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freosam

395 karma · joined February 10, 2018

See https://samwilson.id.au/ for more.
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freosam··on Creating your own federated microblog
Spammers would have to host a page (permanently) that links to your post, and even then they don't get to control what (if anything) from that page gets displayed on your site.

I guess one danger is that they only serve the page that contains your link to the webmention-validating request. That way they get a backlink but don't have to keep a public outgoing link. They'd have to know that a given request is that validation though, and I'm not sure that'd be very easy.

freosam··on Creating your own federated microblog
Webmention receivers can filter on whatever parts of a URL they want to. Maybe a WordPress implementation limits this to the domain? But as far as the spec goes, the receiver just gets a `source` parameter that's a URL. They can then decide to allow that (based on the domain, or any other characteristic they want) and at that point they check that URL to see if the document there contains the link that it's supposed to.
freosam··on Testing DVD-R and CD-R 25 years later: optical disks from Japan
That's all true, and probably a better system overall, but burning an optical disk, labelling it, and putting it on a shelf does feel like a more accessible backup regime for many people. :-)
freosam··on In some parts of the US, the clack of typewriter keys can still be heard
Oh yeah, that makes sense, thanks!
freosam··on In some parts of the US, the clack of typewriter keys can still be heard
Rostered Time Off? Rent To Own? (Sorry, not being a nob, just not sure of the abbreviation!)
freosam··on Archival Storage
I don't know about the best way to split things (I do it topically mostly, e.g. each website backup goes to a separate disc). But hashdeep is a great little tool for producing files full of checksums of all files that get written to the disc, and also for auditing those checksum files.
freosam··on WordPress Alternatives
I've done this sometimes with hosting images and other large files on a combination of Flickr, Wikimedia Commons, Internet Archive, and Zenodo. Flickr costs money, but it feels like it's worth it given I'm using Netlify and all the others for free.

I know some people use S3 services for hosting images, but then you have to worry about generating your own thumbnails etc. and it's trickier.

freosam··on How do archivists package things? The battle of the boxes
Oh right, I've never seen polythene resealable ones here in Australia. (The floppier 'freezer bags' are I think, but they're less useful for archiving.)

I think it's mainly PVC that's to be avoided for archiving, and office supply shops are full of the stuff (document sleeves, etc.).

An archivist once told me that if you burn a bit of plastic and it doesn't give off any smoke then it's likely polypropylene or similar, and so good to use. That's never felt like a particularly robust test though (but I'm not a chemist).

freosam··on How do archivists package things? The battle of the boxes
True. Although the ziploc bags can just be left a bit open, that's quite sufficient. The good thing about food-safe bags is that they're usually polypropylene and so good for archival use (and much cheaper than anything from a preservation-supplies shop).
freosam··on How do archivists package things? The battle of the boxes
The horizontal vs vertical storage thing is interesting. I've often wondered what the rationale is with the difference, and it seems that it's cultural to a large extent.

One thing that wasn't covered, that sometimes matters for non-institutional collections, is that cardboard is thicker than plastic, and can add quite a lot to the number of boxes required for a given collection. Polyester or polypropylene sleeves (open at the top, and stored vertically, i.e. to allow gas exchange) can be as cheap and sometimes are a better option, at ~0.08 mm vs ~0.5 mm.

freosam··on Ask HN: OCR for 100 year old (German) handwritten cursive script?
As others have mentioned, Transkribus works pretty well for handwritten text recognition. You can also train your own model if you have enough source material.

If the documents you have are able to be made public, you could upload them to Wikimedia Commons and use https://ocr.wmcloud.org/ — you can use Transkribus via that. (Disclosure: I'm an engineer working on the Wikimedia OCR project.)

freosam··on Rsync.net
I'm also interested in this. I've been using SpiderOak for years, but am currently trying to migrate away (to rsync.net, coincidentally). It's not that I've ever had any issues with SpiderOak, but nor do they seem to be a very engaged company (e.g. I've never heard of a SpiderOak person posting here on HN, but @rsync is never far away and is always friendly). It does sound like their efforts are in other directions.
freosam··on OwnTracks – keep track of your own location
There are a few OSM apps that make it easy to share tracks. I use OsmAnd, it allows easy recording, viewing, and uploading to OSM. OSMTracker probably has better battery life, maybe.
freosam··on OwnTracks – keep track of your own location
I agree, Overland is good.

I recently added support for it to my blog (which uses twyne.rtfd.io) so I could more easily geolocate photos (from my non-GPS camera), and it was pretty easy to integrate. I tried GPSLogger too, but found that battery life was much better with Overland, and it also has a better system of queuing points when offline (with GPSLogger I found that it lost data at times such as when there was an internet connection but the server wasn't responding).

freosam··on NBC News: sdf asdf asdfasdf asdfasdf asdfasdf asd fsdgfsdgf asdf asdf asdf
Me too. And at the same time it sets a "non-us" cookie, so maybe it's some sort of geolocation silliness.

Anyway, here's an archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20211102003457/https://www.nbcne...

freosam··on RSS is wonderful
One of the indieweb approaches to feeds is to just structure the HTML sufficiently, and not have separate feed files. This works pretty well, and some feed readers work with it. Some info is at https://indieweb.org/h-entry
freosam··on Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
> This boils down the difference between pigment and dye based inks. Dye based inks are more expensive but more resistant to UV light.

I think it might be the other way around: pigment-based inks are opaque particles bonded to the paper, and so even if their colour changes/fades they're likely to still be legible. Whereas dye-based inks, when they fade, can completely disappear. (One advantage of dye-based inks is that they have a larger gamut.)

freosam··on The Flickr Foundation
That is interesting!

I wonder what the "100 year plan" will be. Flickr does seem like one of the few places that could conceivably store copyright photos for as long as it takes for them to become public domain (i.e. it's worth it, because they keep the full-res originals and lots of metadata).

Of course, the vast majority of photos on Flickr could probably be made CC-BY-SA now by their owners (i.e. everyone who's not making money out of their photography). I think more should be done to encourage people to do that.

freosam··on The Flickr Foundation
Flickr has set up a non-profit "to properly preserve and care for the Flickr Commons archive, support Commons members […], and plan for the very long-term health and longevity of the entire Flickr collection."
freosam··on Hand Scraping a Truly Flat Plane (1908) [pdf]
Whitworth's method of scraping (mentioned in this article) is explained in this 1858 paper:

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Miscellaneous_Papers_on_Mecha...

freosam··on Free OpenStreetMap tile library: watercolor, black and white, terrain
Yeah, I love OSMAnd for that reason. With it, you can add POIs and for more complicated edits that need a bigger screen etc. it's easy to add OSM Notes (which other mappers can then follow up on). Notes I find particularly good when I'm travelling and don't have time or enough knowledge of the area to actually edit the map, but want to help others do so.
freosam··on Fountain pen inks: the good, the bad, and the ugly (2011)
I'm the same. I used to almost exclusively write with a fountain pen. Now I write everything with a keyboard. Primarily, because I realised that notebooks full of words are hard to search and fragile in a archival preservation sense. Far better to type everything, and print it all on archival paper with pigment inks (no laser printers!).

Sort of a bit sad though, to not play with pens and bottles and syringes etc. any more.

freosam··on Fountain pen inks: the good, the bad, and the ugly (2011)
What's that?
freosam··on Fountain pen inks: the good, the bad, and the ugly (2011)
I've found it depends on how soon you want it to be waterproof: I've had ink run when it's got wet within a few weeks of being written, but the exact same ink on the exact same paper (Watermans in a Moleskine) has not smudged a bit when getting damp two years after being written.

Not that there aren't inks that are liable to be much better than that, sooner. But really, if an ink is to flow through the pen, and not have it clog things, I reckon it's unlikely to ever be able to be completely waterproof right after being put on the paper. Unlike a 10¢ ballpoint pen with oil-based ink! :(

freosam··on Fountain pen inks: the good, the bad, and the ugly (2011)
This articles says that inkjet ink "frequently uses pigment, not dye," but my understanding is that most inkjet inks are actually dye-based, and that you have to somewhat go out of your way to find pigment-based ones (and they cost more).

The latter are usually recommended for archival printing purposes (e.g. Epson's "Dura Brite" inks), because they are less likely to fade over time and are better bonded with the paper (and actually have particles that can bond with the paper).

freosam··on Ask HN: What is setup for your static blog generator?
The thing I've never figured out with my Pandoc-generated static sites is how to generate RSS feeds from Markdown frontmatter metadata.