Taking a Screenshot

Screenshots, while easily faked, often serve as important records of the past. They are often used as records of chats and website user interfaces. Here’s how to take one:

iOS/iPadOS:

If the device has a home button: Quickly press the home and sleep/wake buttons. A screenshot will be saved to your camera roll. (Newer versions of iOS/iPadOS offer the ability to edit/share a screenshot before saving.)

If the device does not have a home button: Quickly press the volume up and sleep/wake buttons. A screenshot will be saved to your camera roll. (Newer versions of iOS/iPadOS offer the ability to edit/share a screenshot before saving.)

Windows:

All versions: Press the Print Screen (PrtScn) button. A screenshot will be copied to your clipboard and can be pasted in an image editor, Word document, PowerPoint presentation, etc.

Windows 7/8/8.1: These users can also use the pre-installed Snipping Tool.

Windows 10: In addition to the Snipping Tool, these users can also use the more modern Snip and Sketch app. Tip: in the Settings app, under Ease of Access, in Keyboard, you can check “Use the PrtScn button to open screen snipping” to use the PrtScn button to take a screenshot with the more robust Snip and Sketch app instead of copying the image to the clipboard. (I use this feature.)

Alternatively, you can also use the third-party Greenshot app to take screenshots also.

macOS:

All versions: Press Shift-Command-3. After a short delay, a screenshot will be copied to the desktop.

macOS Mojave or newer: These users can also use the Screenshot app to take screenshots.

Android:

Press and hold the power button until a menu pops up. Then press “Screenshot”. Otherwise, try pressing and holding the Power and Volume Down buttons for a few seconds. A screenshot icon will appear at the top of your screen. If these instructions don’t work, try looking for instructions specific to your device, as it can vary between devices.

—tech234a

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For Linux users, there are a couple of packages you could use. The GNOME solution is GNOME Screenshot which lets you take a screenshot with the PrtScr button, though you do have to navigate through a menu to do so. Hit the print screen button, wait a few seconds, and it asks you where to save this image. (Useful for people who don't have a Paint analogue anywhere on their system.)

The KDE solution is called Spectacle which seems to function similarly. (I have no familiarity with this so I'm guessing here.)

- glmdgrielson

Goodbye, Blogger!

So, this page may or may not be our last post on this blog. Only been at it for two months and we're already giving up on it.

Well, not quite. You see, we've moved! We've found some new overlords a partner over at Gaming Alexandria who will be helping us expand, reach out, and do other fun things!

So ah, this blog may or may not be seeing too much love any more. Ah well.

Move to the Data Horde!

- glmdgrielson

Weekly Summary 03/02/2020

Get ready to dramatically throw off your coats, and say "welcome" to spring! As a wise man once said: "Spring is the time of plans and projects", everyone (including us here at Data Horde) has a few things in the works so get hyped!

But first, it's worth mentioning a couple of websites that are expected to shutdown within this month:

The self-proclaimed "tech tabloid" the inquirer and the music database FreeDB are scheduled for shutdown on the 31st of March. Both sites are slowly becoming more and more unusable but a good portion of the inquirer survives as Wayback Machine snapshots and there are a few freeDB mirrors, although a few programs which are hard-coded to access freeDB directly are expected to break.

Moving onto more hopeful news...

The brave web-browser is adding in a new built-in feature for detecting websites that have gone offline, so that's the good old 404 and its siblings. Upon receiving an appropriate error, brave will offer a button which will take you to the Wayback Machine to see if it can find any snapshots. In a world where one-click Google and Wikipedia are almost expected to be bundled with everything, we can only hope this built-in feature will inspire change industry to make all of our lives better.

You can read more details about this on the Internet Archive Blog: https://blog.archive.org/2020/02/25/brave-browser-and-the-wayback-machine-working-together-to-help-make-the-web-more-useful-and-reliable/

Finally there's been a recent status update by BlueMaxima of Flashpoint. His Medium article, starts with a big thank you to all the media outlets and people online covering the project.

"As a result. Flashpoint broke several records in terms of things like monthly unique visits. In fact, we had more unique people visit Flashpoint’s website in this month than the entirety of 2019. My servers were so stressed from people downloading Flashpoint that an automatic abuse switch flipped in my web hoster. That was fun to deal with!"

The rest of the article talks a whole bunch of things, ranging from technical improvements to rarities added to the collection such as the Late Chuck Jones' Thomas Timberwolf. The full article is a must read:
https://medium.com/bluemaximas-flashpoint/flashpoint-status-update-march-2020-6b1bd57e5df0

That's about it for this week...

Stay tuned for next week's summary, where we'll hopefully see each other again same time next week at EST 9 AM!

How the Annotation Worker ...Worked

So the annotation thing. You remember that, right? Well, here is how the worker seemed to function. Note that I'm getting this information from a brief cursory glance (and chatting with one of the devs). I know it works because I had three of them running at any given time. But how? Uh, *shrug*

Let's get started, shall we? So the worker (at omarroth/archive) the code starts by creating a new Worker class. This is our basic worker.

The run function creates a BatchProcess and calls its run. *sigh* So what does that do? Well it asks the server for a batch, pulls it up from a database, and retrieves the annotations for each of them ...which is done in yet another class, this one called AnnotationProcess.

So what does AnnotationProcess do? It does a request to YouTube to get the annotations. (The URL in the repository was changed after the fact. By me. Interesting.) How it gets those annotations is interesting: to make sure the worker is functioning properly, there is a trust system. A fresh worker won't actually get a new batch; it'll get one that's already been verified. As it gives more valid responses, it's more likely to get a new video. This way, the likelihood of getting garbage data is minimized, which is important for an archival project.

Once all the videos in a batch have been downloaded, they're verified with the server and then uploaded to DigitalOcean Spaces, a cloud storage service. This goes on ad infinitum until YouTube decides to pull the plug.

And that is what (I think) the annotation worker did.

- glmdgrielson

Weekly Summary 02/24/2020

This week was rather calm, with mostly positive developments.

A quick update on the Bethesda forums from last week: The shutdown has been rescheduled to March 9th, so that's 2 more weeks from now to grab anything you still haven't backed up.

Besides that, the Internet Archive recently digitized a large collection of Russian books. You can read more on their blogpost: https://blog.archive.org/2020/02/21/russian-book-covers/.

Stay tuned for next week's summary, where we'll hopefully see each other again same time next week at EST 9 AM!