Dan Scott @dbs@code4lib.social

Learned how to use youtube-dl today.

For work: profs subcontracted a local company to create some instructional videos; company posted them to YouTube and might not have the originals anymore. Profs own copyright and want copies of the videos in our institutional repository, away from an ad-plagued platform.

So if worst comes to worst, I'm ready...

Trying to figure out the most environmentally friendly options for some renovations. The most friendly option is to not renovate.

But then the staples continue to stick out of the vinyl flooring, as they have for 14 years...

Wanted: a Canadian librarian to give a keynote on digitization and metadata. Maybe my digipres.club friends can recommend some good candidates?

/cc @anna @ashley @sabrams

Yay, our national library & archives was able to harvest our theses & dissertations collection, and I only had to tweak one thing in our DC-to-ETDMS stylesheet.

DSpace keeps throwing curves at us after ten years but it is still running and maintained, so there's that.

https://github.com/dbs/DSpace/commit/9171de2d41d2a60b8474bc4838be587ea2d4cb92

Turns out it was an amazing largely one-person performance by Matthew Heitl, with some assistance from puppets and shadow theatre.

Off to see a local production of A Christmas Carol with the family. No idea what to expect!

I had been using a convoluted approach with an rPi 1 to provide a Google Cloud Print interface, but this is far better.

And Google Cloud Print is going away, of course: https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/9633006

Last night I set up a Raspberry Pi 2 as a print server for our 13 year old (!) Brother HL 2040 printer at home.

The rPi is running Fedora Server 31 so it's getting regular updates, and provides a nice web-based management UI through Cockpit.

I relied on https://gist.github.com/leafstorm/b2e91b9c9b66c82732e3d483fd90aa9f for the bulk of the printer setup info.

Should have been working on my research but was in a mood to solve this long-standing problem.

You have a sign that you want to print in black and white. When you hit Print, you can choose to send it to one of the following printers:

* Xerox Black & White
* Xerox Colour

Which do you choose?

If you chose "Xerox Black & White", your job won't be on the print queue of any printer in the library, because they're all colour printers.

Instead, send it to the colour printer, and manually override it in person to print in greyscale.

Intuitive eh?

I love that https://migrate.flixstervideo.com/ has the title element "Filxster Video" [sic].

Worst part is that I can't remove the trackers on the page because it's part of the surrounding template into which my bit is included.

My only testing option is to try out changes (including PHP) in production.

At least I can run php -l to check the syntax, but I have no idea what version of PHP they're running or what extensions are available.

I guess I could try dumping the results of phpversion() and get_loaded_extensions() into a hidden block but ugh...

Our library homepage is on the IT-controlled website. They've limited me to 1 PHP file and 1 CSS file that gets included into a Drupal page.

Just turned off "Automatically display images in my email" (uni is a Google Suite operation, so Gmail) because a colleague has been using mailtrack.io to track who has been opening / reading their email. So obnoxious.

Really should have turned that off long ago.

<subfield code="a">Indians of North America -- Canada -- Economic Autochtones -- Canada.</subfield>

No this is not how subject headings work!

I replaced over 18,000 instances of the "Indians of North America" subject heading with "Indigenous peoples--North America" in our catalogue, based on:

Bone, Christine. (2016). Modifications to the Library of Congress Subject Headings for use by Manitoba archives. Paper presented at: IFLA WLIC 2016 – Columbus, OH Retrieved from: http://library.ifla.org/1328/

Now working on over a thousand other records with variations such as ending in a period...

Curse you MARC punctuation!

Linked data dev friends: job opening at @uOttawa Humanities Lab working on the LINCS project. 24 month contract, $69K-88K salary. Apply now, closes Nov. 17th!

https://uottawa.njoyn.com/cl2/xweb/XWeb.asp?NTKN=c&page=JobDetails&clid=27081&JobId=J1119-0159&BRID=&BPAC=&lang=1

Survey text length limits

If your survey/exercise asks me to explain why I chose a specific response, don't limit me to 255 characters! Argggggh

I learned about (and started following) I learned about (and started following) @privacytools today.

As https://www.privacytools.io/about/ states, they focus on transparency in their reviews and recommendations for privacy tools and invite the community to participate. Good stuff.