The Distant Librarian

If it's worth sharing, it's worth saving - Wayback to Facebook

I don't know why this particular solution didn't initially resonate with me, other than my doggedly wanting to link to THE ORIGINAL source, but with the recent demise of my locally-hosted instance of ShareNews, I've been searching for other ways to circumvent Facebook's ban on sharing news sites.

I discovered a couple of solid commercial options in ShareKit and Rebrandly that I'll keep in my back pocket, but I prefer not to pay if I don't have to. (side note: news links shared through Bit.ly and any customized rebrands of it are also blocked by FB) Next up was a locally-hosted version of YOURLs, but just as I was about to deploy that I realized the solution had been there all along, even as already noted by me:

Send the link to the Internet Archive using the Wayback Machine browser extension, then paste the resulting URL into Facebook. This method has the advantage of ensuring your newsworthy article is saved for others to view in perpetuity, should it disappear from the original location for any reason.

The extension is available for FF, Safari, Chrome and Edge, and also as an app for iOS and Android, so this should cover pretty much any platform on which you prefer to work.

Here's a quick screencast showing it in action. It's actually faster than my previous solution. The only potential drawback is that FB bans all links from the Internet Archive, but I'm sure lots of folks have been using this option since the ban began, and they haven't yet, so fingers crossed!

Oh, and other options include posting a news link to a social media site such as Mastodon or Twitter, then posting the link to that post into FB, but then you lose the open graph data that makes the post so much more fulsome. Metadata FTW!

Generative AI courses for your mom

I know it's cliché, but I AM actually trying to help my mom understand Generative AI a little more (hi, mom!).

I just completed this free course, and recommend it as a gentle introduction to generative AI: Destination AI: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. It will require an investment of time, though maybe not quite the 6 hours it claims. The only big drawback is that if you fail a quiz, you'll have to wait a full 24 hours before you can re-take it. That said, you CAN move on to another module even if you don't pass the quiz, so not that big a deal.

What will you learn?

• What AI really is (and what it’s not!).
• The impact of artificial intelligence on the workplace and on society as a whole.
• Go behind the scenes of an artificial intelligence project and get familiar with concepts like deep learning and machine learning.

What if your mom's a teacher? I haven't actually taken this course, but Google offers Generative AI for Educators, which is shorter, at only 2 suggested hours.

You’ll learn how to use generative AI tools to:

• Save time on everyday tasks like drafting emails and other correspondence
• Personalize instruction for different learning styles and abilities
• Enhance lessons and activities in creative ways

Launching ChatGPT Voice Chat on an iPhone 12 with back-tap

In today's issue of Ethan Mollick's One Useful Thing, I learned that the iPhone 15 has a unique button I hadn't paid any attention to - the action button. He mentioned how the action button can be used to launch a voice chat with ChatGPT, and I found instructions at TechCrunch. But I only have an iPhone 12!

I knew the iPhone has a feature called Shortcuts, but I'd never really found a use for them. I also recalled that there are a couple of accessibility features on the iPhone that allow actions to be performed by, for instance, double-tapping the back of the phone. I asked Perplexity how to recreate the action button thing on my older phone, and got the following excellent instructions:

Based on the search results provided, here's what you can do with the Back Tap feature on your iPhone 12 to launch a voice chat with ChatGPT:

## Using Back Tap to Launch a ChatGPT Voice Shortcut

The search results indicate that the Accessibility > Touch > Back Tap feature on iPhone allows you to assign various actions to a double or triple tap on the back of your device. [3]

You can use this to launch a custom Shortcut that starts a voice conversation with ChatGPT, without having to unlock your iPhone or use Siri. Here's how:

1. Create a new Shortcut in the Shortcuts app called "ChatGPT Voice" that includes the "Start Voice Conversation" action from the ChatGPT section. [1][2][3]

2. Go to Settings > Accessibility > Touch > Back Tap. [3]

3. Select either "Double Tap" or "Triple Tap" and choose the "ChatGPT Voice" shortcut you just created. [3]

Now, whenever you double or triple tap the back of your iPhone 12, it will automatically launch the ChatGPT voice conversation mode, allowing you to speak your questions and get responses from ChatGPT without having to unlock your device or use Siri. [1][3]

This provides a quick and hands-free way to access ChatGPT's voice capabilities directly from your iPhone 12, using the built-in Back Tap accessibility feature. [3] The search results provide detailed steps on how to set this up.

Citations:
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3fOIE_CJXI
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/shortcuts/comments/181uy7r/chatgpt_voice_shortcut/
[3] https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/how-to-replace-siri-with-chatgpt-iphone/
[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1702w4p/how_to_replace_siri_with_chatgpt_as_your_voice/

Works like a charm! (though as I read that response, I do have to admit it's not actually a hands-free way to access ChatGPT's voice capabilities, but I'm just fine with that.)

Seeking Alberta FOIP advice

I recently put in a FOIP request to the Alberta Executive Council and got a pretty quick response that no records exist (EC000-2024-G-10 closure letter).

I asked for clarification, and received,

"Based on your very specific request for a list, a thorough search was undertaken to locate the records, and it was discovered that no such list (record) exists with Executive Council. FOIP is unable to interpret results of a search other than convey the results."

That wording makes me think something does exist, but I have to re-word, or ask a different department. Anyone have any advice?

My original request was,

Several news sites, but specifically CTV at https://globalnews.ca/news/10281751/alberta-says-it-consulted-widely-in-drafting-controversial-transgender-rights-policy/ have reported that Premier Danielle Smith "consulted widely" before announcing policy changes affecting transgender and non-binary youth and adults on January 31, 2024.

I am requesting a list of all parties, organizations and individuals with whom the Premier met on this issue, including dates, locations and how long each meeting lasted.

Timeframe: May 29, 2023 to Feb 16, 2024
Eliminations: duplicate records, draft records, email records which are duplicated in the final longest string, records subject to solicitor/client or litigation privilege, records containing third party business information, and records containing third party personal information.

Should I not have asked for a "list"?

llamafile is the new best way to run a LLM on your own computer

I lifted the title directly from Simon Willison's post: llamafile is the new best way to run a LLM on your own computer, even though I don't have the expertise to know if it's the BEST way. I can tell you it's a damn easy way, even on Windows! Simon's explanation works on a mac, but you can also run this on Windows with the following miniscule changes.

1. Download the 4.26GB llamafile-server-0.1-llava-v1.5-7b-q4 file from Justine’s repository on Hugging Face.
2. Open Command Prompt and navigate to the location of your downloaded file.
3. Simply type the filename and wait for your default browser to display http://127.0.0.1:8080/

Simon reports that on his M2 Mac he's seeing 55 tokens per second. On my brand-spanking new Dell office machine running Windows 10, I get 5.5 tokens per second :-( I was getting ready to grump all over Windows, here, but on my 2-year-old M1 MacBook Air it barely runs at all, clocking in with 0.35 tokens per second. And now my MacBook Air has crashed - maybe don't try running it on yours, or do, and tell me why mine sucked so hard! :-)

Two simple ways to share news to Facebook in Canada

Update 05/24/24: my hosted version of sharenews was blocked by FB a couple of weeks ago. See option #1 below, or this post for a little more about it.

Update 10/3/23: both of those Sharenews URLs have been blocked by Facebook, but the developer released his code as open source, so you can now run the service from https://sharenews.pival.me/. Bookmarklet links below have been updated to point to that new location.

If you're in Canada and unable to post news articles to Facebook due to Bill C-18, here are two simple options for you.

1. Send the link to the Internet Archive using the Wayback Machine browser extension, then paste the resulting URL into Facebook. Firefox link Chrome link. This method has the advantage of ensuring your newsworthy article is saved for others to view in perpetuity, should it disappear from the original location for any reason.
2. Someone has built a page called ShareNews.ca (now ShareMyLink.ca) specifically to work around this. All it does is ask you to past your URL, then prepends the URL https://www.sharemylink.ca/ to the front of the URL of the page that you're trying to share, and, for now at least, Facebook is allowing that URL to be included in a post. If you'd like to streamline the process a bit, I built a bookmarklet that allows you to perform that same process w/o having to visit the ShareNews.ca website first. Hit the bookmarklet while on the page you want to share, and it'll prepend the sharenews.ca URL to it and place the whole thing in your clipboard, ready to share to FB. Here it is - just drag this to your shortcuts bar: ShareNews

(if that bookmarklet link gets stripped, here's the actual code:

javascript: (function () { var currentUrl = location.href; var newUrl = "https://sharenews.pival.me/" + currentUrl; navigator.clipboard.writeText(newUrl); alert("The new URL is in your clipboard and ready to post to FB"); })();

Thanks for the pointer to ShareNews.ca, Heather!

Update 9/18/23: updated link and bookmarklet to point to https://www.sharemylink.ca

New to bookmarklets? 

Link wherever you want (YMMV)

Quite some time ago, I used a browser extension called TLDRify that allowed me to highlight some text on a web page, and it would create a link I could share that would jump a person directly to the text I had highlighted. It was a way to both create an anchor link when one didn't exist, but with the added benefit of highlighting the block of text you wanted someone to see. At some point I stopped using it because several browsers threw up scary warnings to the clickee that they were being redirected to a different site, which is true, in that TLDRify actually shows your desired content on a different URL (tldrify.com).

The other day, my friend Peter posted about something called URL Scroll-To-Text Fragment, and it looked promising enough to explore. In my explorations, I think I've learned that TLDRify seems to be working well enough again that I'll likely start with that, but you may be interested in figuring out if either of these solutions might be useful to you. It seems that different browsers may play more nicely with one or the other, with Chrome possibly being the best bet, but I have gotten both link types to work across Windows and macOS, on Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari and Edge.

The "fix" to TLDRify is that now all the browsers that are warning about the link are doing so by displaying the following at the top of the page, but otherwise the link works as desired.

So here are some links to try - how do they work for you?

• This one, created with TLDRify, should jump you to the final line of text on a page detailing MPOW's Travel Loaner Device Program.
• This one is way uglier as hyperlinks look, but you can't tell since it's still embedded as a link. It was created with the Scroll To Text bookmarklet described at the Supple.com website.
• The Link to Text Fragment add-on for Firefox creates an identical type of link, but does so with a right mouse click after highlighting the text. This solution seemed the most finicky in that it didn't always actually create the link I wanted.

Jeremy Singer-Vine's Data Liberation Project

Not to be confused with Canada's Data Liberation Initiative, Jeremy Singer-Vine is spending his time on the Data Liberation Project, "an initiative to identify, obtain, reformat, clean, document, publish, and disseminate government datasets of public interest." There's not yet a lot to look at there, but there's plenty in the pipeline.

I just attended a webinar he gave in conjunction with MuckRock and DocumentCloud (I think I'd missed the memo or forgotten that MuckRock and DocumentCloud had merged in 2018) You can watch a recording of it here. Jeremy described how he built an add-on for DocumentCloud that allows him to subscribe to an email distribution list, turn the content of the emails that are received to RSS, and then parse the RSS looking for PDFs which are then automatically loaded to DocumentCloud, where the PDFs become searchable. Pipelines!

Unfortunately, at this time Jeremy's pretty much focussed on US data sources, which is completely understandable for a one-man show, but I couldn't help thinking about the recently-launched Canadian Investigative Journalism Foundation. Even if they don't end up working together, there are definitely some tools available in Jeremy's project that could be of use to IJF, and indeed anyone who's interested in surfacing data that should be public.

What's that, you say, you don't already know about DocumentCloud? That's probably because it's geared towards journalists, but I think I got in when I was working on a project I thought it would help with. Your mileage may vary for gaining full access as a non-journalist, but if you've got a good use-case, your odds are probably good. It's pretty frickin' cool, and I've just made a mental note to spend some more time with it :-)

Clipchamp - a VERY cool screencasting option!

The other day, Lifehacker posted that Windows Has a New Tool for Simultaneously Recording Your Screen and Webcam. That tool is Clipchamp, and I am impressed! Oh, and it's free.

MPOW has blocked the Microsoft Store, so I wasn't able to install the desktop version, but I was able to run the web version. I have to imagine the desktop version would provide a more seamless experience, with better performance, but even running it in a web browser was perfectly fine. Maybe a little jerky when doing the editing. The web version requires either Chrome or Edge, but running it in Chrome, I was able to record what was happening in my Firefox browser. I'm not going to bother posting the test video I made, but it did everything I expected. When editing, I was able to clip out sections, I was able to move and resize my video camera feed, and I added some stock music and graphics. When saving, I had the option to export at different resolutions, and then have the option to upload directly to YouTube or 7 other destinations. Exports are .mp4 files.

There is a limit of 30 minutes per recording, and I don't see that the Premium version changes that. For 99% of what you're likely to want to record as a screencast, I think this tool would do the trick. Definitely worth checking out!

Quick review: An AI toolkit for libraries

Even more on artificial intelligence. I'm going to create a new category for this blog! I just finished reading An AI toolkit for libraries, by Michael Upshall, in UKSG Insights. I found it to provide a really good background on what artificial intelligence is, and isn't, including some examples of some basic narrow AI currently in use in the academic world (spell check, plagiarism detection, topic discovery, etc.). Then he gets in to what you, as an information professional, should pay attention to when evaluating the use of AI in your workplace. Finally, at the end of the article, we get to the actual toolkit, which is actually a nice checklist. I won't repeat it here, but the main considerations for you to consider are the goal of the product, what's in the corpus used to train it, what's the algorithm, evaluation and metrics, sanity check, dissemination, and feedback.

Even if you don't think you care about AI, or that it doesn't play a role in what you're currently doing at work, this is a great introduction to the topic, and you'll learn something useful. If you already have some knowledge on the topic, it's a great refresher with some good, current references. Oh, and those of you that don't think AI's already in your daily routine, I think you're probably wrong. Go read the article!

5 Tools to Create Bar Chart Races Without Coding

One of my more popular posts from the past few years was Thoughts on building my first bar chart race with Flourish, so HT to @ResearchBuzz, who recently pointed to this post on Hongkiat: 5 Tools to Create Bar Chart Race Without Coding. They mention Flourish, but there are four more you might explore. They missed Tableau, though. Lots of fun choices!

Linked data types in Excel

Apparently parts of this have been around for a couple of years, but it just came on my radar last week with this blog post.

Did you know that Excel can do lookups from providers like Wolfram, Bing, and Power BI on a bunch of different data types? Only available with a Live365 (and/or institutional?) account though, but that covers MPOW. Here's the overview page at Microsoft.

A partial list (you provide the first part, Excel will return data on the second):

• Food: calories, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins, nutrients, etc.
• Exercise: exercise types and calories burned.
• Locations: zip codes, economic data, airports, schools, forests, etc.
• Universities: graduation rates, tuition, student body, etc.
• Chemistry: elements, compounds, and minerals.
• Space: planets, moons, satellites, supernovas, space missions, etc.
• Movies: actors, characters, directors, release dates, poster art, etc.
• And More: music, plants, animal breeds, famous people, languages, etc.

I was going to do a little screencast, but there are good ones already out there.

You can even define your own data types.

I'm not entirely sure what I'll do with this, but at least now that I know about it, I'll keep my thinking cap on!

Initial Thoughts on Alberta's FOIP Process

On December 8, I noticed the Govt. of Alberta had posted a new video to YouTube titled, FOIP Request Service Guided Tour. You know what? I've honestly always wanted to submit a FOIP request!

Here are some initial thoughts on how it went, and I'll report back if/when I hear something.

So we start at https://foip.alberta.ca, where we learn that,

Alberta's Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FOIP Act) provides a method to request records, your own personal information, and to request correction of your own personal information in records held by public bodies. The FOIP Request Service allows you to make requests to the Government of Alberta and some provincial public bodies. If you want to make a request to another public body not covered by this service, please contact the FOIP Coordinator for the appropriate FOIP Office.

At the suggestion of a friend, I thought I'd see what I could learn about one of the firms the current government seems to use as a go-to for so many of their reports, McKinsey & Company. This is what I ultimately came up with, and this was submitted on Dec. 16:

I would like to obtain a list of all contracts awarded by the Alberta Government to McKinsey and Company for the calendar years 2019 and 2020. I would also like to obtain a list of all reports finished by McKinsey and Company for the Alberta Government during the calendar years 2019 and 2020. These two lists should be delivered in an open format such as CSV.

I already had an Alberta ID, so was able to log in right away. I was immediately disappointed to realize that I wasn't going to be able to request records across the entire government :-( Right off the bat I had to choose a specific department. Fair enough, Advanced Education it is.

FOIP Request Body

The first unanswered question is what's the difference between a General and a Personal request? No idea or explanation. I guess from later questions that a Personal request is a request for data about oneself.

FOIP Request Details

Question #2 comes right after that. Scrolling down the screen I have lots of options. What, exactly, do they mean? Will it cost more, or take longer, if I select or deselect some of these options? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

FOIP Request Options

The last question on the form itself is about supporting documentation. In the video I just rewatched, it does note that this is optional, but wouldn't it be nice to mention that on the form too?

FOIP Supporting Documents

Huh. Neither at the end of the submission nor in the email receipt is there any indication of what comes next, or how long this might take. I did some searching, and eventually found a PDF from 2009 that suggests I'll hear back within 30 days.

FOIP Received

I just logged in to check the status of my request, and am left with a final question. Did I miss something, or does this just mean, as I hope, that the request is still open? Too many questions!!!

FOIP Request Status

So yeah, a $25 experiment. Stay tuned, and Happy Holidays!

January 26, 2021 update: I realized the 30-day period had passed, so I logged back on and saw that the status still read "Online Incomplete". I poked at it a few times and finally realized when I hit the Continue button (screenshot above) it was not in fact asking me to submit a new request, which is what the screen looked like to me.  I clicked next on each existing page looking for some indication that I had missed some information, and eventually got to the page that showed I had paid, and when I clicked the next screen it then said the status was Submitted. So NOW the 30-day clock starts. See you again at the end of February. (smh)

How to stop a Zoombombing

Thank goodness I haven't personally experienced this while teaching / presenting via Zoom, but I have been a participant in a workshop that was Zoom bombed, and that was traumatic enough. I can't even imagine how nasty that would be for the presenter.

Lifehacker reports that Zoom is rolling out some new features aimed to make it easier to stop a bombing-in-progress, but also appears to be monitoring for, and will warn you via email "if your meeting invite appears in any public social media posts or other websites where these things are usually posted."

I haven't received anything from my POW (we have a licence for Zoom), or from Zoom directly, nor did I see any abuse options as described by Lifehacker until I manually checked for updates in my Zoom client and updated to version 5.4.3 (Mac).

Go update your clients, folks!!!

The best screen recording software in 2020

Not my original post, but Zapier has a post looking at the best screen recording software in 2020. Definitely useful if you're prepping for online delivery in the months to come! Plenty of choices for Windows, macOS, and even mobile, but they do seem to focus on software and services that cost money. Even though usually that cost is worth it, if you flat out don't have any money, you could also look at TechRadar's post, the best free screen recorder 2020.