bitsgalore.org

1339 Mission, 2000 by Erica Fischer, CC BY 2.0.

Tools by Wilfredor, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Image sourced from Internet Archive, license unknown. in 2014 I wrote a post on the Quattro Pro for DOS spreadsheet formats.

Image sourced from Internet Archive, license unknown.

Donkey and cart icons licensed from the Noun Project.

Digital Dark Age Crew logo.

Control room in Fossil fuel power plant in Point Tupper, Nova Scotia.

A man in armour is confronted by a ghost and a skeleton.

Adapted from Quality Coal by Greenville Daily Photo.

Bailey AKA the "I have no idea what I'm doing" dog.

"Confused, muddled, illogical".

"The Barnum & Bailey greatest show on earth".

"Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots Game" by Lorie Shaull, used under CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Clockwork picture of an itinerant dentist performing an extraction in French rural scene, wood frame, metal workings, first half 19th century.

Donkey, cart and sun icons licensed from the Noun Project.

In 2017 I wrote a blog post on Iromlab (an acronym for “Image and Rip Optical Media Like A Boss”), a custom-built software tool that streamlines imaging and ripping of optical media using an Acronova Nimbie disc robot.

"Fail whale" by Kuni (ka-92) (license unknown), based on "Lifting a Dreamer" by Yiying Lu.

Dutch electro outfit the Digital Dark Age Crew are one of the forgotten legends that used to be a mainstay of Rotterdam’s late 90s to mid-2000s underground electro scene.

This blog post covers some techniques that can be used to identify storage media and storage devices using Python and the Windows API.

It’s been a while since the last release of the Isolyzer tool, but after four years of near-inactivity I just published Isolyzer 1.4.

Intensive Breeding by Jean Marc Cote, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Earlier this month saw the publication of The Significant Properties of Spreadsheets.

Plumbers Tool Box by pszz on Flickr.

Production photo from "2001: A Space Odyssey".

"Android Robot" by Google Inc., used under CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

“World Wide Web - Digital Preservation” by Jørgen Stamp, used under CC BY 2.5 DK; “Wadden Sea” by Envisat satellite, used under CC BY-SA 3.0-IGO.

Original artwork copyright ©Liesbet Zikkenheimer.

“The Scream”, undated drawing by Edvard Munch, Bergen Kunstmuseum, Public domain.

“Broken zip £12.50” by dichoecho, used under CC BY / Cropped from original.

Following earlier work on the preservation of optical media and data tapes, I recently got a request to make an inventory of offline digital data carriers in the KB’s deposit collection.

A few weeks ago one of my web archiving colleagues approached me with an interesting question.

Earlier this year I published this blog post on the recovery of data from ’90s data tapes.

SATA hard disk, USB Flash drive and 3.5" floppy disks As I explained in the introduction of this earlier blog post, as part of our ongoing web archaeology project we are currently developing workflows for reading data from a variety of physical carrier fo…

In 2015 I wrote a blog post on preserving optical media from the command-line.

When the KB web archive was launched in 2007, many sites from the “early” Dutch web had already gone offline.

In a previous blog post I showed how we resurrected NL-menu, the first Dutch web index.

NL-menu was the first Dutch web index.

Earlier this year I blogged about Isolyzer, a tool designed to help the detection of broken ISO images.

Over the last months we’ve been working on the development of a provisional workflow for preserving the content of optical media in our collection.

Some four years ago I wrote a blog post that demonstrated how Apache Preflight (the PDF/A validator tool that is part of Apache PDFBox) can be used to detect features in a PDF that are potential preservation risks.

The development work on an imaging/ripping workflow for optical media is shaping up steadily, and you can expect a write-up with more information about our software and hardware setup here in the near future (you can get a sneak peek here).

In my previous blog post I addressed the detection of broken audio files in an automated workflow for ripping audio CDs.

At the KB we have a large collection of offline optical media.

Earlier this week the National Archives of the Netherlands (NANeth) published a report on preferred file formats.

EpubCheck is an invaluable tool for assessing the quality of EPUB files.

About a month ago the International Digital Publishing Forum, the standards body behind the EPUB format, published an Editor’s Draft of EPUB 3.1.

Yesterday (7 December) we released version 1.16.0 of the jpylyzer tool, which is this year’s third release of the software (excluding bugfix releases).

The KB has quite a large collection of offline optical media, such as CD-ROMs, DVDs and audio CDs.

Today my attention was caught by this report of an “Expert round table” on JPEG2000 and Digitisation, which was published on the TownsWeb Archiving blog.

This is the second and final instalment of a 2-part blog on the use of PDF/A validators for identifying preservation risks in PDF.