Tyng-Ruey Chuang
boosted
Federico Mena Quintero
boosted
Tools I use a lot for my job: https://regex101.com, CLI scripting, and Python. Perhaps, I should write a blog about it. What tools do other preservation people use?
#regex #bash_scripting #python #digipres
Tools I use a lot for my job: https://regex101.com, CLI scripting, and Python. Perhaps, I should write a blog about it. What tools do other preservation people use?
#regex #bash_scripting #python #digipres
Social media web archiving 3/3
Additionally it would be helpful to process these feeds again and record author, date and post in a database.
I'd appreciate pointers to forums, chats, mailing-lists where this is discussed...
I suspect that the webarchiving and digital preservation community could (and should?) take inspiration from the scraping scripts of the tech industry, on Github I saw some of those tailored at extracting content from feeds.
One thing I am wondering with current web archiving: are there any new approaches for how to deal with social media content?
I mean this problem:
Platforms are full of scripts. We use automated browsing to trigger those scripts and record them in a format to replay them. ( #webrecorder #browsertrix etc.). Which makes sense from a historian's point of view, you record the info in its media format. But often the scripts don't replay, we don't see the content.
thread 1/3
Agaric Tech Collective
and 2 others
boosted
New @dpc_chat blog post: Archiving Facebook, Right Now https://www.dpconline.org/blog/archiving-facebook-right-now #digipres #socialmedia
New @dpc_chat blog post: Archiving Facebook, Right Now https://www.dpconline.org/blog/archiving-facebook-right-now #digipres #socialmedia
Joel 🔪 May-Kill 🔪
boosted
i just ftp'd into a public ftp server running in Ecuador, and discovered an absolutely critical piece of US Robotics ISP modem pool software that has been missing for 20 years
thank you from the bottom of my heart, rolando felix of Educational Unit 10 De Agosto, for leaving your departmental computer ftp wide open ❤️ you just preserved some insanely useful and important dial-up ISP history. (don't worry rolando - i didn't peek too deeply into your ms-dos games and music folders)
the story:
in the mid-90s i was a teenager who had a summer job at a dial-up isp. we had 32 incoming lines which were handled by 32 external USR Courier modems, which were fed into a super chonky Livingston Portmaster terminal server. all of the support hardware took up an entire rack - just to let 32 people call in for internet service at 28.8kbaud. it ate a ton of power, and made a lot of heat.
then, in 95-96, US Robotics delivered two insane appliances: the Total Control Modem Pool. these were tiny devices that offered 16 dial-up modems at 33.6kbaud. if you paid a bit more, you could buy the NetServer version, which gave you a terminal server too. an entire isp in a box the size of a network switch.
the modems had buggy firmware. so USR offered firmware updates via their ftp site. you could even upgrade some of the modems to "x2" 56k service with a firmware patch. they supported it for years, and when 3com bought USR, they kept the ftp site running for years. and then, 3com shut down their ftp site. and no one thought to mirror it.
after 3 hours of searching, i was able to track down a single filename thanks to WBM: mpv90an.zip. not a single site on the web had it - not even IA or discmaster. on a hunch, i plugged it into the Napalm FTP Indexer (https://www.searchftps.net) and... unbelievably, there it was, sitting on an ancient box in someone's university office in Quito, Ecuador.
the most amazing part was how slow the server was. at 250 ms pings, it was like digging through a public ftp on a 14.4k modem in 1994.
tomorrow i'll be uploading these files to IA. for now, sleep.
as promised, the treasure trove of US Robotics dialup ISP software is now available on IA. Please note that while I've done my best to describe the software, none of it has been tested. If you're planning on doing something like firmware upgrades, be 100% sure it's the right equipment and firmware.
and if you're one of those lucky 9 people that has a USR Total Control device, i'd love to hear your results.
USR Total Control SNMP Manager MIBs:
https://archive.org/details/tc-mibs
US Robotics SNMP Total Control Manager 2.0.1 and 4.13 Upgrade DIsks
https://archive.org/details/usr-tc-nmc-snmp
COM/US Robotics Total Control NetServer 8/16 Manager and Utilities
https://archive.org/details/usr-tc-netserver8-manager
US Robotics Total Control Modem Pool 8/16 Firmware:
https://archive.org/details/usr-tc-mp16-firmware
Novell NetWare Services Manager 1.1
https://archive.org/details/novell-nsm-1.1
US Robotics Total Control SNMP Manager for NetWare NMS:
https://archive.org/details/usr-tc-snmp-extras
US Robotics Modem Software Downloader 1.7 & USR Sportster Modem Firmware upgrade
https://archive.org/details/usr-sportster-upgrader
US robotics hardware upgrade offer document for dial-up ISPs. This is just a marketing document, but it's a fun read:
https://archive.org/details/usr-x2-offer
i just ftp'd into a public ftp server running in Ecuador, and discovered an absolutely critical piece of US Robotics ISP modem pool software that has been missing for 20 years
thank you from the bottom of my heart, rolando felix of Educational Unit 10 De Agosto, for leaving your departmental computer ftp wide open ❤️ you just preserved some insanely useful and important dial-up ISP history. (don't worry rolando - i didn't peek too deeply into your ms-dos games and music folders)
the story:
in the mid-90s i was a teenager who had a summer job at a dial-up isp. we had 32 incoming lines which were handled by 32 external USR Courier modems, which were fed into a super chonky Livingston Portmaster terminal server. all of the support hardware took up an entire rack - just to let 32 people call in for internet service at 28.8kbaud. it ate a ton of power, and made a lot of heat.
then, in 95-96, US Robotics delivered two insane appliances: the Total Control Modem Pool. these were tiny devices that offered 16 dial-up modems at 33.6kbaud. if you paid a bit more, you could buy the NetServer version, which gave you a terminal server too. an entire isp in a box the size of a network switch.
the modems had buggy firmware. so USR offered firmware updates via their ftp site. you could even upgrade some of the modems to "x2" 56k service with a firmware patch. they supported it for years, and when 3com bought USR, they kept the ftp site running for years. and then, 3com shut down their ftp site. and no one thought to mirror it.
after 3 hours of searching, i was able to track down a single filename thanks to WBM: mpv90an.zip. not a single site on the web had it - not even IA or discmaster. on a hunch, i plugged it into the Napalm FTP Indexer (https://www.searchftps.net) and... unbelievably, there it was, sitting on an ancient box in someone's university office in Quito, Ecuador.
the most amazing part was how slow the server was. at 250 ms pings, it was like digging through a public ftp on a 14.4k modem in 1994.
tomorrow i'll be uploading these files to IA. for now, sleep.
if you were a kid in the 90s or early 2000s, you very likely goofed around with some of this educational software at school, or if your parents hated you sufficiently, at home.
a few months ago someone generously sent me an educational software catalog that their father - who was a teacher - had kept from the 90s. i finally got around to scanning it in, and now you too can goggle at the insane prices schools had to pay for multi-seat game licenses.
this is the catalog your teachers browsed in the summer, before unsuccessfully trying to convince the principal to lay down $495 for an Incredible Machine 3 lab pack.
(fwiw, does anyone really trust an edutainment company that can't spell brussels sprouts?)
pdf and original (400 dpi) scans here:
https://archive.org/details/software-plus-1996
#softwarePreservation#digiPres#retroComputing#retroGaming #edutainment
An ad for 3D Dinosaur Adventure, showing a screenshot from the edutainment software and some copy describing it.
An ad for The Incredible Machine Version 3.0
It shows a screenshot of the game with copy promoting the game.
An ad for Word City and Math Ace. It shows both games sitting on a plate with the tagline below, "It's brussel sprouts for the brain."
Ed Summers
boosted
#digipres folks, has anyone used a command-line perceptual hashing tool for images and liked it? I spent about 45 minutes yesterday trying to get various things to work, but to no avail
#digipres folks, has anyone used a command-line perceptual hashing tool for images and liked it? I spent about 45 minutes yesterday trying to get various things to work, but to no avail
Fascinating article from the BBC on the continued use of old computers including some still remaining uses you might not have heard about.
#digipres#DigitalContinuity#Windows#LegacySoftware#LegacyHardware
Question re #SafeguardingResearch
We encounter 'web applications' that our current method of archiving don't preserve.
Things like [we need a better example, this one is already gone (but the data preserved) https://social.coop/@edsu/114206452552797815]
We are mostly using https://github.com/openzim/zimit to create WARC files and combining them into a single ZIM.
(This uses the browsertrix crawler)
Any ideas on how to archive not just the content, but also the functionality of such applications?
#DigiPres #Web #Archiving