10 Nov 2023
This blog post is part of a series on file formats research. See this introduction post for more information. Update: The official format definition is now online here: MOOF Disk Image. Comments welcome directly to the Library of Congress. The most interesting thing about this format is that its named after Susan Kare’s dogcow icon. (“Comments welcome” – Is there something more interesting?) This might be the first very lean format I’m working with, where...
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03 Nov 2023
This blog post is part of a series on file formats research. See this introduction post for more information. Update: The official format definition is now online here: HFE (HxC Floppy Emulator) File Format. Comments welcome directly to the Library of Congress. My starting point for this format was this PDF (with a sweet logo). And I spent a lot of time deep in the forums on this one. It was nice to see a...
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27 Oct 2023
This blog post is part of a series on file formats research. See this introduction post for more information. Update: The official format definition is now online here: Digital Forensics XML. Comments welcome directly to the Library of Congress. Digital Forensics XML, XML for your digital forensics. This had me thinking about BitCurator, which is a toolkit that had several years of public funding, and some institutional tie-in, but now has a community group and...
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20 Oct 2023
This blog post is part of a series on file formats research. See this introduction post for more information. Update: The official format definition is now online here: PDF Portfolio. Comments welcome directly to the Library of Congress. PDF Portfolio files! PDF is already such a tangled spaghetti mess of a format, and this format is just taking a whole bunch of them and making them into a mega-pasta dish. Here’s an overview And Flash...
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13 Oct 2023
This blog post is part of a series on file formats research. See this introduction post for more information. Update: The official format definition is now online here: WordPerfect Document Family. Comments welcome directly to the Library of Congress. This is a challenging format to work on because it’s an entire family, and the family changed so much over time (and the EndNote Citation Library format was even worse, in this regard). It’s challenging because...
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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. Update: The official format definition is now online here: EndNote Library Format. Comments welcome directly to the Library of Congress. 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...
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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. Update: The official format definition is now online here: Exchangeable Image File Format (Exif) Family. Comments welcome directly to the Library of Congress. 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...
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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. Update: The official format definition is now online here: JPEG File Interchange Format Family. Comments welcome directly to the Library of Congress. 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...
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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 official format definition is now 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...
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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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