Processing WOLFcon Conference Recordings with FFMPEG
WOLFcon—the World Open Library Foundation Conference—was held last month, and all of the meetings were recorded using Zoom. Almost all of the sessions were ...
Recent posts
On Open Library Services: Reflections from the GIL User Group Meeting
In May 2023 I was asked to join the opening session at Georgia’s GIL User Group Meeting. Along with Chris Sharp and Emily Gore, we reflected on the conferen...
Considerations for Online Age Verification (in the U.S.)
The Congressional Research Service has posted four reports about verifying users’ ages for various services online in the past few months. This is a tricky ...
Congressional Research Service Syndication Feed
One of the hidden gems of the Library of Congress is the Congressional Research Service (CRS). With a staff of about 600 researchers, analysts, and writers,...
This website contains 0.00006% of the world’s knowledge
According to reputable sources, this blog contains 0.00006% of the world’s knowledge. The large language models (LLMs) that underlie tools like ChatGPT a...
Reflections on four-months-after-Twitter
It’s coming up on four months this week since I left Twitter, and I started wondering about the impact of that. On the whole, I’m still quite fine with the ...
Issue 100: Internet Governance
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is just over a year old, and shortly after the war started there were calls to cut Russia off from the internet as a punitive ac...
Controlled Digital Lending…What’s the Fuss?
On March 16, 2023, I gave a presentation with this title to the code4lib conference in Princeton, New Jersey. The suggested links from the end of the presen...
Issue 99: Copyright for Generative Artificial Intelligence (ChatGPT, DALL·E 2, and the like)
Cecil Mae Feather, 1929–2023 This issue is offered in honor of Cecil Mae Thornburg Feather, my mother-in-law. Cecil Mae w...
ReplayWeb for Embedding Social Media Posts (Twitter, Mastodon) in Web Pages
If you have been following social media news, you know that Twitter is having its issues. Although there is still a bit to go before it goes away (or, more ...
Issue 98: Time Standards - leap seconds forwards and backwards, moon time, internet time (then and now), and aliens
Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo. The Confessions of St. Augustine. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1931, page 267. Translation...
Issue 97: Again with the AI Chatbots
The hot technology in the news now is chatbots driven by artificial intelligence. (This specific field of artificial intelligence is “large language models”...