The DOAJ has announced JASPER – preserving open access journals forever, a new project. They’re not immediately going to hoover all DOAJ-listed journals into a mountain-covered mega-server, though, and in Phase One an editor has to ask to be included…

The criteria for eligibility for Phase One are that:

– your journal is indexed in DOAJ
– it does not charge any fees of any kind
– it is not archived in a preservation service

Please email preservation[@]doaj[.]org to register your interest in being involved or to be kept up-to-date with developments.

The DOAJ has announced JASPER – preserving open access journals forever, a new project. They’re not immediately going to hoover all DOAJ-listed journals into a mountain-covered mega-server, though, and in Phase One an editor has to ask to be included…

The criteria for eligibility for Phase One are that:

– your journal is indexed in DOAJ
– it does not charge any fees of any kind
– it is not archived in a preservation service

Please email preservation[@]doaj[.]org to register your interest in being involved or to be kept up-to-date with developments.

The Allen Institute for AI has a new prototype Academic Paper to HTML converter, as an online service.

There are of course already polished online services such as a IDR’s PDF to HTML5, but they limit the number and size of uploads.

Such conversions can also be done on a desktop PC via QuarkXPress 2021, which does quick pixel-perfect HTML5 conversion natively and (if you wait for a Black Friday discount) can be had for about £180 on a perpetual licence. Its direct competitor Adobe InDesign is subscription and needs a further expensive plugin (also subscription) to do HTML5 output. Many old-timers will throw up their hands in horror at the name ‘QuarkXPress’, but it’s no longer your grandpa’s creaky old DTP software.

A scary automatic non-appeal-able PayPal account termination for Cryotek, makers of the free open-source Cyotek WebCopy and other free software. It appears that all he did was add a second email address to his PayPal account.

Google Scholar Oneclick Bib, a new UserScript for your Web browser.

“One click to copy the bib information of each Google Scholar entry. The information will be automatically copied into the clipboard.”

Jonathan Matthis, of the Biology Dept. at Northeastern University, has launched the open source FreeMoCap Project. ‘Mo-cap’ records human body movement in space, in a way that can then be pinned to 3D digital skeletons and ‘played back’. Very useful for animators and researchers alike.

What makes this project different? It’s a “low-cost, research-quality markerless” mo-cap system, that can run from video recorded by… two £1,000 iPhones and an £800 graphics card? Nope, that’s what I was expecting. But in this case you just need two standard USB webcams.

The aim is have… “a 14-year-old, with no technical training and no outside assistance, recreate a research-grade motion capture system for less than $100”. The early results have had animation professionals making very positive noises.

This worthy project then feeds its data to the free open source Blender 3D software. Great. The only problem appears to be that you need an NVIDIA graphics card in your PC, to process the video in a way that can get the skeleton data out of it. Where you’ll find a useful NVIDIA graphics card for less than $100 I don’t know, but I’m guessing the system may eventually be able to run on the sort of ancient graphics cards that get eBay’d for $20.

Anyway, it seems to me that this is an open project that could use some donations and volunteer coders for its early stages.

Extensive new support for editing PDF annotations, in the latest version (June 2021) of the popular freeware SumatraPDF PDF reader.

Regrettably it’s also removed support for embedded media. You used to at least be able to right-click on an embedded video, and “save as…” then play.

There’s now a manual workaround to fix the important all-Windows ‘PrintNightmare’ security hole, at least for domestic and standalone PC users who don’t need to print over a network.

See the official Microsoft Workarounds / Option 2.

Stop the Print Spooler as a Service.
Change the PC’s Group Policy to block “inbound remote printing operations”.
Restart the Print Spooler.

This will “will block the remote attack vector”. Yup, it seems the fix is that easy.

Although… some versions of Windows do not have the required Group Policy Editor. In that case AskVG has instructions for Home users.

Update: Cancel that. Ten days later and another hole has been found, which for now means that the Windows Print Spooler service should be stopped totally even on domestic and standalone PCs. From some software you may still be able to “Save as PDF” but not always. There’s now a massive commercial opportunity for someone to develop a way to print on Windows, without the Windows Print Spooler service being active. Someone is going to make millions from that, as Microsoft doesn’t seem to be interested in the possibility.