TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Verge: Twitter says paying Blue subscribers now get ‘prioritized rankings in conversations’. “Twitter has updated its list of features for Twitter Blue, saying subscribers paying for the $8-a-month service will now get ‘prioritized rankings in conversations’ and the ability to upload videos up to 60 minutes in length.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: 6 Ways to Find Symbols and Look Up Symbol Meanings . “While surfing the internet (as well as in the offline world), we come across a lot of symbols. Some of them are common, but for others, you’ve probably wondered what a particular symbol means more than once. Thankfully, the internet has many symbol identifier resources to help. We’ll show you how to find out a symbol’s meaning using a variety of methods.”

Online Journalism Blog: Making video and audio interviews searchable: how Pinpoint helped with one investigation. “MA Data Journalism student Tony Jarne spent eight months investigating exempt accommodation, collecting hundreds of documents, audio and video recordings along the way. To manage all this information, he turned to Google’s free tool Pinpoint. In a special guest post for OJB, he explains how it should be an essential part of any journalist’s toolkit.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Mashable: ‘My 2022 eras’ trend is perfect TikTok ephemera. “Soundtracked to a sped-up version of ‘Celebration’ by Azealia Banks, the ‘my 2022 eras’ trend consists of users posting a series of photos that encapsulate their year. Each image is captioned with the “era” is represents. So far, over 340,000 videos have been posted using the song. On the internet, the term era describes a period of one’s life. For example, when someone says “I’m in my girl-boss era,” what they mean is that, right now, they’re ambitious and independent.”

The Independent: Judith Kerr archive acquired by Newcastle’s National Centre for Children’s Books. “Kerr, who died in 2019 at the age of 95, wrote and illustrated a number of much-loved children’s books including The Tiger Who Came To Tea, the Mog series and When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit…. The archive includes artwork and papers for 32 books, loose studio artwork, notebooks and a diary from 1948.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Washington Post: Faxes and floppy disks: Japan’s bureaucracy needs an upgrade. “For a country where emoji were invented, Japan’s bureaucracy remains steadfastly analog. Official documents are often submitted via fax (a machine that sends messages over the phone line) or floppy disk (a precursor to the USB drive). In fact, thousands of government regulations insist on the use of such 20th-century stalwarts.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

NiemanLab: This is the year of the RSS reader. (Really!). “It is at this point that the most organized people in late capitalism will rise up about a very small matter and demand something better: An RSS for the people, open source, easily used, and not some weird niche version for podcasts or that uses AI.”

Route Fifty: Machine Learning Digs Into States’ Archives. “Amid growing backlogs of archival data, states are turning to software tools to streamline records management.”

Hindustan Times: C-DAC Pune to develop ‘virtual walk through’ for Raigad fort. “In a bid to provide a virtual tour of the historic Raigad fort, the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune has begun work in collaboration with the state government to digitise the iconic landmark in Maratha history. … This will be the first virtual tour of any of Maharashtra’s forts, utilising cutting-edge technology to provide the public with a one-of-a-kind experience without having to visit the fort.” You can read more about the forts of Maharashtra here.

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

ZDNet: This 3D printing system converts waste sawdust into stunning wooden lamps and guitars. “In the build box, an inkjet print head drops a water-based binder onto the surface of the sawdust and the two substances meld into each other. The printhead simultaneously injects a water-based ink that mimics practically any wood grain you would want, including rosewood, zebrano, ebony and mahogany, among others. Deposits of the binder and injection of the ink is done layer by layer, as per the contours of the rendering dictated by the 3D software.” Good afternoon, Internet..

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