ePub-translate

The new ePub-translate. A Python…

script to automatically translate an ePub using Google, AWS or DeepL API. It can output parallel text in columns.

As the guidance states, some tweaking for fit may be needed after translation. I assume it can handle fixed-layout ePubs, as well as the re-flowable sort.

ScreenToGif Portable – now un-shackled from .NET and FFmpeg

Possibly useful for those making short educational screen-capture tutorials for online display or bundling alongside a .PDF file. As of February 2022 the excellent open-source freeware ScreenToGif Portable no longer requires clunky extra downloads, such as Microsoft .NET Framework or the infernal FFmpeg. Currently the 68Mb ScreenToGif.2.37.1.Portable.x64.zip is the download that most Windows people will want.

ScreenToGif can also output screen recordings to .APNG (animated PNG), which may help if your audience or environment is likely to have .GIF blockers installed. Simply manually rename to .PNG for upload to blogs etc. Web browsers will still recognise it as containing multiple frames, and play it (all major browser now support animated .PNGs). ScreenToGif can set the number of loops to show.

And, yes, there is javascript to ‘play, pause, continue’ an .aPNG on a Web page. So if you have multiple tutorial steps, the reader doesn’t have to see them all animating at once. Also look at another solution.

Or for a simple HTML solution, this works and does have them all play once (assuming one loop). Then it hands over control to the user in the form of “click to replay”.

Yes, you would add math.random here as a cache-buster, but using it appears to mess up the timings of the frames in the replay. The above works fine for reloading the same image on Chrome/Firefox-based browsers, and does not cause problems with frame slippage. You’re welcome.

Note that free WordPress blogs do not support the format, and the uploaded .PNG will there become a normal file that just shows the first frame of the animation. To host and run an animated .PNG file you need your own Web space.

Popular freeware viewers such as IrfanView can (since 2016) run animated .PNG files locally on your PC.

Sadly they can’t be embedded in PDF magazines, and still animate. They can in fixed layout ePubs, but the problem there is Windows. Basically, you have to force your readers to use Thorium, as that’s the only viable ‘fixed layout + animation’ reader choice on Windows desktops.

Cultural Placemaking reports archive

Research & Reports Database – Cultural Placemaking. 61 PDF reports on ‘cultural placemaking’ (community arts orgs + local tourist board, usually). It’s a new library and will likely grow, and as such I daresay they’d welcome your submissions.

A new ‘multi paste’ UserScript

This may be useful for those who have to repetitively fill in a great many forms via a Web browser. A new browser UserScript today, for Multi paste…

Copy every word from the clipboard into multiple consecutive input fields

The copy-pasted clipboard data needs to be in simple comma-separated form. So I assume phrases or article titles would also work, if comma-separated. Those who do this sort of thing by hand, for a living, probably have better solutions. But it may be useful for someone with just 100 or so such actions to perform.

Google is set to freeze all CSEs

Google Custom Search Engines (CSEs) have a new tablet-centric Control Panel. It’s not good news. As usual with such tea-boy tinkering, it’s a big step backwards and not just in the user interface. It removes absolutely vital features needed to manage a CSE of any size.

There are two major problems with the new Control Panel.

1. A key and vital feature of the old Panel was the ability to quickly check (‘Filter’) what you had in your URL list, before adding a new URL. You’d paste or type in part of an URL, and instantly see if you already have it in the list.

This vital feature has been removed in the new Panel. There is no longer any ‘Filter’ option, anywhere.

2. I’ve also looked all over the new Control Panel, and it appears that Google have shut down the ability to export your URL list to an .XML file. This is what you had before…

This is another vital feature, which is now nowhere to be found anywhere in the new Panel.

Regrettably, the notice today is that: “The legacy Control Panel is still available but will be removed in the future.”

Thus, back up your CSE’s .XML annotations (i.e. the URL list) now, before it’s too late.

Without the vital “Filter” option, having a local .XML of the URLs will be the only way to quickly check what’s in your CSE. Indeed, it will be the only way to see the whole of what is in your CSE at all.

With the removal of these two vital features, Google is effectively set to “freeze” all larger Google CSEs. Because old URLs in a large CSE will no longer be able to be found and updated. They can’t be re-found for fixing, even if you know they’re in there (because you have the .XML spreadsheet with the full list). Thus, your CSE can no longer be maintained over time.

Blog search tools for Google

Google Search tends to dislike blogs, for some reason I’ve never quite been able to fathom. I’ve often idly thought that the dislike might be due to the common ‘sidebar link-lists’ with dead links. But surely Google’s bots have the ability to detect and ignore such sidebars when indexing? Unless, for speed/cost, that’s impossible and the bots just rip out raw text regardless of where it is on the page?

Anyway, ResearchBuzz Search Gizmos is a new suite of tools for working with Google Search and blogs, in the form of scripted workarounds. Including…

* Blog Shovel, for decades-back searches across blogging services which are still live.

* Back That Ask Up, which lets you remove the last x days or weeks from your Google News results. Doesn’t appear to work all that well. But perhaps most useful for its live working demo of sophisticated URL chaining in Google Search, effectively creating a mini Google CSE…

keyword (inurl:2022) (site:wordpress.com | site:squarespace.com | site:wix.com | site:blogger.com | site:tumblr.com | site:typepad.com)

Though if you’re going to do a lot of that then you’d be better off making a CSE, to which you could also add selected self-hosted blogs.

Show Amazon Wishlist Total

A new free UserScript to show Amazon Wishlist Totals. Show the total cost of purchasing all items on a Wish List. Possibly useful for librarians and scholars doing a ‘bulk order’ via a finalised Amazon Wish List. Although that assumes you don’t need to bag the ‘used’ book bargains on the list, from third-parties.

OAmg tested

A quick test of the new OAmg academic search tool with keywords: Tolkien earendel. Four results.

1. “Authoring the Century: J.R.R. Tolkien, the Great War and Modernism.”

Book review, though initially looks like it might be the book itself. The Google Scholar pass-through button takes me to a result that then leads to a paywall. The English Society there invites me to purchase the item for $40. However OAmg’s PaperPanda button for the item takes me to Sci-hub, which instantly gives me a pirated copy of a review in the Oxford University journal English, 2010.

2. “Le livre des contes perdus.”

French translation of the Book of Lost Tales Vol 1. DOI button gives “error DOI not found”, as do all DOI links on OAmg, currently. “Download via Google” button is currently a template search unrelated to the search result. The Google Scholar button passes the title through to Scholar, which in this case is not that useful. You’re not going to find full-text for the French translation of the Book of Lost Tales via Scholar. There’s no PaperPanda link leading to Libgen.

3. “De Cynewulf a Tolkien: Earendel y las imagenes de la luz salvadora”.

2011 paper from an Argentine journal. DOI button gives “error DOI not found”, as before. “Download via Google” button is kaput, as before, though theoretically “a title as a phrase” pass-through to a Google search would be useful. The Google Scholar pass-through does get me the full-text link, on a university repository.

4. Tarscay’s “Chaoskampf , Salvation, and Dragons: Archetypes in Tolkien’s Earendel” which I know is free at Mythlore.

There’s a huge abstract on the OAmg page (each article/item gets one page), which is useful. DOI button gives “error DOI not found”, as before. The pass-through to Google Scholar gets the link to the full-text.

---

Not bad on basic numbers, then, on this micro-test. A 50% full-text delivery rate, and 75% if you count the pirated item. Other quick searches suggest that PaperPanda links (I’d never heard of them before) are all over the results, and the ones I tested all went to Sci-hub.

A large amount of open papers that ‘should be there’ for this Tolkien earendel search are not there. OAmg only claim a bare 200 million in total, via combining the outputs of all the usual API-offering aggregators.

A search for Mongolian folk song suggests the semantics is good, but also seems to indicate that the Chinese state aggregator is slipping in somehow, though CNKI or similar are not listed on the list of data sources used.

Still, full marks for chutzpah and energy. It feels like it could shape up to be a useful discovery tool, in the sense of “now I know this exists” rather than “now I know this exists, and I just downloaded the full-text”. But they have to: i) make the DOI pass-through work, which given the flakiness of DOIs is probably easier said than done; ii) hope that Google Search doesn’t throw a fit and block them when the title pass-throughs actually start working; and iii) throw Sci-hub piracy overboard (which seems as simple as un-plugging PaperPanda).

I’d say the value here lies in the possibility of timeliness and time-saving. Offer a $20-a-year custom monitoring service for new items of interest that happen to pop up across the 24 or so databases.

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…