andrew @andrewjbtw@digipres.club

digitize everything with the money you save by not paying for physical storage and conservation

Does anyone know of resources about working for Code4America? (Besides their own of course.) Many years ago I applied for something there, but long before I had much tech experience. As I think about what I'd do if not libraries or an academic program, civic tech is high on my list of potential directions.

Because the repository I manage both misses some functionality but also scales really well, I always feel like an outlier in digipres conversations.

Topic: file format analysis
Many: we're doing dedicated analysis with metadata extraction tools and developing format plans
Me: we get some minimal metadata, one day we'll analyze it

Topic: research data
Many: we're not really responsible for it right now
Me: [tells a story about a 400 GB file called DATA.TAR]

optimizing for iteration

indecision-based systems architecture

The Microsoft Outlook client for OSX isn't launching on my work computer and the error message is something about code signing. Can I say Apple canceled my meetings?

In this case I needed to enumerate all possible combinations of three lists to make a spreadsheet. With a conditional thrown in because the third list only applies in conjunction with certain values of the other two.

Rights metadata is complicated.

Every now and then I accomplish something via nested loops and appreciate the fact the small number of programming techniques I learned as a kid and didn't use for decades are still relevant.

My family was very much a road trip vacation family and the date ranges of these pictures has a huge overlap with when I was a kid.

I only follow one bot and it's just old roadside pictures and it never ceases to bring me some joy

https://botsin.space/@oldroadside

One thing I've learned from doing various types of technical work is that "detail-oriented" is too generic a descriptor. Some people are really good at spotting typos in code and some are really good at checking for data processing errors but there isn't necessarily an overlap between the two. Either skill is learnable, anyway.

Torn between refusing to call google drive a file system and calling it my least favorite file system.

Sample copyright statement (for testing data): "you wouldn't download a car"

Thinking about my attachment to using an old-school digital alarm clock as I drift off to sleep reminded me of a story from my youth: for about a year in college my alarm clock, at least 10 years old by then, stopped sounding the alarm at any time other than midnight. So every night when I got ready for bed I did the math backwards and reset the clock so it would show midnight when I wanted to get up.

Yes, I was a history major, thanks for asking.

One of my favorite things about re-watching The Conversation is not being invested in the plot, which detracts from all the scenes of surveillance.

Second Moderna dose hit me hard. Feels like a whole day disappeared as I tried to sleep through it. Probably wouldn't have been so bad if I took something for the symptoms, but I've been following the theory of let the immune system work. Finally took Tylenol last night since that's supposed to be ok and I slept better.

I'm glad I planned for a strong reaction but I wouldn't have minded being wrong.

One of my favorite experiences is reading an authoritative sounding thread that ends with the author being surprised at the attention because they're not an expert and then an expert weighs in on what they got wrong.

I'm not an OCR or Python expert so here's how I evaluated it:

1. Linked from official documentation (not a guarantee of quality, but usually a good sign)

2. Active maintenance as indicated by the commit history (not just a readme update 3 years later or whatever)

3. Works on the sample they provided (you may be surprised how often people's own examples fail)

4. Worked on a sampling of files I have

This seems like a generally useful tool for working with ALTO XML, especially if you just want the actual plain text, so I'm reposting from a thread:

https://github.com/cneud/alto-tools