Warning: X-ray visions

08 Sunday Oct 2017

Posted by in My general observations

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Just a warning to picture librarians and magazine editors, about ‘x-ray delta one’ on Flickr. He’s now posted nearly 18,000 pictures there in high-res, mostly science-fiction and fantasy. It all gets placed under his default Creative Commons catch-all. I’ve been aware of him for a few years now, and he appears to make little distinction between genuine public domain (of which there is, admittedly, quite a lot now) and material where the IP and copyrights still belong to big studios with big lawyers.

For instance, claimed as Creative Commons just this week: a scan of a frame by Jack Kirby, one of the world’s best known comics artists, from the Marvel Comics 1977 adaptation of MGM’s classic 2001 movie…

Pop off, Google…

07 Saturday Oct 2017

Posted by in JURN's Google watch

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More junk in the Google Search box? It seems so, in the form of another layer of distractingly dumb autosuggest. Which is now on individual words, even those at the end of a long-chain search query, as a ‘pop-down’.

No, Google — when I am searching for “public domain”, I have no interest in “domain names”. An apparently hyper-intelligent search company jammed with semantics experts and AI should know that by now.

Thankfully it can be hidden with AdBlock Plus’s Element Hiding Helper.

Watercolour World

03 Tuesday Oct 2017

Posted by in Spotted in the news

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Coming soon, Watercolour World…

“Founder of the project, Fred Hohler, found the “orphan collection of images” while setting up the Public Catalogue Foundation […] The watercolours will be available for your use simply through an online catalogue, to be made available by March next year [2018]. Dubbed the Watercolour World.”

Sounds good, hopefully (I’m guessing) the orphan works will be hi-res and without watermarks?

Fireflop

02 Monday Oct 2017

Posted by in JURN tips and tricks

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If you’re also cursing Firefox 56’s total system hangs, and want to downgrade to the previous version of the Web browser: Firefox 55.0.3 Win64 En-GB. Yes, I tried the suggested remedies. Renaming the files places.sqlite and cert8.db to *.old and then letting Firefox replace them with fresh ones on restart. Didn’t work. I’m now very seriously looking at switching to Opera, rather than having to go to Firefox 57 and be a guinea-pig for experimental code and suffer the looming “won’t run legacy add-ons” problem. Nearly all my Addons currently sport the yellow “Legacy” banner.