Web/Tech – Page 4 – The Distant Librarian

Shasta vs. Descript

Dec 20, 2021

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It's a premature title, as I don't actually have access to Project Shasta yet, but this announcement makes it sound very similar to Descript: Adobe’s Project Shasta is an AI-powered, web-based audio editor. I have requested access, though, and will report back when I know more! 🙂

Historical COVID-19 R-Values for Alberta charted

Jun 17, 2021

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Paul R. Pival

in Data, Service, Web/Tech

Last month, I posted about how a patron request prompted me to collect the historical COVID-19 R-values for Alberta. That data is available on a public Google Sheet, but I had meant to throw up a chart as well. The other day I was reminded about Datawrapper, so I used that to make this: Hopefully…

Queering Zoom: students and educators say online learning must be more inclusive

Feb 25, 2021

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Paul R. Pival

in Miscellaneous, Social Networks, Web/Tech

Here's a good article from the University of Alberta student newspaper: Queering Zoom: students and educators say online learning must be more inclusive. A couple of points and counterpoints: While professors often include anti-harassment and inclusionary policies in their syllabus, Morris noted that they feel these are hollow statements. “[These professors that have these inclusion…

How to stop a Zoombombing

Nov 18, 2020

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Paul R. Pival

in Electronic Reference, Random Tech Tips, Social Networks, Tutorials, Web/Tech

Thank goodness I haven't personally experienced this while teaching / presenting via Zoom, but I have been a participant in a workshop that was Zoom bombed, and that was traumatic enough. I can't even imagine how nasty that would be for the presenter. Lifehacker reports that Zoom is rolling out some new features aimed to…

How to Find the RSS Feed URL by Guessing

Jan 17, 2020

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Paul R. Pival

in Discovery, Ideas, Random Tech Tips, Tutorials, Web/Tech

The Zapier newsletter I just got had a link to this article from last year: How to Find the RSS Feed URL for Almost Any Site. It's got some good tips for sussing out RSS feeds, but I have a couple more. I ran across two sites recently that should've had RSS feeds, but apparently…

Available Reads is like Library Extension lite

Dec 5, 2019

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Paul R. Pival

in Books, Discovery, Linking, Web/Tech

I just added the Available Reads browser extension, and really like the feature to sort my Goodreads titles by availability on Overdrive. But for even more information on additional sites (like Amazon), Library Extension still takes the cake. Some screen shots featuring the two extensions: (click to embiggen for details)

An RSS feed for the Statistics Canada Infographics page

Jul 5, 2019

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Paul R. Pival

in Discovery, Ideas, Linking, Service, Web/Tech

I got tired of there not being an RSS feed for the Statistics Canada Infographics page, so I made one. You can use it too! https://feed43.com/8203235035481320.xml

Some Sci-Hub stuff

Jul 3, 2019

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Paul R. Pival

in Document Delivery, Legal, Linking, Scholarship, Social Networks, Web/Tech

Sci-Hub popped up a couple of times today, along with a link to a tool I hadn't seen before. Tools to liberate scholarly articles, help sources understand journalism and publish printable online zines. Mentioning the existence to journalists They Know We Know They Know: Does Sci-Hub Affect Library Subscriptions? which in turn led to the…

11 Best Web Scraping Tools to Extract Online Data

Apr 4, 2019

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Paul R. Pival

in Data, Web/Tech

Hongkiat just posted a list of the 10 Best Web Scraping Tools to Extract Online Data (ht ResearchBuzz). I've tried a few of them, but now have more to explore. I was really surprised that Octoparse wasn't on their list. I've had some really good success with it before, and it definitely deserves to be…

Thoughts on building my first bar chart race with Flourish

Mar 28, 2019

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Paul R. Pival

in Data, Ideas, Miscellaneous, Tutorials, Web/Tech

If you're on social media you've probably seen a bunch of bar chart races pop up in the past couple of weeks. The folks at Flourish have a good post chronicling the "new" phenomenon. Even better, Flourish created a template which makes it pretty easy to build your own, so that's what I did. Here…

Category: Web/Tech