I’m leaving this as a note for myself, so that I can refer to it in the future, but it might help other people too. I’m downloading a large quantitiy of rips of 78 RPM records from the internet archive’s Great 78 Project (for a project that I’ll discuss later) and I want to ensure that I only get the “The preferred versions suggested by an audio engineer at George Blood, L.P. [which] have been copied to have […] more friendly filenames.”

I just finished reading a book called “The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation”, by Trevor Owens. I’m going to take a few minutes to talk about what I thought about the book, and how it is influencing my approach to my own digital collections.

As was probably inevitable, I’ve spent the last few weeks poking around with Gemini. I want to take a few minutes to talk about what Gemini is, what it isn’t, and why I care.

I’ve just finished reading Subject to Change: Guerrilla Television revisted by Deirdre Boyle, and I have some thoughts about it that I want to capture while they’re fresh. This isn’t a review, really, just a way for me to organize how I feel now that the book is over.

When researching the history of Video in DIY Media (or as Wikipedia is so fond of calling it, Citizen Media or Participatory Media), most popular accounts start with the release of the BMC-110 betamax movie camcorder by Sony in 1983. This is the first consumer Camcorder, it seems like a logical place to start. It isn’t a logical place to start and most popular accounts are wrong. This isn’t surprising, we’re bad at this kind of thing, and pretty much always have been. So, today, I want to spend a few bits talking about the first consumer video camera and tape recorder, the Sony Portapak released in 1967, and the DIY Media Revolution that the US has largely forgotten.