Read aloud on Archive.org

New on Archive.org, a nicely revamped scrub/zoom line, now looking much smarter. It also has an additional icon to launch a read-aloud voice, which starts from the top of the current page, visually highlighting the block of text currently being read. The voice does a fairly good job, about as good as TTS gets at present without some dedicated voice-AI chip on your PC motherboard. There currently seems to be no option to choose your own TTS voice, though you can slow it or speed it up.

WebSatchel

Fancy creating your own personal Wayback Machine (Archive.org)? WebSatchel is a free add-on for Chrome-based Web browsers. When you bookmark in your Web browser… “it creates a full copy of the webpage” on the WebSatchel Cloud service.

Users only get 1Gb storage for free, though. A test-save to PDF, of a fairly regular front-page of a robust blog, weighed in at 2.5Mb. So, at a guess, the free 1Gb might let you save around 350 pages. Pages are indexed in full-text (“every word on a page”) and made keyword-searchable for the user. Making it perhaps useful for a fairly small time-limited research project. I don’t know how easy it might be to “delete and start over” on a new project, or if your 1Gb can only be filled up once.

An additional search option, for searching stable sites as part of a small time-limited project, would be to create a Google CSE. A CSE would give you a wider and perhaps more serendipitous “catch”, and give your search Google’s leading relevancy-ranking. However, so far as I’m aware, there is no one-click bookmarking-like way to add a new site into a Google CSE. Perhaps there should be.

Experimental Musical Instruments

Now on Archive.org, the complete run of the journal Experimental Musical Instruments, 1985-99. April 1989 has what appears to be only article ever written on making clay bells capable of good musical tones. You might have thought that there would be an entire cottage industry on making and understanding clay bells by now, among acoustic researchers, musicologists and crafts makers. But a search of Scholar and JURN, Google Books and Amazon, reveals absolutely nothing. “Ceramic bells” likewise. There’s a groundbreaking thesis topic there, if anyone wants it.

Fivver blocks legitimate academic book-conversion services

Fivver appears to have swept away legitimate offers of ebook conversion, in its recent robo-crackdown on plagiarism services. In this case, the offer to convert from Word .DOC to linked Kindle ebook — with all footnotes intact and working as round-trip hyperlinks, for sale by the author on Amazon.

Sumatra PDF upgrades its core ‘mupdf’ engine

Its been a long while since Sumatra PDF had an update. The last 3.1.2 was in 2016, and the new 3.2 is March 2020. Among other things the new Sumatra PDF has updated to a new faster version of its core engine…

“upgraded core PDF parsing rendering to latest version of mupdf. Faster, less bugs.”

One if its slight drawbacks has been its slowness to render some PDFs on opening. Some users will be familiar with the message given while waiting for the render. As such, an upgrade of the core underlying ‘mupdf’ engine seems worth the slight ‘faff’ of configuring Sumatra PDF once again for magazine reading. Config is required, since such settings are not persistent across version installs. Here’s how to make the required changes…

1. Under Menu | Settings | Options, set “Book View” and “Fit Page”, and while you’re there you may want to uncheck updates…

2. Restart the software by loading a magazine PDF. Check the View menu to make sure you are now in “Book View”.

3. The last step is to get rid of the gutter (i.e. the gap between pages, in double-page spreads). A gap is not desirable on magazines featuring art, nature, gardens etc as these will show double-page spreads which assume widescreen viewing rather than single-page tablet viewing. The gutter gap can be easily fixed by going to advanced settings…

And there changing 4 4 to 0 0…

Save, restart the software, and you’re done.

I see the software also has a manga reading mode, but I have not tested that yet. Manga is the Japanese name for comics. These are read in a particular way, and so presumably the setting is to run the PDF in that manner.

PDF Index Generator 2.9

PDF Index Generator 2.9 is a new February 2020 release of the best sub-$100 back-of-the-book automatic indexing software. It very usefully adds automatic footnote indexing, and…

The Windows edition of the program now comes with Java embedded inside it, so you don’t have to worry about installing the right Java edition to run the program.

Find your lost LOLcats

Archive.org has a new search option, from the search-box on the main page…

It’s about as slow as you’d expect, given that’s it’s now been put in front of the general public, but it works. Search results currently look like this…

Also, as you can see, radio and TV ‘news’ transcripts.

Snazzy map images

Snazzy offers a library of customisable live Google Maps interfaces, such as Google Maps without Labels. The service has now added a new feature, which appears to enhance a 1000px screenshot with 3x AI upscaling.

You could do the same with a screenshot utility and Gigapixel AI, but I’d guess that Snazzy is training its AI on map screenshots and small text. Gigapixel AI gives rather poor results on small text.

A new unified UKRI website

UKRI write…

“We are creating a unified UKRI website that brings together the existing research council, Innovate UK and Research England websites. If you would like to be involved in its development let us know“. They will be “testing through 2020”.

Linked to prison

Japan will make it a crime to download… “academic texts from the Internet. The new law will take effect on January 1, 2021.” Two years in prison and an $18k fine, for public “pasting hyperlinks of illegal websites”. The Japanese parliament passed the new law on Friday.

One imagines there will be mass civil disobedience over such a disproportionate law. Doing things like posting links to the most obscure Elsevier textbook freely available on Archive.org, all over official government websites, and then publicly daring the authorities to prosecute.