NEW RESOURCES

6SqFt: NYC launches online platform with free access to 9.3 million historical birth, death, and marriage records. “The New York City Municipal Archives has launched a digital search platform as part of a mass digitization project that will ultimately provide online access to 13.3 million historical birth, death, and marriage records. At 70 percent complete, the NYC Historical Vital Records Project currently has 9.3 million genealogical records accessible in digital form, free of charge.”

New-to-me, from Database of Ring Theory Blog: Check it out: Catalogue of Mathematical datasets. “I’ve seen the question asked on math.stackexchange and mathoverflow a few times where people want to make a big list of mathematical databases online. But recently when talking to the maintainers of π-Base, I discovered that someone has really outdone themselves.”

Creative Commons: Open Education Week 2022 Lightning Talks: Recordings and Slides. “In honor of Open Education Week (March 7-11, 2022), the Creative Commons Open Education Platform community offered Lightning Talks, or seven-minute presentations on specific updates or stories in open education. Moderated by Stephen Downes, the lighting talks covered everything from leveraging tax legislation for open education funding, to theories and practices around OER, fireside stories of open sharing, and even a Texas Sing-a-long!”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Chrome Unboxed: Google Forms API now available for all, out of restricted Beta. “In October 2021, Google introduced the Google Forms API, further increasing its potential and providing a way to manage forms and act on responses programmatically. However, the API was made available only as a restricted Beta at the time. Google has now provided an update on this beta and has made the API generally available.”

Ars Technica: Android 13 preview locks down notifications, adds more to the tablet taskbar. “Android 13 Developer Preview 2 is out, and with it come a bunch of changes for the next version of Android. Preview 2 is still a very early look at Android 13, and most of the big feature reveals for these Android previews come during Google I/O.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: The Top 7 Plugins for Cloning a WordPress Website . “Cloning your WordPress website is a useful way of backing up your files or transferring your site to a staging or live environment. You can do this the manual way if you’re comfortable working on the backend of websites. But an alternative approach is to use a WordPress plugin. A plugin is the easier method, and in this article, we’ll take a quick look at seven of the best.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Smithsonian Magazine: Conserving and Digitizing the Hewitt Sisters’ Diaries . “Earlier this week, Smithsonian Libraries and Archives launched a new Smithsonian Transcription Center project to transcribe the diaries of Sarah and Eleanor Hewitt. Curious how these well-loved diaries made their way from our library shelf to your computer screen? Conservation and digitization staff describe the work that goes on behind-the-scenes to make these volumes available.”

New York Times: Securing the TikTok Vote. “Social media has played a role in political campaigning since at least 2007, when Barack Obama, then an Illinois senator, registered his first official Twitter handle. Since then, enormous numbers of political bids have harnessed the power of social platforms, through dramatic announcement videos on YouTube, Twitter debates, Reddit A.M.A.s, fireside chats on Instagram Live and more. TikTok, with its young-skewing active global user base of one billion, would seem a natural next frontier.”

NBC News: The internet’s meth underground, hidden in plain sight. “In December, Paul went home for the holidays. Like many people, he hadn’t seen his family for almost a year. But instead of spending time with his loved ones, he said he stayed in his room and injected methamphetamine. While his family was downstairs, Paul said he pretended to be sick while he relapsed in a multiday meth binge. Though he was alone in his room, he was using drugs with other people. As he was injecting methamphetamine, he connected with hundreds of other individuals doing the same thing over Zoom.” Very deep dive.

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Verge: Vimeo is sorry, and here’s how it’s changing. “Vimeo has announced that it’s making some major changes to its bandwidth policy, after several creators spoke out about how the company pulled the rug out from under them by demanding large sums of money if they wanted to keep hosting their videos on the platform. The new policies replace nebulous terms with definitive ones, and guarantee that creators will have time to prepare for changes.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Core 77: REscan: A Helmet-Based System for Scanning and Capturing 3D Spaces, Hands-Free. “…the helmet essentially has the array of cameras and lasers that self-driving cars do, just up on your dome. Best of all, it’s hands-free, so you can carry things, open doors, take notes, sketch, etc. as you’re scanning and capturing.”

Boing Boing: This website turns text into music. “Typatone assigns musical tones to letters. Start typing (or paste in any text) to hear original music.” I tried it. The music I made reminded me of some of those trippy Sesame Street animations from the early 70s. Good morning, Internet…

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