19 Sep 2023
please please please!!! please please please: an endless clicking game where you can beg the cruel and unrelenting universe for good fortune; a perfect choice for any place or state of oblivion, e.g. waiting rooms, airports, typing awareness indicators, sports arenas, and others. Recently, I realized I don’t have a way to send my desperate pleas out into the void, to beg at the feet of an relentlessly cruel, vast universe. I have vibe checks...
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15 Sep 2023
This blog post is part of a series on file formats research. See this introduction post for more information. Meta-note: This blog series aims to run once a week, but there won’t be posts for the next THREE weeks, as I’ll be on vacation and offline. Series to resume Oct. 13th. Big thanks to Tyler Thorsted for providing me with many sample files for this format (and for doing research that led to some thorough...
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08 Sep 2023
This blog post is part of a series on file formats research. See this introduction post for more information. This format was one that I started researching, but was only accidentally part of the set I was given, so this one will never have an FDD! But I learned a bit about the format before that was determined, so it merits having a blog post anyway. Radiance RGBE Image Format: This looks to be the...
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01 Sep 2023
This blog post is part of a series on file formats research. See this introduction post for more information. Hot on the tails of the JFIF format family, time to crack into the Exif family. (That’s short for “Exchangable image file format”) Like JFIF, LC already has an entry for EXIF so that makes for a good starting point. “Everything you wanted to know about media metadata, but were afraid to ask” is a nice...
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25 Aug 2023
This blog post is part of a series on file formats research. See this introduction post for more information. As a meta-update: The formal works are starting to appear online! Go here to see Set 9’s official format descriptions. I’ve updated the previous two blog posts with direct links. Going forward, I thiiink my blog posts will mostly, if not completely, run ahead of the published sets. Right now, I do the bulk of the...
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11 Aug 2023
This blog post is part of a series on file formats research. See this introduction post for more information. Update: The format definitions are online here: MySQL Table Definition and MySQL View Definition. Comments welcome directly to the Library of Congress. This format took me on an interesting journey deep into the debts of MySQL. Not just any MySQL, but legacy, nearly-deprecated, “during or before shit hit the fan” MySQL. I laughed out loud when...
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11 Aug 2023
This blog post is part of a series on file formats research. See this introduction post for more information. Update: The format definition is online here: FASTA Database Format. Comments welcome directly to the Library of Congress. First format: FASTA! This is a format used to store nucleotide acid or amino acid data. You can see examples of what this looks like here. To me, this format looks a bit like screaming into a void....
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04 Aug 2023
In June, I started working on a project that will run for the next year – it’s helping the Library of Congress update their Sustainability of Digital Formats page with around 40 new file formats! You can see the list of 2023-2024 formats here – those are the formats I’ll be researching. There’s an announcement in this general updates post from the Library of Congress and another announcement blog from Myriad. Doing this research is...
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12 Jul 2023
Hello! Today is the day! The Illustrated Guide to Audio Formats and The Illustrated Guide to Film Formats are now available (or can become available) everywhere books are sold! Buy ‘em now! You can also visit my Author page on Bookshop.org or my Author page on Amazon. These books are arriving one year after the first of the series, The Illustrated Guide to Video Formats, was published. It’s been a huge amount of work researching...
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05 Jul 2023
Recently, I was in the market for a new color scheme, which means I had to think about things like branding, how colors work together, and, most importantly, how the colors work well together on the web, on a website. I’m starting to think I’m not very good with colors. I feel like I understand the theory, and maybe I understand colors in the context of, say, painting, or a specific mark (see: the handful...
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09 May 2023
This is a delayed blog post from a project I threw together back in March. That project was: Mediainfo Parameter Definitions! See, I had done a lot of work three years ago, working in the open right here on this blog, in fact, around providing definitions to the potential parameter options in MediaInfo. After three years, that work was finally merged in the library! But also, it wasn’t added to the library at the same...
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26 Apr 2023
I made yet another “techno-divination” website! webpage? web “app”? SPA? What are we calling cute lil simple spots on the web these days? Anyway, hello to BILLBOARD ASTROLOGY, the 5th techno-divination. You can see the others here. They include the i-ching, the aura reader, the aura reader with partner, barthes tarot, and a planet-mapper. I started on this project by looking at this library, but I didn’t want to use Python for a basic website....
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29 Dec 2022
Hi. Back for another one of these (the ninth on this weblog, in fact!). 2022 I can’t say this year was great. But let’s see what we’ve got. The good Good overall Great partner, happy home, lovely friends, beautiful cats, exciting city, steady salary, ability to eat well, no major health concerns, and some light safe travel. I can reflect on all of this and think, yes, an overall good year. However, this annual report...
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06 Aug 2022
Hey, I made a book! The Illustrated Guide to Video Formats is widely available through most booksellers. And I made a website too! Archives of Tomorrow has everything the book has and a bit more. I have a lot of process-y things to say but haven’t found the time to put them to paper, and this announcement post is already 3 weeks late! Here are a few of the things I hope to write about...
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29 Jul 2022
Without trying to sound too much like a #girlboss-in-recovery, I’ve been trying out a new way to structure my workday. Here’s the goals tl:dr; knowing what feels like “a full day’s worth of effort” in a remote, async, many-timezones environment feeling productive when working on slower-moving goals where there isn’t instant feedback not working too much or feeling guilt because “I feel like I didn’t get anything done today” Here’s the structure tl:dr; morning/evening checkins...
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