Readmill closing; Team joins Dropbox
According to the Readmill.com closing announcement: Our team will be joining Dropbox, where our expertise in reading, collaboration and syncing across devices finds a fitting home. Millions of people use Dropbox to store and share their digital lives, and we believe it’s a strong foundation on which to build the future of reading. We’re delighted to work alongside this talented team and imagine new ways to read together. Interesting times ahead for Dropbox.
Decoding Anglo-Saxon art: The British Museum
Rosie Weetch, curator, and Craig Williams, illustrator, British Museum provide a brief guide for understanding the transition of Anglo-Saxon art between the 5th and 11th centuries in a recent blog post on The British Museum’s website. Based on three significant examples (a 6th century Isle of Wight brooch, a Sutton Hoo gold buckle, and the Fuller Brooch), they show how styles shifted from the birds' heads and often obscure figures to the Trewhiddle Style in the 9th century with the Fuller Brooch.
Codex Sinaiticus added to BL digitised manuscript collection
Codex Sinaiticus (detail) (Source: julianharrison.typepad.com) From http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2014/03/codex-sinaiticus-added-to-digitised-manuscripts.html Codex Sinaiticus is one of the great treasures of the British Library. Written in the mid-4th century in the Eastern Mediterranean (possibly at Caesarea), it is one of the two oldest surviving copies of the Greek Bible, along with Codex Vaticanus, in Rome. Written in four narrow columns to the page (aside from in the Poetic books, in two columns), its visual appearance is particularly striking.
J.R.R. Tolkien's Beowulf Translation to be published in May
From The Guardian today: “Hwæt! Almost 90 years after JRR Tolkien translated the 11th-century poem Beowulf, The Lord of the Rings author’s version of the epic story is to be published for the first time in an edition which his son Christopher Tolkien says sees his father ‘enter[ing] into the imagined past’ of the heroes.” Read the rest of the article at theguardian.com and more information at the custom website for the publication: http://www.
If I lived in medieval times...
…what would I be? http://thedoghousediaries.com/ does it again! Too funny!
Merging folders on a Mac
Tried to find a nice GUI way to merge folders on my Mac. After searching, I discovered that I wasn’t missing something - the Finder doesn’t support merging folder contents. I didn’t want to buy one of the many available Finder extensions (since I’m naturally cheap). And I didn’t want to go through setting up Unison (which I have used for more heavy-lifting, including remote backups/copies – it does work well) for a potentially one-off solution.
Catch is dying... Long live Catch!
One of my favorite note-taking and general information management apps, , is closing, according to an announcement on its website. I’ve found Catch to be incredibly simple but both powerful and useful, a rare combination. Catch, you will be missed. TechCrunch has an article available about Catch closing, but (as of 7/31 at 6:30pm ET) no more details. Now, after exporting my Catch notes, I guess I’ll have to move to Evernote…
The Best Management Memo … Ever!: Observatory: Design Observer
The Best Management Memo … Ever!: Observatory: Design Observer. A brilliant message in a tiny package. Something for each of us to learn in this post.
Lines of beauty: British Library’s medieval manuscripts go digital - FT.com
Beowulf manuscript (c) Michael Bodian “The British Library aims to digitise its 25,000 medieval manuscripts, so readers around the world can see them. Here are six of the rarest” including the Beowulf manuscript (shown above; photo (c) Michael Bodian). via Lines of beauty: British Library’s medieval manuscripts go digital - FT.com.
Facebook Graph Search with Cypher and Neo4j | Max De Marzi
Facebook Graph Search has given the Graph Database community a simpler way to explain what it is we do and why it matters. I wanted to drive the point home by building a proof of concept of how you could do this with Neo4j. However, I don’t have six months or much experience with NLP (natural language processing). What I do have is Cypher. Cypher is Neo4j’s graph language and it makes it easy to express what we are looking for in the graph.