Beaker is a new peer-to-peer Web browser…

“Create and share websites for free, with no advertising and no third-party services, directly from your browser. Visitors to your site rehost your files automatically on the peer-to-peer network. No blockchain required.”

CORE is now picking up 70m record pages…

If you have ‘linked’ or on-the-fly Google Custom Search Engines, note that they will have stopped working a week or so ago. As planned and announced, at around the end of May 2017 Google withdrew the ‘linked’ CSE option (self-hosted, and a pain to set up and admin). They also withdrew the ‘cref’ URL-path item, which was what enabled an on-the-fly CSE from any page of Web links (handy, but not that often). It’s a pity to see the latter go, but apparently it’s part of a modernisation of the CSE service.

JURN’s various ongoing search projects are not affected by the changes, as GRAFT has been ported. But if you’re affected, then you now need to either: i) port your search tool’s URLs into a full free CSE, via Google’s CSE console (easiest way is .tsv files containing 500-URL chunks of your list, must be less than 30Kb per .tsv); or ii) use the free DuckDuckGo CSE functionality to get a quick CSE which only runs over a handful of URLs. The current drawback of the DuckDuckGo CSE service is that the Duck may not yet have had a good quack at some of the obscure academic sites you may want in your CSE.

There’s a newly-mature free PDF reader, PDF-XChange Editor which has just had an excellent TechRadar review. Sounds interesting but I cancelled my download halfway, immediately after reading…

“You can try any of these “Protected” features [buttons for features in the paid-for version] but, be very careful not to save your PDF if you do not want the watermarks to appear in the upper corners of each page in the document. Once a document is watermarked, there is no way to remove them without a license”.

Ugh. Sounds to me like the free version is effectively a form of ransom-ware, activated by the user’s curiosity and tiredness.

Europeana : Photography has launched, with a wide range of public domain and CC0 pictures from the nations of continental Europe (the UK seems to be almost absent). Judging by a test search for “cat”, it’s mostly landscape and architectural pictures.

Great to see Public Domain filters, though. But then there’s no way to search by the pixel size on the final download. The test samples I downloaded were pointlessly small, at just 600px to 800px. You can however use a Google Images site search and then filter by size…

site:http://www.europeana.eu/portal/en/record/ “Public Domain Marked”

But the Google Images search filters can’t yet distinguish between a photo and a good engraving…

… and adding the word “photograph” to the Google Images search is of no help in that respect. This makes it difficult to filter just for the Europeana Photography collection.

Here’s another fly-through of the Unsplash collection, a new large bank of not-cheesy CC0 stock pictures. This time looking for librarian, archivist and similar pictures. Again, batch-reduced to 80% compression while retaining pixel size. Like the other batch, these are all big and Creative Commons Zero (CC0), and the photographer name is part of the file name.

Unsplash is a new large bank of CC0 stock pictures, rather more funky than the usual stock look. There’s a Pinterest-y aspect to the service, which allows members to curate folders called Collections. This is useful when your search shows no results. For instance, I searched for Business Independent and had no results, but was pointed to two somewhat useful Collections on ‘Work’ and ‘Office’. A search for Business Creative was better, though as Mac-cultist and white-walls as you might expect, but I found a few excellent pictures (see below) for illustrating creative industries production activities.

Presentation of a Collection assumes you have superfast broadband, with huge previews, which means slow browsing for the rest of us. It makes one especially reluctant to open Collections which have over about 50 pictures. There are also some curious word-wuffles: search for Animation and get Animals, for instance.

There’s no-hassle downloads though: just click “Download” and the picture downloads. Test downloads revealed 2700px+ pictures, usually at 72dpi. I think the biggest I downloaded was 40Mb. The photographer name is sensibly embedded in the file-name, should you want to credit.

Here’s my ‘creative industries’ selection, batched to 80% compression, which takes it from 360Mb to 58Mb in total without changing pixel size.

(For poets and visionaries).

Europeana Fashion…

“brings together an incredible wealth of content including historical clothing and accessories, contemporary designs, catwalk photographs, drawings, sketches, catalogues and videos contributed by nearly 40 museums and fashion brand archives from 13 European countries.”