Category Archives: News

New Udemy course: Personal Digital Preservation

Posted on January 12, 2016 | Comments Off on New Udemy course: Personal Digital Preservation

course imageMy second Udemy course, Personal Digital Preservation, is now available! The regular price for enrolling is $16, but for readers of this blog (and anyone else you want to tell!) it’s just $10 with the coupon code DATALITH10. That code is good through the end of February.
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Coming soon: Course on personal digital preservation

Posted on January 8, 2016 | Comments Off on Coming soon: Course on personal digital preservation

Promo image for personal digital preservation course
My next video course on Udemy will be (Udemy willing, which I think they will be) “Personal Digital Preservation: Keeping Your Files Safe and Usable.” Unlike my previous course on File Format Identification Tools, this one will be aimed at a broad audience: anyone who has a lot of files and wants to keep them usable for years to come. I’ll be covering three main areas: avoiding file loss, recovering files, and keeping files usable and understandable. The price will be $16, which will include about an hour of lectures as well as reference PDF files, but I’ll post a coupon code here to get it for less.

There’s still work to be done, including the approval process. It will appear as soon as it’s approved, so I can’t tell you an exact date, but I’m targeting January 12.

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Aside

Due to a misunderstanding of mine, there wasn’t a free preview lecture with my course on file format identification tools, even though the promotion video said there was. I’ve rectified that, and the introductory lecture is now available for viewing … Continue reading →

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Posted on January 5, 2016

File Format Identification Tools: Price War!

Posted on January 1, 2016 | Comments Off on File Format Identification Tools: Price War!

Udemy does strange things with course pricing. They’ve put my course on file format identification tools on sale for $10, through January 11. This is the same price as my introductory coupon code, which expired last night.

The only problem is that when you sign up on Udemy without a coupon code, I only get to keep half the money. If you use a coupon code, I keep almost all of it. So in self-defense, I am declaring a price war against myself. With the coupon code PRICEWAR01, you can get the course for just nine dollars! If you use the code, I keep more money at that price than at Udemy’s $10 price, so please use the code.

The code expires January 11, the same day as Udemy’s sale.

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Approaching the year’s end

Posted on December 28, 2015 | Comments Off on Approaching the year’s end

Several people have already signed up for my Udemy course on file, ExifTool, DROID, JHOVE, and Tika. It looks as if most of them have taken advantage of the discount code INTRO1 to get it at just $10 and are planning to take it later on. This makes complete sense, since the code is good just till the end of this year. If you’re taking the course, feel free to start a discussion or ask questions; I’ll answer them to the best of my ability. If you’re a specialist in one of these tools and would like to see how I’m teaching it, I’ll offer you a free pass if your credentials are good.
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Aside

The PRONOM file format signature files were updated on December 17. DROID users should make sure they have the latest files.

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Posted on December 19, 2015

Support your favorite (Unicode) character

Posted on December 18, 2015 | Comments Off on Support your favorite (Unicode) character

What’s your favorite character? Luke Skywalker? Georgia Mason? Captain Ahab?

Oh, sorry, we’re not talking about that kind of character. We’re talking about characters like the Hungarian double-acute u (ű), the four-leaf clover emoji (🍀), or the Katakana “ka” (カ). The Unicode Consortium is looking for people to “adopt” their favorite characters with a tax-deductible donation. Each character can have one Gold ($5000) sponsor, five Silver ($1000) sponsors, and any number of Bronze ($100) sponsors. As I read the rules, only recognized Unicode characters are eligible, so you probably can’t support Klingon characters.

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New video course: How to Tell a File’s Format

Posted on December 16, 2015 | Comments Off on New video course: How to Tell a File’s Format

Course logoMy new video course on Udemy, How to Tell a File’s Format: Five Open Source Tools is now live! This course introduces file, DROID, ExifTool, JHOVE, and Apache Tika, explaining how to install them and use them for format identification. Since I wrote most of the code for JHOVE, the course has some special tips on how to get the most out of it. For each tool, you get instructions on downloading and installing it and a screen capture demo. I’ll be available to help out with any questions.

The standard price for the course is $28, but you can enroll through December 31 for the introductory rate of not $27, not $26, but just $10 US! Use the coupon code INTRO1 to get this rate.

If you’re a currently active developer on any of the tools I mentioned, get in touch with me before December 31 and I’ll get you a free pass in exchange for your feedback.

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PDF/R

Posted on November 9, 2015 | 2 comments

The PDF Association and TWAIN Working Group have announced a partnership to develop a specification called PDF/Raster or PDF/R. It’s described as “a component of TWG’s TWAIN Direct™ initiative, a language/protocol that eliminates the need for users to install vendor specific drivers as communication between scanning devices and image capture software applications.”
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JHOVE 1.12 beta

Posted on November 3, 2015 | Comments Off on JHOVE 1.12 beta

New JHOVE logoJHOVE 1.12 will be the first release of JHOVE that I had no significant role in, but I’m still glad to see that the beta release is now available. I’ve downloaded it, run the installer (yes, there’s now an installer!), and then launched JHOVE without having to edit any configuration files by hand! That’s a huge advance by itself. Nice work by Carl Wilson and everyone else at the Open Preservation Foundation. It’s now built with Maven, and I’m sure that the building process is much better than the clunky old one.
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