NEW RESOURCES

The University of Pennsylvania has started creating a digital archive of its newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian. “At this time, the Libraries are providing access to a 40-year portion of the project on The Daily Pennsylvanian Digital Archives website, but they are still seeking funding to make a full virtual facsimile of The Daily Pennsylvanian available.”

New-to-Me: A Web site that lets you look up musical metadata for records. “Disconest is an app that’s set out to find the beats per minute, time signature, and key of every record in existence. The kind of thing DJs once had to laboriously tap out and record, probably, on the record sleeve. Now it’s just freely available and searchable, like everything else, soon, in our lives.” There were some artists I could find almost no releases for and no metadata (Marie Knight), some artists who had lots of releases listed but no metadata (Anita Mui), some artists had a lot of metadata but were still missing a bit here and there (Josh Martinez), and many artists which had lots of releases and lots of metadata (Ganstagrass, Ricky Skaggs, Perry Como, etc.)

TWEAKS & UPDATES

Genealogists, be told: Mocavo.com has moved to FindMyPast. “We launched back in March 2011 when, only three months old, Family Tree Magazine named us as one of the best 101 genealogy websites of 2011. In 2012 we released The Free Yearbook collection and since then we’ve continue to publish hundreds of records and archives every day. We’d like to thank you, our customer, for being there with us as we’ve continued to grow. We are now in the process of moving all Mocavo site content to Findmypast so you’ll soon be able to enjoy everything currently available on Mocavo and more. As part of our ‘Free Forever’ promise, Mocavo subscribers will continue to enjoy free access to all of the same records that were previously published for free on Mocavo. We will be transferring your account over to Findmypast soon so stay tuned for updates.”

Instagram now lets you “Discover” other users on the Web. “Facebook-owned photo-sharing app Instagram has another addition to the homepage in its web version: a little compass icon that takes you to a new page where you can “discover” other users. The new button is located near the top-right corner of the window when you’re viewing Instagram.com in the browser.”

A little bit of morning weirdness: Facebook is making search suggestions?

USEFUL STUFF

Are you sick of Microsoft reminding you to upgrade to Windows 10? You’ve got options. “Never 10 is a free tool from Gibson Research Corporation which places users firmly in control of whether Windows 10 is installed or not. While the name might imply that it is all about avoiding Windows 10, this is just part of the story. It’s entirely possible that you might change your mind further down the line, and Never 10 can also be used to lift the upgrade block once you have put it in place.” If you’ve been around the Internet for a while and “Gibson Research” rings a bell, it’s run by Steve Gibson, the guy behind ShieldsUP.

From James Tanner at Genealogy’s Star: Strategies for Searching Cemeteries Online.

Interested in VR? Make has a roundup of free tools.

I can see this coming in handy. From How-To Geek: How to Extract Images, Text, and Embedded Files from Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Documents.

Lifehacker is having another productivity smackdown: Wunderlist vs. Any.do. “It’s been a while since we’ve heard from some of our favorite to-do apps, Wunderlist and Any.Do, which means it’s a perfect time for a fresh look at both apps. Both are still some of the best, cross-platform, free to-do managers available, but let’s see how far they’ve come.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Google and Oracle are headed back to court, and a judge has ruled the two parties must reveal how they’re planning to vet the social media profiles of potential jurors. “After both sides requested extra time to review potential jurors’ answers to questionnaires, U.S. District Judge William Alsup said he realized the attorneys really wanted that time to scrub potential jurors’ social media accounts for personal data. ‘In this case there are good reasons to restrict, if not forbid, such searches by counsel, the jury consultants, investigators and clients,’ Alsup wrote in a March 25 ruling.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

If you like Donald Shakestrump, you’ll love this: a Donald Trump speech, Deep Dream’d by Google’s neural network. And if anyone wants to Deep Dream another candidate’s speeches or appearances – I suspect Bernie Sanders’ “bird on the podium” moment would be ideal – I’ll link to them too. Fair’s fair. Good morning, Internet…

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