Ethan Gates @The_BFOOL@digipres.club

A thing I love about snap apps is how the font cache corrupts literally every time you quit a program

Tried to write a year-end reflection, wound up in therapy:

Ethan Gates | 2021 Year in Review
https://ethan-gates.com/2021/12/2021-personal-review/

new EaaSI release just dropped, check out some details on the >600 (!!!) tickets and bug fixes closed from 2020.03 to now:

https://forum.eaasi.cloud/t/eaasi-platform-release-notes-v2021-10/315

oh no except it sorts podcast names with "The [xxx]" under "T" ☠️

The answer is AntennaPod

I do not care about discover of new podcasts in-app, and if your "Add to queue/default playlist" feature adds the selected podcast to the start of the queue rather than the end, don't ever speak to me again (looking at you, Stitcher)

I've been a pretty loyal PocketCasts user for years, but they don't explicitly support private RSS feeds (e.g. from Patreon) and it's been tripping up and not showing episodes from those feeds more and more of late.

Anyone have a favorite Android podcatcher alternative? The things I have liked most about PocketCasts:
- ability to download and add an episode to listening queue in one swipe
- plays nice with Bluetooth connection in the car
- sleep timer, obvi

New EaaSI training module!

ARE YOU READY FOR MORE DISK IMAGE DISCOURSE?

https://www.softwarepreservationnetwork.org/eaasi-training-module-5-disk-images/

Happy World Digital Preservation Day, digipres club!!!

also notable: if I'm reading this correctly, there was literally no objection placed to the expanded exemption for non-video game software. if you are a GLAM admin, manager, or counsel who is still scared of this, you are fighting with no one

(my apologies to all my video game preservation colleagues, who have a much tougher fight of this despite the game/software distinction also being totally unclear)

sure, the limitation that "[DRM-circumvented] works be accessible to only one user at a time and for a limited time" makes no goddamn sense when you're talking about software-dependent digital objects and collections. who cares? in many cases, how is someone even going to know you circumvented the DRM? who's going to know that you offered the same copy of Windows XP to two different patrons simultaneously? just do it!

we're often talking about some of the biggest and richest companies in the world (Microsoft! Apple! Oracle! Adobe!) who already have their hands completely full (and largely fail) to prevent basic-ass piracy of their latest and greatest in-market products. they do not give a shit if you use a found Win98 license from WinWorld, and if they did, they would go after the places actually hosting and distributing that info first

I mean, already the worst thing that could possibly happen if you provided access to legacy software with broken DRM was a takedown notice. then you take it down! *if* that even happens! which it never will!

My take on the new, expanded DMCA exemption for software preservation is that, while still kind of nonsensical and written by someone without a clear understanding of the issues, the removal of the "on-premises" language means that the vagueness now works entirely in practitioners' and researchers' favor and I hope GLAM admins and counsel allow us to interpret it as such

and just for the folks on Mastodon: it's a textbook, so I realize the pricing is hefty, especially for the ebook version - so just hit me up if you'd be interested in a scan of my chapter or any other (reasonable) section of the book you'd be interested in. esp if it's for students/teaching purposes

much thanks to Dr. Patricia Franks, who both personally invited me to write this and was a wonderful editor to work with, helping me give both a concise definition of terms but also (I think) give a pretty clean summary and illustration of emulation's possibilities in archiving

I've been really enjoying perusing the whole thing, check it out (or maybe encourage your library/program to pick up a copy) if you can!

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781538137345/The-Handbook-of-Archival-Practice

It's been a tough month, such that I haven't had a chance to properly hype: I've been published!!!

The Handbook of Archival Practice is a new and really neat encyclopedic snapshot of current activities around preserving both analog and digital materials. There's a great balance of traditional and emerging concerns, and I was kindly invited to contribute the entry on "Emulation"!

specifically working in Vue here, I think, but really any guidance on terminology or tools here to help me figure out what to search is helpful

Doc-minded colleagues: does anyone know of good + accessible tools or libraries for creating help-text overlays or guided actions on a web site?

Like, something that can be integrated into a front-end client that enables a "tutorial" mode with scripted actions and text you can advance through to explain the interface

FYI, all good here - thanks if anyone checked!