USEFUL STUFF

Wanna make an animated text GIF? The Next Web has a cool tool for you. “Slate, which is racing up Product Hunt’s rankings today and got the seal of approval from Product Hunt godfather Ryan Hoover, is a single page that lets you create animated text GIFs and save them to Imgur.”

Jim Birch has an article about GoogleDoc2Html, which is a script created by Omar AL Zabir that cleans up the HTML from Google Docs. “Using Google Docs and the Google Docs Script Editor, this script emails a pretty simple HTML file of the document to your Google email account associated with your Google account.” Mr. Birch has a quick list of instructions and a link to the script that he forked.

tuts+ is offering a free course on crawling the Web with Python. “Recently we’ve started producing short, free courses aimed at those of you with limited time and a limited budget. The idea is that in a set of short videos, clocking in at around an hour of total viewing time, you can learn some useful new skills, without paying a penny.”

From UberGizmo: How to password-protect a USB drive. “However, encrypting a whole drive is not always the answer to protecting your data on a USB drive. May be you just have a single document that you need to protect, or a few MBs worth of files, why go through the whole-disk encryption process? In this tutorial, we are going to list simple to complex methods to password-protect a USB drive, you can select the one that fits your needs best.”

From How-To Geek: How to teach yourself programming on the cheap. “Want to teach yourself how to code, but don’t have a lot of extra scratch laying around to learn how to do it? Nowadays, there are tons of resources available on the Internet that you can use to get yourself up to speed on all of the most advanced coding languages, often without having to drop a dime for the privilege. Though only one of the learning portals listed here will actually leave you with a degree to pin on your wall by the time all is said and done, having the skills these websites provide is still a great way to get started in the world of independent contracting, and being able to build your very own websites on the fly.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Woo hoo! IFTTT Now has a Wikipedia channel. There are several triggers for this channel – picture of the day, article of the day, new edit to specific article, etc – but there are no actions.

WordPress 4.3 Beta 3 is now available.

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

The Wikimedia Foundation has released its third transparency report. “In August 2014, we published our first transparency report, which detailed the number of requests we received to disclose user data or alter or remove content from the Wikimedia projects between July 2012 and June 2014. We updated the report in April 2015 with new data, real-life examples of the types of requests we receive, and additional categories such as “voluntary disclosures” and “right to be forgotten” requests. We are happy to continue this tradition with our latest update, covering January to June 2015. During this time, we received 234 alteration or takedown requests and 23 user data requests, none of which we granted.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Google Photo apparently keeps backing up your pictures even after you delete the app. ZOMBIE APP! Well, not really. “It turns out that when you turn the ‘back up & sync’ setting on for Photos in your Android phone, you’re not actually accessing the setting in the app, but in the phone itself. If you delete the app, the setting remains, so all your photos will continue to be backed up to Google Photos even though you no longer use it. Since most people probably don’t make a deep dive on their phone settings on a regular basis, it’s pretty much a set it and forget it thing, it’s very possible that many users have photos in the cloud they don’t know about.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

There’s a Twitter bot dedicated to generating moths. Why? BECAUSE IT’S THE INTERNET, THAT’S WHY. “@mothergenerator, a new Twitter bot, adds to the diversity by generating spectacular digital moths, naming them, and tweeting them. The Moth Generator (or lepidoptera automata if you want to get scientific) is a joint venture between artist and poet Katie Rose Pipkin and artist and video game designer Loren Schmidt.” I like the “agreeable semicirus fumosa.” Good morning, Internet…

I love your comments, I love your site suggestions, and I love you. Feel free to comment on the blog, or @ResearchBuzz on Twitter. Thanks!