afternoonbuzz

SI, MS-DOS, USC, More: Evening Buzz, January 6, 2015

The Internet Archive now has 2,400 MS-DOS games playable online. Because they are in a conspiracy to make sure I don’t get any work done.

Two Smithsonian Institution galleries have released their entire collections online (mostly) for non-commercial use. “he free public resource—called ‘Open F|S’—will launch at open.asia.si.edu, allowing anyone to explore and create with the collections, from anywhere in the world. The vast majority of the 40,000 artworks have never before been seen by the public, and more than 90 percent of the images will be in high-resolution and without copyright restrictions for non-commercial use.” Thanks for everyone who sent me a note about this, by the way! Y’all have my back.

Publishers Weekly has an update on Google’s ebook program. “…Google Play has emerged as a much more significant e-book force, particularly for Android, the operating system developed by Google. And it continues to gain traction. Of the 65 countries where Google Play Books is available, close to a third, or 21, were added in the past year, according to spokeswoman Gina Johnson.”

More Google: it has announced Google Cast speakers. “Some of the apps primed to work with Google Cast speakers include Pandora, Rdio, TuneIn, iHeartRadio, NPR One, Deezer and, of course, Google Play Music. Rather than drain a user’s mobile device by using it as the audio source, the speakers will instead pull audio content from the cloud.”

More More Google: it was asked to remove over 345 million allegedly pirate links in 2014. “Google doesn’t report yearly figures, but at TF we processed all the weekly reports and found that the number of URLs submitted by copyright holders last year surpassed the 345 million mark – 345,169,134 to be exact.” (TF stands for “TorrentFreak”.)

Wow! Over $500 million in Kickstarter pledges were made in 2014.

The University of Southern California will be putting testimonies of Armenian genocide online. “The USC Shoah Foundation and the Armenian Film Foundation signed an agreement in April 2010 to digitize the interviews of the late J. Michael Hagopian, recorded on film between 1972 and 2005. The entire collection is expected to be integrated with the archive by the fall.”

Facebook has purchased a voice-recognition startup. Okay, this could get weird.

Because I think topic-specific lists of Twitter accounts are interesting: 100 “must follow” Twitter feeds about tax, according to Forbes. Includes government, tax reformers, professors, CPAs, media, etc. Good Evening, Internet…

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