NEW RESOURCES

Ellines: The first web Atlas of ceramic kilns in Ancient Greece. “The Web Atlas of Ceramic Kilns in Ancient Greece is the first of its kind GIS database of kiln sites in Greece. Kiln sites cover almost five millennia, dating from the Prehistoric to Post-Byzantine periods (ca. 3000 BCE-1820 CE). The Web Atlas will help excavators of kiln sites to quickly contextualize them within their chronological, geographical, and typological horizons, as well as other scholars of Greek antiquity to address questions of ceramic production, distribution, and consumption in various eras and regions.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

G9IGA: Kenya to use Alphabet’s balloons for rural internet. “Kenya will use Alphabet Inc’s system of balloons to beam high-speed internet access in hopes of connecting more of its rural population to the web, its ICT Minister said on Thursday. Known as ‘Project Loon’, the technology was developed by Alphabet’s X, the company’s innovation lab.”

USEFUL STUFF

The Verge: This amazing new web tool lets you create microsites that exist solely as URLs. “Former Google designer Nicholas Jitkoff, who’s now the vice president of design at Dropbox, has created a really nifty new web tool he’s calling itty bitty sites, or self-contained microsites that exist solely as URLs…. you can fill the equivalent of about one printed 8.5 x 11-inch page with any combination of plain text, ASCII characters, or emojis. The actual byte limit depends on where you’d like to share it; Twitter and Slack allow for around 4,000 bytes, while the Mac version of Chrome can accommodate up to 10,000 bytes. The site isn’t actually hosted anywhere — the entirety of the webpage exists as a URL compressed using what’s known as the Lempel–Ziv–Markov chain algorithm.”

MakeUseOf: How to Mute People on Social Media: Facebook, WhatsApp, Reddit, and More. “No matter what you use social media for, you probably have all your friends and family on there. And while you may love and respect those people, seeing every single thing they post online can sometimes get a little too much. On top of that, you probably have contacts who post things that either don’t concern you, or simply annoy you. The problem is you don’t always want to unfriend people just to de-clutter your feeds.”

From Amit Agarwal, in case you were wondering: How Attachment Reminders work inside Gmail?. “If you haven’t seen this earlier, compose a new email in Gmail, add ‘I’ve attached the file’ in the body and hit send. Gmail will pop-up a warning saying – ‘it seems like you forgot to attach the file.’ How does the forgotten attachment detector work inside Gmail? I was looking at the source code of Gmail.com using Chrome Dev Tools and found an interesting snippet that bares it all.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

CanIndia: India to set up disaster database before 2020: Rijiju. “Highlighting the need to systemise disaster data by setting up a database on a sustainable basis, Union Minister of State for Home Kiren Rijiju on Wednesday said it will be India’s endeavour to set up disaster database expeditiously well before the target date of 2020, an official statement said.”

TODAYOnline: As inflation soars, Facebook drives trading in Argentina’s barter clubs. “At an abandoned train station in Buenos Aires’ working-class suburb of San Miguel, hundreds of Argentines gather with bags of clothes, rice, flour and sugar to trade.Most are women, some accompanied by children. Cardboard signs with their names scrawled in black marker hang from strings around their necks. They walk slowly around the old concrete platform yelling out the names of people they had agreed to trade with in a forum on Facebook.”

CNET: Snapchat Spectacles review. “Spectacles have grown up. Snap’s new version of its sunglasses with a camera look similar to the first version, but some tweaks help make them feel more like actual sunglasses rather than just a camera for Snapchat. They’re $150 (or £150 in the UK).”

SECURITY & LEGAL

TorrentFreak: US Online Piracy Lawsuits Break Record Numbers. “Copyright cases in the United States are dominated by two companies which are generally unknown to the public at large. This year alone, Malibu Media and Strike 3 Holdings have filed more than 1,700 lawsuits, breaking a new file-sharing lawsuit record in the most recent quarter.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Global News: First of its kind database aims to reveal how FASD affects Canadians. “Saskatchewan, like other provinces, does not collect specific data on how many people have fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD). The Canada FASD Research Network (CanFASD) is launching the first national database, and first globally, on the disorder.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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