NEW RESOURCES

Grand Valley Lanthorn: GV alum and current NYU librarian working to preserve the dynamic web. “Grand Valley State University alum and current New York University Librarian for Journalism, Media, Culture and Communication, Katy Boss, is working with a team dedicated to preserving the dynamic web. Boss, along with co-principal investigator Vicky Rampin and lead developers Remi Rampin and Ilya Kreymer, is developing a tool called ReproZip-Web that preserves dynamic web apps and websites. ReproZip-Web is an open-source program that bundles together all the files necessary to run dynamic web apps and saves them as a downloadable .rpz file.”

University of Vermont Libraries: Special Collections Launches a New Digital Collection. “Silver Special Collections is pleased to announce the launch of our latest digital collection, Diaries. The collection provides access to more than thirty digitized and transcribed Vermont diaries from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, with three-fourths of the diaries authored by women.”

9to5 Mac: ‘RealityScan’ is a new app from Epic Games that uses the iPhone camera to create 3D models. “Epic Games announced on Monday a new app called ‘RealityScan,’ which will let anyone use the iPhone camera to scan objects and turn them into high-fidelity 3D models. The app was developed using technologies from Capturing Reality, a company specializing in photogrammetry that was acquired by Epic in 2021.” The app is free but is currently in a limited iOS beta.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Podnews: Exclusive: YouTube’s plans for podcasting. “Despite no announcement from YouTube’s director of podcasting, Kai Chuk, at Podcast Movement Evolutions last week, Podnews has been sent an 84-page presentation produced by YouTube, intended for podcast publishers. In it, three slides marked ‘Looking Ahead’ allow us a view into what YouTube is planning…”

Search Engine Journal: Google Introduces Retail Search For Ecommerce Sites. “A new solution for ecommerce sites provides Google-quality search and recommendations on retailers’ digital properties. Google Cloud has announced the release of Retail Search, a tool designed to give retailers the capabilities of Google’s search engine on their own domains.”

USEFUL STUFF

WIRED: 6 Free Ways to Practice Sign Language Online . “Although studying ASL online cannot replicate the nuanced experience of in-person communication, curious students who are willing to invest time do not need to pay money for beginner lessons. All of the learning options on our list are either completely free or offer a generous amount of content in front of their paywalls.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

New York Times: Gathering Watch-World Heritage in One URL. “Imagine if the world’s horological archives — and their cache of pamphlets, drawings, reports, photographs, letters and other primary sources — were accessible to anyone with an internet connection. To make that possible, the universe of analog ephemera documenting the history of watchmaking would need to be digitized and organized into a Big Data repository, an effort almost too big to contemplate. And yet, over the past two years, a team of horological specialists has begun to do just that, creating what it calls the Watch Library.”

Techdirt: Game Jam Winner Spotlight: Mr. Top Hat Doesn’t Give A Damn!. “There were quite a few entries this year that did ambitious things with their visuals — always a bold challenge to undertake in a 30-day game jam. That’s just not enough time to make something graphically polished, but it’s plenty of time to do something graphically creative, and that’s just what Josh from Dirtbug Games did with Mr. Top Hat Doesn’t Give A Damn! The game mines what is increasingly one of the richest veins of visual assets and inspiration that can be found amidst the material entering the public domain right now: American animation.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

The Verge: Hackers breached Mailchimp to phish cryptocurrency wallets. “Mailchimp, the veteran email marketing platform, has confirmed that hackers used an internal tool to steal data from more than 100 of its clients — with the data being used to mount phishing attacks on the users of cryptocurrency services. The breach was confirmed to the press by Mailchimp on Monday, but it had come to light over the weekend when users of the Trezor hardware cryptocurrency wallet reported being targeted by sophisticated phishing emails.”

CNET: State Department Launches New Cybersecurity Bureau. “The State Department on Monday launched a new cybersecurity bureau in an effort to make digital security a part of US foreign policy at a time when authoritarian regimes in Russia and China are increasingly trying to influence the internet.”

The Guardian: Stolen Darwin journals returned to Cambridge University library. “Two Charles Darwin manuscripts that were reported as stolen from Cambridge University library have been anonymously returned in a pink gift bag, with a typed note on an envelope wishing a happy Easter to the librarian. The items were found to be missing in 2001, but at the time staff believed they may have been misshelved.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Hack A Day: Monitor Space Weather And The Atmosphere With Your Cellphone!. “Above our heads, the atmosphere is a complex and unpredictable soup of gasses and charged particles subject to the influence of whatever the Sun throws at it. Attempting to understand it is not for the faint-hearted, so it has for centuries been the object of considerable research. A new project from the European Space Agency and ETH Zurich gives the general public the chance to participate in that research in a small way, by crowdsourcing atmospheric data gathering to a mobile phone app.” Good morning, Internet…

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