Tom Goskar

Archaeologist, researcher, curator and folklorist

Blog

I write about technology and its uses in the varied world of heritage, from 3D scanning prehistoric petroglyphs to the use of ChatGPT in museums and archives.

  • Jamendo: Creative Commons music

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    Tom Goskar
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    Jamendo is a music website where artists release their music for free download, under a Creative Commons license. There are community features such as commenting, personal playlists, favourites, ratings, and forums, and from experience, it’s a very vibrant community indeed. I’ve been using Jamendo since it was launched, and a visit to the site today…

  • Linux Training

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    Tom Goskar
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    This week I’m attending a number of Linux courses run by Well House Consultants. So far we’ve covered the basics of Linux and an introduction to Linux administration. Thursday and Friday will cover the beginnings of Linux web servers, so I have my tinfoil hat wedged firmly on my head this week. It’s great to…

  • Splogging

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    Tom Goskar
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    I’ve noticed a new type of spam in the past month or so. Buried in the hundreds of spam comments left on this blog and the countless others that I look after I’ve noted that some of them are trackbacks containing excerpts of my own posts. They have often been subtlely changed by using synonyms…

  • Facebook is morphing steadily into MySpace

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    Tom Goskar
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    I have a MySpace account purely because I have a few friends on there, and have had to use it to send the odd message once in a blue moon. I hate the way MySpace looks – it’s cluttered, slow, gaudy, clunky, and I just don’t like it. When Facebook came around, naturally, I signed…

  • WordPress Dashboard Widgets

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    Tom Goskar
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    Does anyone know of a decent OSX dashboard widget for posting to a WordPress blog? I’ve been using WordPressDash on and off for over two years now, and in Leopard some strange things have happened to its appearance. One that supports WP2.3’s tags would be nice. Ideas, anyone?

  • Blogging habits, Twitter and aggregators

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    Tom Goskar
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    I haven’t been posting much to this blog, or to Past Thinking lately. There’s been no reason for this except perhaps that I’ve just got out of the habit of blogging. I don’t want to force myself to post things to my blog, but I think I’ll try and remember to post little snippets of…

  • HD Video Sharing

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    Tom Goskar
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    Tired of those tiny video offerings on YouTube? 320×240 video at 15 frames per second is starting to look a bit tired on large screen resolutions. At work I’m lucky enough to have a new iMac with a 24″ screen running at 1920×1200, and trust me, YouTube starts to look a little… inadequate… on my…

  • Scribd – YouTube for documents

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    Tom Goskar
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    I’ve been looking at Scribd recently as a way of distributing documents online. Think of it as a kind of YouTube for documents – upload a document (Word, PDF, OpenDoc, RTF etc), tag it, choose a Creative Commons license if you so desire, and it gets converted into FlashPaper and is viewable online. You then…

  • Is podcasting fading away?

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    Tom Goskar
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    If you visit the Yahoo! Podcasts directory, the following message appears at the top of the screen: “Yahoo! apologizes deeply, but we will be closing down the Podcasts site on Oct. 31, 2007” I found out about this from Read/Write Web, and one of the comments on the article by reader “Dave H” is quite…

  • iMovie ’08 on a 1.8GHz single processor G5

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    Tom Goskar
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    According to the system requirements for Apple’s newest incarnation of iLife (iLife ’08), iMovie ’08 shouldn’t work on my machine (an ‘original’ 2003 1.8GHz SP G5 with 1GB RAM). The installer runs a system check before it installs iLife (as it did on my G4 laptop) to see if your system meets the minimum requirements…