Some poor devil has to scan in thousands of handwritten documents over the next four years—it's no wonder bags of cocaine are being intercepted by foreign customs on the way there.
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6:39 am Mon
Mar 24, 2014
Vatican digitizing archives
Yahoo Groups archivists despair as Verizon blocks their preservation efforts ahead of shutdown
Since 2010, Nightowl, the "head of the Yahoo Users Crusade," has been leading a preservation effort to scrape and archive the sprawling contents of Yahoo Groups. She writes, "Now we are desperate. We are running out of time to ever save our precious content. Yahoo has never made it easy to rescue it, and has […]
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Using machine learning to pull Krazy Kat comics out of giant public domain newspaper archives
Joël Franusic became obsessed with Krazy Kat, but was frustrated by the limited availability and high cost of the books anthologizing the strip (some of which were going for $600 or more on Amazon); so he wrote a scraper that would pull down thumbnails from massive archives of pre-1923 newspapers and then identified 100 pages […]
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Duke University acquires the archives of Charles N Brown, founder of Locus Magazine
Charlie ("Charles N") Brown was the force behind Locus Magazine (previously) until his death in 2009; he hired me to be a columnist for the magazine in 2006 and I've been writing for them ever since.
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Forget glue: This quick-bonding plastic seals in seconds
Things break, and even in this disposable world, there’s a need to fix them. Up until recently, that’s been the crusty bottle of glue in your junk drawer, which is just as liable to coat your fingers as the thing you actually want to repair. Looks like there’s finally a Star Trek-level solution on the […]
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This money management app does more than just crunch numbers
Paying for things is all too easy online these days, and that’s why managing your money has gotten so hard. We’ve all done it: You sign up for a streaming subscription or gym membership, blow past the free trial date, and it becomes a part of your monthly expenses. Some of us juggle so many […]
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Teach STEM through space combat with these DIY drones
We all know those gifts we get “for the kids,” the ones that parents are secretly more excited to open. Drones are a perfect example, but there’s a model out there that really doubles down on that appeal. Introducing the Space Fighter Building Block Drones, a series of space fighter drones that are a blast […]
