9xbuddy

14 Friday Oct 2016

Posted by in JURN tips and tricks

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The free 9xbuddy is very useful and has been fast and reliable for me for several years now. Paste in the URL of almost any streaming media that doesn’t offer an .MP3 download. 9xbuddy then ferrets among the HTML and javascript in search of the actual audio file, then gives you a simple link to download it. It’s actively maintained and supports a huge range of streaming services. Also works for video, which is useful for lecturers who want to show pre-loaded video clips and thus bypass the usual wi-fi connection hassles.

9x

Noto

10 Monday Oct 2016

Posted by in Spotted in the news

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Google has released the Google Noto Font, the only font to feature all 110,000 Unicode characters and cover 800 languages. The intention is get rid of the “⯐⯐⯐⯐” sometimes encountered while browsing the Web or viewing some types of PDFs. Noto is a 480Mb download. You may not want to install all the language versions of the font, as that may well slow down the loading times of behemoth software such as Photoshop.

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Since the font is Open Source, the vast variety of shapes from around the world can also serve as a ‘design-mine’ for graphic designers.

LifeTurner

04 Tuesday Oct 2016

Posted by in My general observations

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LifeTurner: a streamlined online service to help a scholarly author to put all their papers and published works in order, to upload them in a suitable format, and then to store them ‘a digital vault’ ready to be released to the world as Open Access on their death. The service could also help to ‘buy back’ rights to the author’s formerly commercial works, also negotiate any picture rights involved. Then the catalogue would be presented as beautifully formatted website alongside an authorised biography, and endowed in order to stay online forever. As far as I know, such a personal service doesn’t yet exist.

Blogger.com search is restricted

27 Tuesday Sep 2016

Posted by in Spotted in the news

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Google is removing extended search from its Blogger.com blogs. A blog’s search box used to return additional results from the sidebar blogroll and Web pages your blog had linked to. No more…

blogger

However, such capability might make a useful plug-in for WordPress. I couldn’t immediately find such a plugin in a quick search. Possibly it might hook into DuckDuckGo to provide the functionality?