Ethan Gates @The_BFOOL@digipres.club

Frankly not sure whether I ever did a proper #introduction post, so making one I can pin:

Hello, new and seasoned fediverse! My name's Ethan, I live in central Massachusetts in the U.S I'm also a struggling puzzle addict and I'm curious about tech. I post too much about work (as a digital archivist) so trying to post more about what I'm reading, watching, playing.

I keep several long-form blogs if that's your thing:
https://patchbay.tech
https://bestfilmofourlives.blog
https://ethan-gates.com/blog

vibing on Neptune Frost tonight

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neptune_Frost

(tl;dr - we gather a lot, send a lot to Wikidata, but most of it's not actually standardized or integrated directly into the EaaSI platform! read on for more detail on our thought process, influences, and needs though)

In the wake of the Software Preservation Network's Software Metadata Recommended Format (SMRF) Guide, the EaaSI team got a lot of questions about metadata for emulation and the EaaSI platform. Me and Claire Fox tried to dig into those questions in the latest EaaSI Training Module:

https://www.softwarepreservationnetwork.org/eaasi-training-module-7-implementing-metadata-standards/

Today I participated in a focus group on software citation - the call was recorded on Zoom by the facilitators but then after the call we all got an (automated) notice from Otter.ai that one of the other participants in the group had recorded the call transcript, without notice, consent, etc

It turned out to be a total accident/unintentional - the person just had their Zoom and Otter accounts linked and the settings were off.

Need new earbuds - any wireless recommendations?

I could try patching some install media and then using that to re-install the now-patched OS on the Mac Mini image, but that approach seems to rely on the universal Server builds for Tiger and I only see options for e.g. 10.4.7 or 10.4.8 (not sure if there ever was any kind of recovery media for versions higher than that, or if you only got above 10.4.8 with upgrades?); so I doubt that reinstall-in-place approach would work

Anyone ever had any luck emulating the Intel version of OSX Tiger? Preferably in QEMU?

Scenario: successfully imaged a Core2Duo Mac Mini (2,1) running OSX 10.4.10. For various reasons would like to inspect the whole machine in emulation, but I've never successfully gotten x86 versions below 10.6 running in QEMU or VirtualBox. There are one or two tutorials for patching Tiger install media to make it run but can't find applicable guidance for patching an already-installed system.

(I refuse to play the shareware pop-up game with Sublime)

I'm unable to put my brain to anything more "productive" at the moment, so investigating Atom alternatives now

Playing a bit with VSCodium (VSC compiled with proprietary branding/config/telemetry removed):
https://vscodium.com/

it would do, but still annoyed at how over-powered and busy IDEs are for someone who pretty much just wants to write and preview various markup docs and maybe a few simple scripts. Atom threaded the needle really nicely.

is the answer paying for Sublime Text?

I'm enjoying the little digipres library I'm building up next to my desk:

- Home Computers: 100 Icons That Defined a Generation
- How Video Works
- Black Software
- Re-Collection
- Kill It With Fire
- The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation
- Race After Technology
- 1995: the Year the Internet Broke 😈
- Breaking Things At Work
- The Real World of Technology
- Subprime Attention Crisis
- Computing (by Ceruzzi)
- Glitch Feminism

...what am I missing? 😇

I'm rather fascinated that in this instance - again, the earliest I've found, three years before Rothenberg's Scientific American article - it's specifically in the context of what we would now think of as migration-via-emulation, i.e. keeping emulators for the purpose of translation/conversion to a modern system, rather than presenting data in an emulated system as an access strategy in and of itself. This feels significant/formative...

(I have found a number of papers and reports from roughly the late '80s through the early '90s that describe the encroaching problems of digital preservation for archives and records management - software and hardware obsolescence, a shift from physical preservation strategies to copying and redundancy, etc. - but none until now that specifically suggest emulation as a solution or route meriting exploration)

I did it: I finally found a published, explicit suggestion of emulation as a necessary strategy for digital preservation that predates Rothenberg

https://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/lesk/lesk2/

Have any reMarkable users played with rmfakecloud? Seems like what I've been wanting to sync my tablet in a meaningful way to my Nextcloud, but a little nervous about it

Also curious what kind of hardware folks run it on. Raspberry Pi? Could it maybe run on the same VPS my Nextcloud is already on?

https://github.com/ddvk/rmfakecloud

Forget the secret Prince tapes or whatever, release the Ishtar soundtrack

I finally pieced together all the tutorials that folks on the birdsite linked me on APIs, a GUI tool that makes (some) visual sense to me, someone else's Python script, and some half-baked/auto-generated documentation into a successful GET request on an EaaSI deployment and I'm so stunned I forgot what to do next

A quirk of our apartment is that our landlord provides and controls the wifi (he's a WFH San Francisco expat tech manager of some sort) - nice in that he shouldered the cost/brunt of getting both our households set up with the highest-tier service option available (covered with rent) and set up a good mesh network, downside is that I don't have router control ergo can't set up all the weird home servers I want

Oh yeah also I forgot to mention that I have a lot of random opinions about Soviet and Russian cinema so definitely enjoy @CinemaMillions now that you're all on the fedi

Frankly not sure whether I ever did a proper #introduction post, so making one I can pin:

Hello, new and seasoned fediverse! My name's Ethan, I live in central Massachusetts in the U.S I'm also a struggling puzzle addict and I'm curious about tech. I post too much about work (as a digital archivist) so trying to post more about what I'm reading, watching, playing.

I keep several long-form blogs if that's your thing:
https://patchbay.tech
https://bestfilmofourlives.blog
https://ethan-gates.com/blog

Settling into a rate of one new Patch Bay post every two years

https://patchbay.tech/blog/2022/04/21/the-cloud-is-just-someone-elses-10000-computers/