I get a little grumpy when I open a new browser tab and am not greeted by a random public domain image from the Library of Congress. It’s like someone taking a knife to my IV drip of small joys. This is enabled by a little gizmo I have taken under my tech wing, the […]
The best web gems are ones you find while looking for something else. While following some links on AI data sets I fell into Source.Plus PD12M “a highly aesthetic image-text dataset with novel governance mechanisms.” At 12.4 million image-caption pairs, PD12M is the largest public domain image-text dataset to date, with sufficient size to train […]
Claims of technical death are always overrated, but in the hell mell rush and glee for the synthetic cartoon garish sadly robotic “style” of generative AI imagery I for one remain thrilled by the small acts of thanks. These acts are “generated” from the closing in (if I can catch up on the backlog) of […]
It’s the little things, at least for me. With some luck and guesses sometimes I can fix technologies I do not understand the workings of. This is purely a followup for maybe one of my favorite web browser tools that I guess I might be the sole user of, the Library of Congress Free to […]
Ain’t that llama a cutie? What is that smile about? Ah, it’s how this person (a.k.a..me) can stand the fact that someone is making money off of a photo I took and shared on the internets. Doesn’t a license protect me? Welcome to my unconventional corner of the Creative Commons tent, already explained in 2016: […]
Oh noes! A favorite thing was broken today. The subject or object of a number of posts here I think of as the Opener of Glorious Rabbit Holes is the Library of Congress Free to Use Browser Extension. Each time I open a new tab in my browser (like 50 times a day), rather than […]
We use it so frequently that perhaps we do not marvel that web search works. Especially the one where the brand name becomes the verb. In that googling something, typing a few words into a box, pressing a button, and getting a long stream of positive results. And of course “works” is the laden term […]
January 1 was not only the day that relieved us of 2020, but also a celebration of works entering the Public Domain so works published in 1925 are finally available to all (celebrating that it takes 95 freaking Sonny Bono years to make this happen is bittersweet). I have a several times a day ceremony […]
Beyond movies and perhaps MAD magazine references I have no direct experience with being forced castor oil as a cold remedy. But there is an old advertisement in an image that is in the public domain. Every indication is that the stuff does not taste well. Bring it on. I’ve been conducting a long running […]
For a while I was saving screen shots of some of the convoluted license statements I come across in Wikimedia Commons. There were ones where images were public domain in one country, but of course here in the US Congress every few years extends copyright like another 50 years. One of the most “crappy” set […]
