Tucows is burger-ed

The Tucows site has closed its doors and shipped the famous cows off to the local burger-flipping joint. In the early years of the broadband Internet the Tucows site was a go-to-place for desktop PC freeware for Windows, and well-known for its “two cows” graphic logo.

Key ongoing alternatives for users of desktop PCs and classic Windows freeware in 2021 are…

Softpedia. The usual go-to, found from a general shallow-search search-engine such as DuckDuckGo. Mixes trials with well-documented freeware, but it’s obvious which is which.

Lo4D, I rarely use it, but it’s useful if you want a second opinion on a Softpedia find.

MajorGeeks. The best for tracking freeware on a daily or weekly basis, re: what’s new or updated. Also very comprehensive. Just avoid the scattered text ads for downloads of the Malwarebytes software, which is ‘limpet-ware’ — it does what it says, but is a lead-in to a purchase and is extremely difficult to remove once installed.

OldApps is also useful if you need a specific older version. Despite the name, it’s classic Windows desktop software and not mobile apps. It also has some Mac pages.

GitHub Search can be useful, if you know what functionality you’re looking for and the precise terminology. Such as Scan Tailor Experimental 2015 for automatic de-curving of photos of opened book pages.

Being a bit of a connoisseur of rare or overlooked graphics and utility freeware for the Windows desktop, I also know that many nice bits of freeware never reach such sites, and reside on the maker site or some specialist software-specific directory like Paint.NET Plugins Index. Sometimes the latest updates from a solo maker are only ever posted on forum threads, with Dropbox links, and that’s the last you hear of him. In such cases, a search with a deep-search engine such as Google is often needed, as such recent or forum-buried things are usually not highly ranked by the search-engines. Yippy can also be useful for finding free scripts.

Sweep away the breadcrumbs

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?

On the cards

The leading graphics-card developer NVIDIA has a new NVIDIA NGC catalog that…

provides GPU-optimized AI software for data engineers, data scientists, developers, and DevOps teams” and these are “optimized to run on NVIDIA GPU cloud instances, such as the Amazon EC2 P4d instance.

Apparently free, though the December press-release called it a “Storefront”. Presumably the modules are free, but you then pay to have them pondered by Amazon’s super-brain.

Seamless height-maps for the whole world

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 I find that work for mesh export is Height Map to OBJ. This smooths the 3D mesh as it exports, also smushing fine details regretttably, 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.

PDF Index Generator 3.0

Slipped out at the end of August, PDF Index Generator 3.0, the leading back-of-the-book index maker. French, German, or Italian translations; speed boosts resulting from memory fixes; a new 32-bit version for wider use around the world; bug-fixes and UI fixes; Java 9 integrated.

Venezuelan Scielo – URL change

It appears that the Venezuelan Scielo at www. scielo.org.ve/ is now just ve. scielo.org/ DuckDuckGo still indexes the old URL, which it seems no longer works. I get a pass-through to the Wayback Machine at Archive.org on hitting such dead URLs, though that’s the result of my browser plugin.

Google Search is indexing the new URL only, which works. When Google Search changes, it’s usually a sign that the old URL really is kaput.

It’s probably best to keep an eye on the other Scielo aggregators, to see if they make the same change and thus break older URL paths and Web links. They don’t appear to have made such a change, so far.

My guess would be that the .ve change could be a result of buying one of those ‘vanity’ fixes which remove the www. in an URL. After some hard-sell from a salesman such fixes usually turn out to be very expensive to maintain, and after a time the URL often defaults back to normal.

In the meantime JURN is also directly indexing Venezuela’s journals at produccioncientificaluz.org and saber.ucv.ve/ojs/ and erevistas.saber.ula.ve. The nation is starving, but their journals are still online and reachable for now. The latter two appear to have different sets of journals, despite being from the same University of the Andes.

Yahoo Groups to close

The Yahoo empire continues to crash and burn. The old Yahoo Groups will shut down completely on 15th December 2020. If you had a Group there with content that’s still useful, now’s the time to back it up and upload the .ZIP file to Archive.org in perpetuity. Although I imagine that Archive.org itself may already be ‘on the job’ in that respect.

Two vital Google Search UserScripts, fixed

Newly fixed vital UserScripts for use with Google Search:

Google Search Sidebar

Google Search restore URLs (undo breadcrumbs). This restores readable URL-paths in search results, a vital aid to avoiding the growing amount of spam in Google Search.

Add the following to the top of the Breadcrumbs script, to stop it working on Google Books.


// @exclude http*://www.google.*tbm=bks*
// @exclude http*://www.google.*.*tbm=bks*


Subject to change

“Subject indexing in humanities: a comparison between a local university repository and an international bibliographic service”, Journal of Documentation, May 2020.

… the use of subject index terms in humanities journal articles [is] not supported in either the world’s largest commercial abstract and citation database Scopus or the local repository of a public university in Sweden. The indexing policies in the two services do not seem to address the needs of humanities scholars for highly granular subject index terms with appropriate facets; no controlled vocabularies for any humanities discipline are used whatsoever.

A robust fix for reaching the Classic Editor, for free WordPress.com blogs

I’m pleased to see that the vital WordPress.com edit post redirects UserScript has updated, and it handles the current changed arrangements at the WordPress.com free blogs. It’s working fine for all functions (start new post, edit post from side-link on existing post, edit post from wp-admin list, etc). It briskly takes you and your post to the Classic Editor, rather than to the awful Block editor.

I had coded a Lua script for the StrokesPlus mouse-gestures freeware to provide a workaround for the current problem, which was working. But it’s now no longer needed. Here it is anyway, for what it’s worth…

---


-- A LUA SCRIPT for a STROKESPLUS mouse-gesture.
-- TITLE: Auto-load the Classic Editor at WordPress.com
-- DATE: October 2020.
--
-- Your Web browser is at ../wp-admin/edit.php and you do the mouse gesture.
-- First the script pauses, to ensure wp-admin has time to fully load itself
acDelay(1500)
-- select and copy the current browser URL
acActivateWindow(nil, gex, gey)
acSendKeys("^l{DELAY 100}^c")
url=acGetClipboardText()
-- process the browser URL, trimming it back
new_url=string.gsub(url,"(.+)/.+/?","%1")
acSetClipboardText(new_url)
-- load the new trimmed URL in the browser
acSendKeys("^v{DELAY 100}{ENTER}")
-- copy the current browser URL again
url2=acGetClipboardText()
-- append the posting URL and thus effectively go to New Post
new_url2=string.gsub(url2,".+/?","%1/post-new.php")
acSetClipboardText(new_url2)
acSendKeys("^v{DELAY 100}{ENTER}")
-- delay 7 seconds to allow the sluggish Block editor to load
acDelay(7500)
-- type the word draft in the post title, and Ctrl + S to save as a Draft post
acSendKeys("draft")
acSendKeys("^s")
-- pause 3 seconds for WordPress to switch to the new numbered URL
acDelay(3000)
acActivateWindow(nil, gex, gey)
-- copy this new URL to the clipboard
acSendKeys("^l{DELAY 100}^c")
url3=acGetClipboardText()
-- append the vital &classic-editor slug to the end of the URL
new_url3=string.gsub(url3,".+/?","%1&classic-editor")
acSetClipboardText(new_url3)
-- take the Draft post into the Classic Editor and finish.
acSendKeys("^v{DELAY 500}{ENTER}")


---

And to handle the additional “Edit” side-link on posts, you’d use a second Lua script with its core being…

-- look at the current URL, keep only the post number
new_url=string.gsub(url,"[^0-9]","")

… then prepend and append the required URL structure around the post number, to get a working URL back again, then load that URL.

---

Will either of these solutions last beyond 2021? Perhaps not, as I suspect the Classic Editor will then be killed off totally as previously announced for that date, rather that effectively hidden from the mass of users. As such it’s probably best to just start learning the free Open Live Writer and try to use free blogs in WordPress.com that way. That assumes, however, that in 2021 WordPress.com doesn’t also block offline-editing using such blogging software.