Notices by John Goerzen (jgoerzen@floss.social)

@dangillmor Thank you, Dan. You are one of the few that hasn't already acquiesced. I can remember pretty clearly the downfall of my previously-favored media. NPR, who "both-sidesed" its own reporting on Roger Stone after he was arrested. WaPo, for obvious reasons. NYT and its normalizing. What does it say that the most incisive op-ed about this moment is from USA Today? https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2024/11/06/trump-wins-2024-presidential-election/75942805007/

Wow! Vintage Computer Festival Midwest is the largest vintage computer festival ever, anywhere. I've seen: old IBM System/36 mainframe (running its disk pack!), an entire analog telephone network for the show (complete with DSL), AT&T Unix workstations, CP/M, a DEC vt100, and just about every PC type you can imagine. And it was fun to fly myself to Chicago! #vcfmw #vcfmw19 1/

The DEC vt100 wasn't the first terminal, but it was one of the most successful early ones. And the System/36 was an early and influential IBM mainframe. #vcfmw #vcfmw19

@fu I love used bookstores. One of my favorite places to visit when traveling, in fact. Even for newer books, I often don't see what I'm interested in at the library. The library might have stuff about how to use Excel or Python, but not a book about how Facebook's data collection impacts mental health. I do read a fair number of ebooks, which aren't included in my numbers. 2/

@fu Generally, I find that the libraries I have access to are inferior to independent bookstores (used or otherwise) for serendipitous discovery, and to online bookstores (again, used or otherwise) for specific targets. I mean, there are probably few libraries in the world that still have Kermit or UUCP manuals, or obscure biographies from a certain small town in Kansas, or a German songbook published in Ohio in 1890. If I don't keep them, I may never be able to read them again. /end

@fu We are a household of 5, so it falls into a few categories. I'm finding shelves hold a lot more books than I thought!

- Children's books
- My wife's reference material (about 400 books). Most of them belong to her but are kept at her workplace. She uses them regularly.

I enjoy the sort of book that I rarely find in a library. In fact, I'm more likely to find copies DISCARDED by a library than in a library; books about tech from the 80s and 90s, etc. 1/

Then when done, we sort and shelve! I bought some 18x48x85" steel shelving units from Global Industrial that should save us a lot of space. end/

From there, I wrote a Rust program to generate labels. It drives Labelle with the new batch mode I wrote for it at https://github.com/labelle-org/labelle/pull/72 . The Rust program can take LCC and ISBN and generate the label, or it can take ISBN and do a lookup to the exported data and generate the label from that. Great with the barcode scanner.

The labels themselves encode the ISBN in the QR code. If no ISBN is present, they hold a local barcode number generated by LibraryThing. 4/

@inventaire @older @tivasyk That is fantastic, thank you! Do you think Inventaire might also support tagging at some point?

@older @inventaire @tivasyk Wow, I hadn't known of #inventaire! Thanks for mentioning that!

From a quick look, it doesn't have fields for LCC (Library of Congress Classification), publication date, etc. I did a test import of a book: https://www.librarything.com/work/25717416/details/268620860 vs https://inventaire.io/entity/isbn:9780937175101 . LT pulled publication date, LCC, Dewey, publisher, and correct cover from its databases and the Library of Congress. Inventaire got the wrong cover, has no LCC or Dewey, and doesn't support tags. 1/

@older @inventaire @tivasyk So Inventaire won't meet my needs right now, but I note it can import a Librarything JSON so I'm going to keep my eye on it because I would love to switch to locally-hosted if it does in the future! Thanks again for mentioning! /end

@tivasyk Ahh, got it. Yeah, AbeBooks owns 40% of LT, and Amazon now owns AbeBooks. I haven't seen any Amazon influence on the site, though -- different from Goodreads. LT seems to be evolving at a slightly faster pace than Goodreads, which I guess is somewhat amazing considering that Goodreads is an Amazon unit now. OTOH, I do take frequent exports of my data.

Anyhow, I think you and I are in full agreement. I'd rather host locally. LT has its warts, but I haven't found anything better yet.

We have a problem. Our family reads. We have lots of books. And they haven't been well-organized. We have run out of storage space. So it's time to get organized. Here's the result. 1/

We are a family of readers. We have somewhere north of 1000 books in our house, and they haven't been well-organized. We have an assortment of bookshelves, which have loosely been organized by which person originally bought the book.... but not well.

So, decision number 1 was: how are we going to organize them? Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress Classification (LCC)? I went with #LCC because we tend to have a lot on certain topics (eg, Kansas history), and it is great with that. 2/

Then, how to track? I wound up using #LibraryThing. It integrates with the Library of Congress and other libraries, plus Amazon, for pulling in metadata. Its site is designed to work well with barcode scanners (I found the Honeywell 1900G-HD works really well). It also has CSV and JSON exports, plus CSV imports. I can also add all my books from local authors that aren't in any database, etc. 3/

@tivasyk Yes, I too would have preferred something local, but I didn't find any such thing. But, at least they let me do a full export of absolutely everything in my account in two useful formats, so I figure I at least have a local backup I can resort to if something happens at LT. They seem to be a small company doing good things, so that's good.

@tivasyk You might be thinking of #Goodreads with that sellout to Amazon. I migrated my data from Goodreads to #LibraryThing because I had long been uncomfortable with that at Goodreads. Also, while LibraryThing does have social aspects, it is far stronger at organizing and managing your own collection.

I looked into #Bookwyrm, which is a Fediverse project. But it was far more about social than organizing, and wouldn't have helped with my project.

This is so ridiculous, but I am not making it up: #Facebook #censored my post about an illegal raid on the Marion County Record because, apparently, the same site wrote a story critical of #Meta due to.... #censorship of posts about climate change.

Screenshots and the full story on my blog here: https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10657-facebook-is-censoring-stories-about-illegal-raid-in-marion-kansas

For those of you concerned about the #Hobbes #OS2 archive, I got you -- I uploaded it to #InternetArchive : https://archive.org/details/hobbes-os2-archive_202401

So much appreciation for @internetarchive for helping preserve things like this!

The case for #hope and #optimism, a thread.

Lately I've noticed an increase in very pessmistic posts here. The topics are varied: COVID, AI, capitalism. Sometimes valid points are included. But the hopeless tone is the opposite of what we need.

We know there is hope, that activism can and does make a difference. Give people hope and they will act. 1/