Category: Web/Tech
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First run on autoEdit 2, open source transcription tool
Having had this tab opened for what seems like forever, I finally got around to running some tests of autoEdit 2, an open-source automatic transcription tool (automatically creates a text file from a given audio or video file). This tool only runs on the Mac, and there are two flavours, if you will. One, Gentle…
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Before and After – Calgary and Ft. McMurray
The other day Google Earth released updated historical imagery, so I thought it’d be neat to take a peek at two spots I know have grown a lot since 1985, the date of the earliest imagery. I also wanted a quick and dirty way to make a before/after image slider, as shown on the above…
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Mita makes the case: Why Libraries Should Maintain the Open Data of Their Communities
Mita Williams has an excellent blog post titled Why Libraries Should Maintain the Open Data of Their Communities. It's a long (for a blog post), but important read, and includes an excellent history of how Canadian government data has evolved, and how it compares (poorly) to US government data . I've been making the same…
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Bookmarklet to convert open.canada.ca JSON to HTML
Somewhere along the line I subscribed to the JSON feed of the Govt. of Canada Open Data releases, so I get something that looks great in my Feedly list: But when I click through I get the JSON data instead of the actual HTML descriptive page with pretty separate download the CSV etc buttons. Too…
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Thoughts on Canada’s Draft New Plan on Open Government
Last week the Government of Canada released the latest draft of the new plan on Open Government, and I thought it was pretty good reading! Here are some of the things I learned, or highlighted as particularly interesting: Canada was recently ranked 4th out of 92 countries by the World Wide Web Foundation’s Open Data Barometer which…
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12 Screencasting tools that were all new to me
Admittedly I haven't spent lots of time staying up-to-date on screencasting tools, but I have to admit I was surprised that a recent list on MakeUsOf, Record Your Desktop with These 12 Great Screencasting Apps, contained all new stuff to me. Take a look, maybe you'll find something useful there! (OK, obviously I know about…
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Recreating Hilary Mason’s Research-quality data sets bitly bundle
I'm about halfway through an excellent Coursera MOOC called Getting and Cleaning Data, part of my plan to learn R. We were just shown a slide listing a bunch of collections where we could find data sets to play with, and the first one on the list had disappeared. Turns out it was originally created…