#archiving

[fujocoded]

Archive your Pixiv links

We're still on break, in theory! In practice, given current events, we've just emergency-released a script to archive Pixiv galleries from a list of links.

Check out (and download) the code here

Our priority is producing our guide to Git/GitHub and fulfilling our latest fundraising campaign, so we won't be able to offer support to help people run or debug this code. But we had it already written (by @essential-randomness for a personal project) so we hope it will help some.

The work we're doing is specifically meant to help people become able to run scripts like this on their own. If you want to help us make webdev accessible, consider sponsoring us on our founder's Patreon.

#pixiv #web development #censorship #archiving

[spiritheyregone]

765 Price Canyon Rd, Pismo Beach, CA 93449

#archive #archiving #web archive #house #treehouse #live oak #live oak tree #zillow #pismo beach #california

[wuwubean]

Okay hold on with the Unity thing. Hopefully this change will be stopped, but if not we need to start archiving everything NOW.

Cult of the Lamb won’t be the only one. Hundreds if not thousands of games might be deleted. Years of gaming history, lost forever because people can’t afford this change. This is almost as bad as the Adobe Flash shutdown.

I’m going to be honest, I have absolutely no clue how to go about this. But if anyone does, please organize something. We only have 3 and a half months to do this.

EDIT: The above tweet screenshot ended up being a joke (three cheers for autism), but the fact still remains that a bunch of games will still be pulled of steam, especially the smaller ones that only barely hit the revenue mark for being charged.

#unity #game development #game dev #game preservation #archiving #media archival

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Happy birthday to the Flickr Foundation!

Happy birthday to the Flickr Foundation - the biggest, best archive of no-restriction, public domain photos on the web, with over 100 participating institutions, including the Library of Congress!

The Flickr Foundation is structured as a 501(c)3 nonprofit, with an ambitious, 100-year plan to catalog, safeguard, and make available a vast trove of images that belong to all of us.

They are taking the "access" part seriously - making sure that the competing priorities of "getting and storing everything" and "letting everyone use everything" don't come down on the side of a vast, musty archive that no one sees - and no one defends when it's on the chopping block.

You can already search Flickr for millions of CC images, but these come with strings attached, requirements for attribution and follow-on licensing. The Commons, on the other hand, is entirely free to use. Search for yourself!

#flickr #commons #glam #archiving #public domain #photography #flickr foundation

[thebonesofhoudini]

Buy physical media. Buy CDs. Buy records. Buy tapes. Buy books. Buy physical artwork or prints. Take photos of yourself and get them developed at a photo processing booth. Write your thoughts down in a journal. Why? Because as this world get more digital, what's physical will slowly but surely disappear. There will be less things you can touch and feel, and more things that you can see and not touch. You can post all the digital pics you want on social media...nothing is assured and those pics and those platforms could be gone in an instant. An album on streaming platforms will never be the same as the original album in your hand with the liner notes, as versions of that album can get removed, and/or replaced with re-recorded material (since the artist doesn't own their masters). Books go out of print. And staring at a jpeg (no matter how much you paid for it *cough cough* NFTs) of an artwork will never be the same as owning the actual artwork or a print of it.

Preserve these things. If not for yourself, then for future generations.

#archiving #archives #physical media #records #cds #music cds #vhs tapes #vhs #dvd #dvd collection #photographs #photos #photography #books #books & libraries #literature #digital media #art #painting #art prints

[spockandawe]

Double edit: actually, that's enough of that.

Edit: I was expecting maybe thirty notes tops. This is a surprise, and one that doesn't delight me. If I hear about any harassment stemming from this post, I'll be more pissed at the harasser than the person this is about.

God. Dammit.

I hate this, let's just out that out there! I'm unhappy that I'm talking about any of this, I'm unhappy there's an issue that's come up at the intersection of media preservation, respecting authors, and one of my favorite book series. And I'm unhappy that I've censored the names in the screenshots I'm about ti post! I'm not happy that I'm helping to slide consequences away from someone who thought this was an acceptable thing to do to a modern working author. But I'm even less happy this is something that happened in the first place, and I'm VERY unhappy the original post has been deleted without a whisper of accountability or apology.

And here's a partial screenshot of the IA page, which has since been removed. I get the excitement to share something you love with a new audience. This isn't the right way to go about it.

First, if Martha Wells' patreon is still in place, I encourage everyone in the strongest possible terms to go sign up for it. It'll charge you one dollar. I've been a member since probably 2018, and I mistakenly believed it was locked to new members (it's labeled 'Currently Closed To New Patrons') until I had reason to look it up last night, when I tripped across this reddit post from earlier this year.

Now. I was looking it up because of this sudden patreon message:

Even if the patreon goes away, I still recommend that people sign up. Explore the stories! They're very fun! Even though the patreon has been dormant for years, I've loved having that repository in place.

In fact, in the interest of full disclosure, what kept me from immediately reblogging last night is that I've felt the same archival urges! I bound a hard copy of these stories earlier this year, and let me quote my own words from that post:

I live in a state of perpetual low key stress over the impermanence of digital media and that goes extra for sites that aren’t designed to work well as archives. I hope, desperately, that someday Martha Wells publishes more raksura, maybe even including these stories! I will buy it immediately. No thoughts, wallet empty. I own all her other raksura books in literally three formats, fingers crossed that by printing this, I can actualize a formal official printing of these stories by the author 😂

So. Archiving, yes. But especially with a living, working author, I would never DREAM of posting a public free-for-all with IA and mediafire links. My most charitable interpretation is that OP thought it was fine since the stories were "free," even though the writeups acknowledge that access costs a dollar. Ao3 is also free. Reposting someone else's fic is still understood to be a dick move.

Last night i was left kind of stunned, and I was hoping to see some kind of response from op this morning taking responsibility, and was... disappointed to see that the post was just deleted. The IA listing was deleted too, and I hadn't actually looked up the mediafire post yet but I'm guessing it's also been nuked. Out of curiosity, I wanted to see if there was anything more in the comments, so I found a surviving reblog. And there was!

So I'm writing this post because I'm... frustrated. Taking down the files is a good step. Posting them publicly was a worse step, but hey. I still more than understand if Martha Wells still deletes her patreon. I don't understand what sending her files of her own stories is meant to accomplish, but whatever. Ascribing a profit-driven motive is driving me up a wall, though. She's financially stable. I read her email, and what i see is frustration that even though it only cost a dollar to access 62k of her work through her own chosen location, control of her writing is being forcibly removed from her. I'm sure that seeing copies sold by third parties wouldn't help, but I don't think that's the root issue.

This is a fandom-heavy website, I'm sure most of us have seen posts about not reposting art when you can share directly from the artist's blog. I've seen posts about stop copying your ao3 faves over to wattpad just because you like reading there better. At a fundamental level, I read the message from Martha Wells as a deep frustration at having no way to share her creative work without someone removing control of it from her hands. And I don't know if there's any way to really take back that damage.

#long post #the books of the raksura #archiving

[conservethis]

the two archives genders

#original content #archives #preservation #archiving #archivist #boxes #boxes with only two folders #boxes stuffed to the edge of exploding #the two genders

[1863-project]

Was going through my scans from last night and found the best Ingo face I have ever seen

What a mood.

#Pokemon #Submas #archiving #my scans

[charmac]

Maxim Pages from Rob and Glenn's Crab Fishing Trip have actually led me to the article which you can read here on the Internet Archive. Some highlights include:

Glenn using a Curious George mechanical pencil to open a bottle of wine:

Glenn's affinity for spritzers:

The fact that it's Rob's boat that he owns and named "The Rickety Cricket"

And 12 years later he got 'em on the show:

The infamous piss moment:

And how else would a night with Glenn and Rob end?

#iasip #glob #glenn howerton #rob mcelhenney #sunny 2011 #bts #cast #call that #archiving #thank you archive dot org i love you #means i didnt have to spend $30 on a damn magazine #also this is great content that should be preserved #obviously #rob mcelhenney’s piss kink

[meeedeee]

The Internet Archive is under attack by corporations seeking to wrest more and more of our fair use rights, our public spaces and our communities from the public good. The Archive was recently forced into a settlement for scanning and digitizing legally purchased books. They are now facing a $325 million lawsuit for accepting donations of old 78 RPM historical music records that were digitized by volunteers. The goal is not only to stop the distribution of these works, but to create new legal precedents that make it illegal to preserve or archive for any reason. This will have a significant impact on our culture, our communities, and our future

Here is how you can help them

1. Use The Internet Archive Site

2. Save websites via "Save Page Now" browser tool

3. Become a patron to get a free "library card"

4. Curate & Upload to the Archive

5. Tell People That the Internet Archive Exists

6. Browse The Many, Many Collections

7. Take care of yourself and the people you care about

(Link will take you to a blog article that goes into these suggestions in detail)

#the internet archive #internet archive #fair use #copyright abuse #capitalism #digital archiving #digitization #digital preservation #archiving #fandom history #our culture #our voices #our past #our present #our future #libraries

[ashxlr]

Go on. You don't want them to get cold do you?

#Tma #the magnus archives #the magnus pod #archiving #jonathan sims #jon sims #martin blackwood #sasha james #tim stoker #elias bouchard

[spiritheyregone]

765 Price Canyon Rd, Pismo Beach, CA 93449

#archive #archiving #web archive #house #treehouse #zillow #pismo beach #california

[silvermoon424]

Really awesome command-line programs I've discovered on GitHub

I'm a data hoarder, so all of these have to do with downloading and saving media. I also use a Mac, so all of these are MacOS-compliant via Homebrew. If you also use a Mac (or Linux), do yourself a favor and install Homebrew via Terminal right now- all you need to do is copy-paste a line of code into Terminal and it will open you up to tons of awesome programs that normally only run on Windows.

Anyway, onto the list!

Yt-dlp (Youtube/Video downloader): On top of letting you rip Youtube videos directly from the site, this program supports a huge array of other video/media websites. The program is highly customizable as well; I would highly recommend at least installing FFmpeg, which allows you to download videos in quality higher than the default 720p. Here's a guide on how to do that for Windows and I wrote a guide here for Mac (I forgot to write in the guide that you should install FFmpeg via Homebrew).

Mangadex-dl (Mangadex downloader): Allows you to download manga directly from Mangadex, the hub of scanlation. Like yt-dlp it is customizable and you can pick which chapters you want to download (useful if you only want to download current chapters you haven't gotten before).

Gallery-dl (Bulk image downloading): A godsend for an art-hoarder like me, this program allows you to bulk download things like Pixiv pages, Twitter galleries, Deviantart galleries, Instagram pages, etc. Like yt-dlp it is highly customizable. Some websites (like Pixiv) may require user authentication; the GitHub page outlines the steps each authentication process requires.

List of other command line programs you might find interesting on GitHub

I'm sure I'll add to this list as I find more cool stuff on GitHub!

#github #programming #computers #technology #data hoarding #signal boost #archiving #archival

[empty-movement]

May I ask what scanners / equipment / software you're using in the utena art book project? I'm an artist and half the reason I rarely do traditional art is because I'm never happy with the artwork after it's scanned in. But the level of detail even in the blacks of Utena's uniform were all captured so beautifully! And even the very light colors are showing up so well! I'd love to know how you manage!

You know what's really fun? This used to be something you put in your site information section, the software and tools used! Not something that's as normal anymore, but let's give it a go, sorry it's long because I don't know what's new information and what's not! Herein: VANNA'S 'THIS IS AS SPECIFIC AS MY BREAK IS LONG' GUIDE/AIMLESS UNEDITED RAMBLE ABOUT SCANNING IMAGES

Scanning: Modern scanners, by and large, are shit for this. The audience for scanning has narrowed to business and work from home applications that favor text OCR, speed, and efficiency over archiving and scanning of photos and other such visual media. It makes sense--there was a time when scanning your family photographs and such was a popular expected use of a scanner, but these days, the presumption is anything like that is already digital--what would you need the scanner to do that for? The scanner I used for this project is the same one I have been using for *checks notes* a decade now. I use an Epson Perfection V500. Because it is explicitly intended to be a photo scanner, it does threebthings that at this point, you will pay a niche user premium for in a scanner: extremely high DPI (dots per inch), extremely wide color range, and true lossless raws (BMP/TIFF.) I scan low quality print media at 600dpi, high quality print media at 1200 dpi, and this artbook I scanned at 2400 dpi. This is obscene and results in files that are entire GB in size, but for my purposes and my approach, the largest, clearest, rawest copy of whatever I'm scanning is my goal. I don't rely on the scanner to do any post-processing. (At these sizes, the post-processing capacity of the scanner is rendered moot, anyway.) I will replace this scanner when it breaks by buying another identical one if I can find it. I have dropped, disassembled to clean, and abused this thing for a decade and I can't believe it still tolerates my shit. The trade off? Only a couple of my computers will run the ancient capture software right. LMAO. I spent a good week investigating scanners because of the insane Newtype project on my backburner, and the quality available to me now in a scanner is so depleted without spending over a thousand on one, that I'd probably just spin up a computer with Windows 7 on it just to use this one. That's how much of a difference the decade has made in what scanners do and why. (Enshittification attacks! Yes, there are multiple consumer computer products that have actually declined in quality over the last decade.)

Post-processing: Photoshop. Sorry. I have been using Photoshop for literally decades now, it's the demon I know. While CSP is absolutely probably the better piece of software for most uses (art,) Photoshop is...well it's in the name. In all likelihood though, CSP can do all these things, and is a better product to give money to. I just don't know how. NOTENOTENOTE: Anywhere I discuss descreening and print moire I am specifically talking about how to clean up *printed media.* If you are scanning your own painting, this will not be a problem, but everything else about this advice will stand! The first thing you do with a 2400 dpi scan of Utena and Anthy hugging? Well, you open it in Photoshop, which you may or may not have paid for. Then you use a third party developer's plug-in to Descreen the image. I use Sattva. Now this may or may not be what you want in archiving!!! If fidelity to the original scan is the point, you may pass on this part--you are trying to preserve the print screen, moire, half-tones, and other ways print media tricks the eye. If you're me, this tool helps translate the raw scan of the printed dots on the page into the smooth color image you see in person. From there, the vast majority of your efforts will boil down to the following Photoshop tools: Levels/Curves, Color Balance, and Selective Color. Dust and Scratches, Median, Blur, and Remove Noise will also be close friends of the printed page to digital format archiver. Once you're happy with the broad strokes, you can start cropping and sizing it down to something reasonable. If you are dealing with lots of images with the same needs, like when I've scanned doujinshi pages, you can often streamline a lot of this using Photoshop Actions.

My blacks and whites are coming out so vivid this time because I do all color post-processing in Photoshop after the fact, after a descreen tool has been used to translate the dot matrix colors to solids they're intended to portray--in my experience trying to color correct for dark and light colors is a hot mess until that process is done, because Photoshop sees the full range of the dots on the image and the colors they comprise, instead of actually blending them into their intended shades. I don't correct the levels until I've descreened to some extent.

As you can see, the print pattern contains the information of the original painting, but if you try to correct the blacks and whites, you'll get a janky mess. *Then* you change the Levels:

If you've ever edited audio, then dealing with photo Levels and Curves will be familiar to you! A well cut and cleaned piece of audio will not cut off the highs and lows, but also will make sure it uses the full range available to it. Modern scanners are trying to do this all for you, so they blow out the colors and increase the brightness and contrast significantly, because solid blacks and solid whites are often the entire thing you're aiming for--document scanning, basically. This is like when audio is made so loud details at the high and low get cut off. Boo.

What I get instead is as much detail as possible, but also at a volume that needs correcting:

Cutting off the unused color ranges (in this case it's all dark), you get the best chance of capturing the original black and white range:

In some cases, I edit beyond this--for doujinshi scans, I aim for solid blacks and whites, because I need the file sizes to be normal and can't spend gigs of space on dust. For accuracy though, this is where I'd generally stop.

For scanning artwork, the major factor here that may be fucking up your game? Yep. The scanner. Modern scanners are like cheap microphones that blow out the audio, when what you want is the ancient microphone that captures your cat farting in the next room over. While you can compensate A LOT in Photoshop and bring out blacks and whites that scanners fuck up, at the end of the day, what's probably stopping you up is that you want to use your scanner for something scanners are no longer designed to do well. If you aren't crazy like me and likely to get a vintage scanner for this purpose, keep in mind that what you are looking for is specifically *a photo scanner.* These are the ones designed to capture the most range, and at the highest DPI. It will be a flatbed. Don't waste your time with anything else.

Hot tip: if you aren't scanning often, look into your local library or photo processing store. They will have access to modern scanners that specialize in the same priorities I've listed here, and many will scan to your specifications (high dpi, lossless.)

Ahem. I hope that helps, and or was interesting to someone!!!

#utena #image archiving #scanning #archiving #revolutionary girl utena #digitizing #photo scanner #art scanning

[falsettosarchive]

falsettoland 1990 original cast CD booklet

#archiving #falsettos #falsettoland

[superlinguo]

Research Data Management. Or, How I made multiple backups and still almost lost my honours thesis.

This is a story I used to tell while teaching fieldworkers and other researchers about how to manage their data. It’s a moderately improbable story, but it happened to me and others have benefited from my misadventures. I haven't had reason to tell it much lately, and I thought it might be useful to put into writing. This is a story from before cloud storage was common - back when you could, and often would, run out of online email storage space. Content note: this story includes some unpleasant things that happened to me, including multiple stories of theft (cf. moderately improbable). Also, because it's stressful for most of the story, I want to reassure you that it does have a happy conclusion. It explains a lot of my enthusiasm for good research data management. In Australia, 'honours' is an optional fourth year for a three year degree. It's a chance to do some more advanced coursework and try your hand at research, with a small thesis project. Of course, it doesn't feel small when it's the first time you've done a project that takes a whole year and is five times bigger than anything you’ve ever written. I've written briefly about my honours story (here, and here in a longer post about my late honours supervisor Barb Kelly) . While I did finish my project, it all ended a bit weirdly when my supervisor Barb got ill and left during the analysis/writing crunch. The year after finishing honours I got an office job. I hoped to maybe do something more with my honours work, but I wasn't sure what, and figured I would wait until Barb was better. During that year, my sharehouse flat was broken into and the thief walked out with the laptop I'd used to do my honours project. The computer had all my university files on it, including my data and the Word version of my thesis. I lost interview video files, transcriptions, drafts, notes and everything except the PDF version I had uploaded to the University's online portal. Uploading was optional at the time, if I didn't do that I probably would have just been left with a single printed copy. I also lost all my jewellery and my brother’s base guitar, but I was most sad about the data (sorry bro). Thankfully, I made a backup of my data and files on a USB drive that I kept in my handbag. This was back when a 4GB thumb drive was an investment. That Friday, feeling sorry for myself after losing so many things I couldn't replace, I decided to go dancing to cheer myself up. While out with a group of friends, my bag was stolen. It was the first time I had a nice handbag, and I still miss it. Thankfully, I knew to make more than one back up. I had an older USB that I'd tucked down the back of the books on my shelf (a vintage 256MB drive my dad kindly got for me in undergrad after a very bad week when I lost an essay to a corrupted floppy disk). When I went to retrieve the files, the drive was (also) corrupted. This happens with hard drives sometimes. My three different copies in three different locations were now lost to me.

Thankfully, my computer had a CD/DVD burner. This was a very cool feature in the mid-tens, and I used to make a lot of mixed CDs for my friends. During my honours project I had burned backed up files on some discs and left them at my parents house. It was this third backup, kept off site, which became the only copy of my project. I very quickly made more copies. When Barb was back at work, and I rejoined her as a PhD student, it meant we could return to the data and all my notes. The thesis went through a complete rewrite and many years later was published as a journal article (Gawne & Kelly 2014). It would have probably never happened if I didn’t have those project files. I continued with the same cautious approach to my research data ever since, including sending home SD cards while on field trips, making use of online storage, and archiving data with institutional repositories while a project is ongoing.

I’m glad that I made enough copies that I learnt a good lesson from a terrible series of events. Hopefully this will prompt you, too, to think about how many copies you have, where they’re located, and what would happen if you lost access to your online storage.

#language #linguistics #data management #archiving