreadsheet was kindly shared on the TechTweaks blog by ‘Conscience’ in April 2017. Here is has been adapted by myself to also extract data.

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