#Custom Metadata

[fexleservices]

 Build Your Custom Vocabulary with Org Dictionary

Picture this , A tool that lets you craft a unique vocabulary tailored just for your projects in Salesforce. With Org Dictionary, you can set up a personalized list of terms that make sense for your specific needs.

Whether you’re dealing with custom objects or unique fields, you can create and maintain a dictionary that grows with your project. It’s like having a custom glossary at your fingertips to ensure everyone on your team is on the same page.

Work together with your Salesforce consulting partner to maximize the benefits of Org Dictionary, ensuring your project is streamlined, organized, and effectively managed.

[thevalleyisjolly]

Manual data entry my beloathed

[jcmarchi]

How Wealth Managers Can Build Trust Through the Power of Automation and AI

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/how-wealth-managers-can-build-trust-through-the-power-of-automation-and-ai/

How Wealth Managers Can Build Trust Through the Power of Automation and AI

Building trust between wealth managers and their clients has traditionally been credited to effective communication and understanding between the two partners. Over time, wealth managers’ have become increasingly spread thin because of larger portfolios of more demanding clients. The knock-on effect is that clients can feel out of the loop due to extended response times from their wealth managers.

The latest AI solutions now enable wealth managers to eradicate human error and secure integral daily processes, including knowledge work automation, which improve client experience and increases trust.

More time for client relations

 Wealth managers don’t have enough time during the week to foster the relationships they have with clients. Over time, wealth managers have seen their portfolios expand, increased compliance responsibility and other non-revenue generating tasks thrusted upon them. In-turn, schedules have become congested for wealth managers.

Manual, time-consuming procedures have been required when handling workflow processes for wealth managers. Taking up time and energy of wealth managers to ensure workflow is properly handled and stored, has in turn, hindered their capability to improve client relations and foster new ones.

Through the power of automation, wealth managers can store and access the most up-to-date version of customer data immediately and without the worry of if it’s the correct version – as it always will be.

Avoiding content chaos

For wealth managers, the handling of sensitive client data is an everyday responsibility. One false move in saving or sharing an incorrect file can now lead to huge legal and financial implications.

Knowledge work automation, supported by metadata and AI technology, ensure wealth managers are accessing the correct data every time. Ensuring only one version – the correct one – is stored, wealth managers avoid the construction of data siloes across their systems. The creation of data siloes slows down workflow processes, as accurate data is more difficult to come by and also increases the chances of sharing incorrect data both internally and externally.

The wealth management industry cannot afford to be viewed as taking a light-touch approach to data handling. High net-worth individuals will sooner find new opportunities to invest or store their capital if they feel wealth managers are simply not up to the task of handling their assets and data.

The AI trust-factor

With much of a wealth manager’s success relying on trust from the client, how can AI better improve relationships for both parties? With AI, building trust in wealth management is born out of these automated workflow management processes. Prior to these tools, wealth managers would be typically time poor, which would increase the likelihood of workflow being mishandled as schedules become increasingly strained.

The power of automation providing seamless and secure processes for wealth managers ensures client data is safely handled and in a timely manner. From a client perspective, trust is only going to increase once wealth managers have harnessed these tools in a bid to eradicate human error.

Money talks

Implementing AI across knowledge workflow processes has little downside when considering the risks often involved in the processes become mitigated and automation rapidly improves delivery.

For wealth managers and their clients, a more present and interactive relationship is born out of the AI overhaul as their schedules become increasingly accommodating as a direct result of automation. Wealth managers have to be up to date on all the emerging financial tools and investment instruments now available on the market as well. It is not just manual processes which are taking up their time – wealth managers need all the help they can get from automation as their job roles continue to evolve.

Eradicating the threat of human error and easing time pressures offers greater levels of trust during the customer journey. Over time, the increased adoption of AI will revolutionise the wealth management offering across these crucial processes. This improved security established across wealth management processes will result in prospects looking to the sector as a reliable channel to store their net worth.

[ourjobagency]

Salesforce customization is not merely an option, it's a necessity in today's rapidly changing business landscape.

To Know More Visit Us:

[bipidin]

I have discovered MP3Tag and I am in love

[insanelyclevermarketing]

How To Build A Website That Will Boost Business Profits

It is essential for every business to have a website. Especially with more customers preferring to shop online. Having a website will boost your business visibility and ensure you do not lose out to other businesses that do offer online services.  You won’t want your business website to turn off customers. Instead, you will want it to attract them, generate leads, and boost sales. Therefore, use…

[jimbuchan]

Automate The Foundation Not Just The Furniture

Considering all that your CRM provides so much as customization and manipulation of data, would it surprise you to learn that a similar function can also be done for the creation of new Fields in Salesforce? Depending on various factors that differ from business to business, the subject of automating the creation of fields may never come up, but when it does (particularly when a large amount of fields need to be created), your time can be cut dramatically in comparison to manually creating them. Much like bulk creation (or removal) of records using Data Loader, you can accomplish the same convenience with field creation… after all, you have the power to manipulate and change the Data in your system… why not your MetaData? Bulk Object Field Creator can accomplish the insertion of new fields rapidly with 1 action, as opposed to tens or hundreds of individual updates, and within the same routine, they can be created all within single (or multiple) Profiles as well as being assigned to various Page Layouts. This is particularly useful when you have hundreds of fields which need to be created for a given Object… a task that can take a fair amount of time if performed manually.  As a time comparison, consider as a baseline that it takes approx. 1 minute to create a single field (i.e. Field Type / Field Name / Profile and Layout). If the amount of fields you needed to create amounted to 250, this would put you in excess of 4 hours in one sitting. Realistically, it would likely take multiple days as the likelihood of other requests competing for your time during the day would likely be the case. In utilizing the BOFC tool, it would take only minutes to complete the same action, which would be accomplished in a 2-step process. First, the list of fields would be assembled in a CSV or XLS file and then imported via the tool with a few selections including Object, Field Type and Name, Required Checkbox, Description and Help Text information. Once entered, the only action required is to click the ‘Create New Fields’ button and presto… the fields are now completed automatically in about the same amount of time it takes to perform a standard Data Load.

But wait… there’s more. Along with the auto-generation of fields, the same can be done for creating (or cloning) Objects in mass as well as  Formula Fields and even Validation Rules. For those who are not yet familiar with the Apex Data Loader (or Dataloader.io) the difference in using a tool like BOFS is that the creation of these elements are done outside Salesforce by assembling your fields in Google Sheets or Excel. This represents a rapid means of entering your data without lag on the server and once completed, your Objects / Fields are completed in your environment in one shot. Taking the tool to further extremes, BOFC can also serve a a ‘Diff’ engine by comparing Objects / Fields between Production and Sandbox instances... a time-saving task which would otherwise require you to have keyboard and mouse-click superpowers. You can also use the application to move data between Orgs in just a few steps. Further, if your business has a requirement to export the Apex Code (including Code Coverage), BOFC also includes this feature.  While the majority of Meta-Data fields created will be done within Salesforce's native environment, when the opportunity arises for a vast amount of fields to be inserted, the Bulk Object Field Creator tool can save your firm time, both in development, and the often overlooked testing phase.  For those who have created large objects which need to be set up in multiple environments, there is nothing quite like the standardization and ease of use for this tool, which is custom suited for the developer / admin who is short on time and long on results.

Title image by GeoDrilling International  |  Screenshot by Ayan Software

[autogyne-redacted]

Let's Talk About Security Culture: Why Keeping Secrets is Cool and Sexy

It's a natural impulse -- if you love crime -- to want to talk about how great it is. And if you hate America, it's only natural to want to share your dreams for its future with the rest of tumblr dot com. It can feel brave and transgressive. And there is a drive to share your soul with the world at the heart of social media. Surely I should be posting the most concrete implications of my politics, right? This is the poster's curse.

Security Culture refers to a set of "best practices" developed over the past several decades, largely (in a US context) coming out of radical environmental groups as they faced intense state repression, infiltration and entrapment. If you're not familiar, there's some fascinating crimethinc write ups to give you a window into that world:

Much of it boils down to: don't talk about crimes, past or forthcoming with people who don't need to know about them, and be mindful of the possibility of surveillance and infiltration. And, we can support each other as a community in minimizing risks, with an eye towards enabling bold action rather than getting bogged down in fears and anxieties. The guidelines that make sense for AG-based trouble-makers are different from the guidelines that make sense for posters, but plenty of common principles apply. To speak briefly to our position here as posters:

First, it bears saying that long term anonymity is nearly impossible to maintain. Unless you've never accessed Tumblr without a vpn, and avoided connections with other ppl who can be associated with you/your location, and never shared pictures without scrubbing metadata, and a bunch of other 100% consistent steps, it's trivial for the state to know who you are.

Second, just because something isn't actively being prosecuted now doesn't mean it can't be prosecuted later. The priorities of the state change and a shift in power towards the right or a growth in radical action from the left can suddenly make it a priority to destroy anarchist networks or just find a few ppl to prosecute as examples (who probably weren't that plugged into larger networks before getting arrested). Advocating for specific anti-government crimes or declarations of intent to commit such crimes are likely prosecutable, and even if charges don't stick, they're an easy vector for legal harassment.

Third, it's worth thinking about heat as separate from prosecutability. There are modes of engagement that may not be directly criminalized but signal that you are someone worth watching. Some people choose to be public in ways that make heat unavoidable. But it's worth noting that heat isn't strictly individualized, that it persists over time but also is going to shrink over time.

It's easy on here, ime, to see yourself as a proud member of the crime fandom but not much of a content creator. And it's easy to feel like you've generated an amount of heat where you're locked into that role. But heat you generated 10 years ago is probably pretty well gone. Heat you generated 5 years ago has faded substantially. It's worth thinking about how the world might shift in the coming years and what doors you want to keep open.

The non-individualized nature of heat also means that leaning into the spiciest of anti-state positions will make it a bad idea for people who are acting out those positions end up tied to you. Loudly talking about how "more people should be doing [X/Y/Z]" unfortunately sets you up to remain distant from people who might be doing or thinking about doing such things.

Which brings me back to: keeping secrets is sexy. Not spelling everything out builds intrigue. You can lay out a theoretical position and leave working out the practical implications of that as an exercise for the reader. There's value in opacity. The poster's curse and the drive to confess are extremely convenient for the state, but we can resist them. We can hold dreams in our hearts that we refuse to offer up to the posting spectacle.

[foervraengd]

A very quick and rough guide on how i watermark my art. Additional points:

- Watermarks does not prevent art theft or reposters. The point of a watermark or a signature is to provide info on who made the artwork. Majority of reposters dont go extra lengths of removing watermarks, art thiefs on the other hand are more prone to do so.

- a watermark will stay on even if the image is screenshotted or reuploaded in ways that removes the files metadata. A watermark will outlive websites and links and qr codes. A watermark will last even if the image is printed on to paper. A watermark/signature is a very reliable form of information.

- A watermark also serve as evidence if you would ever have to prove you are the creator of a piece.

- Never, and i cannot stress this enough, NEVER upload the original high resolution of your art online. Not on discord. Not in DMs. Not on any fun silly website that can “animate your drawings” etc. The higher the resolution is, the easier it will be for ppl to remove your watermarks. High res images are also more attractive to ai scrapers.

- you should watermark doodles and sketches as well. Because it is common that silly doodles or loose sketches can get more attention online, so mark those as well.

- if you are a digital artist you should be able to know how to create a brush with your signature on it. You dont need an extra program or app to do this. If you can make your own custom brush shapes you can make your own signature. If not, look up a tutorial.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

One of America’s most corporate-crime-friendly bankruptcy judges forced to recuse himself

Today (Oct 16) I'm in Minneapolis, keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. Thursday (Oct 19), I'm in Charleston, WV to give the 41st annual McCreight Lecture in the Humanities. Friday (Oct 20), I'm at Charleston's Taylor Books from 12h-14h.

"I’ll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one." The now-famous quip from Robert Reich cuts to the bone of corporate personhood. Corporations are people with speech rights. They are heat-shields that absorb liability on behalf of their owners and managers.

But the membrane separating corporations from people is selectively permeable. A corporation is separate from its owners, who are not liable for its deeds – but it can also be "closely held," and so inseparable from those owners that their religious beliefs can excuse their companies from obeying laws they don't like:

https://clsbluesky.law.columbia.edu/2014/10/13/hobby-lobby-and-closely-held-corporations/

Corporations – not their owners – are liable for their misdeeds (that's the "limited liability" in "limited liablity corporation"). But owners of a murderous company can hold their victims' families hostage and secure bankruptcies for their companies that wipe out their owners' culpability – without any requirement for the owners to surrender their billions to the people they killed and maimed:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/11/justice-delayed/#justice-redeemed

Corporations are, in other words, a kind of Schroedinger's Cat for impunity: when it helps the ruling class, corporations are inseparable from their owners; when that would hinder the rich and powerful, corporations are wholly distinct entities. They exist in a state of convenient superposition that collapses only when a plutocrat opens the box and decides what is inside it. Heads they win, tails we lose.

Key to corporate impunity is the rigged bankruptcy system. "Debts that can't be paid, won't be paid," so every successful civilization has some system for discharging debt, or it risks collapse:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/bankruptcy-protects-fake-people-brutalizes-real-ones/

When you or I declare bankruptcy, we have to give up virtually everything and endure years (or a lifetime) of punitive retaliation based on our stained credit records, and even then, our student debts continue to haunt us, as do lawless scumbag debt-collectors:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/12/do-not-pay/#fair-debt-collection-practices-act

When a giant corporation declares bankruptcy, by contrast, it emerges shorn of its union pension obligations and liabilities owed to workers and customers it abused or killed, and continues merrily on its way, re-offending at will. Big companies have mastered the Texas Two-Step, whereby a company creates a subsidiary that inherits all its liabilities, but not its assets. The liability-burdened company is declared bankrupt, and the company's sins are shriven at the bang of a judge's gavel:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/01/j-and-j-jk/#risible-gambit

Three US judges oversee the majority of large corporate bankruptcies, and they are so reliable in their deference to this scheme that an entire industry of high-priced lawyers exists solely to game the system to ensure that their clients end up before one of these judges. When the Sacklers were seeking to abscond with their billions in opioid blood-money and stiff their victims' families, they set their sights on Judge Robert Drain in the Southern District of New York:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/23/a-bankrupt-process/#sacklers

To get in front of Drain, the Sacklers opened an office in White Plains, NY, then waited 192 days to file bankruptcy papers there (it takes six months to establish jurisdiction). Their papers including invisible metadata that identified the case as destined for Judge Drain's court, in a bid to trick the court's Case Management/Electronic Case Files system to assign the case to him.

The case was even pre-captioned "RDD" ("Robert D Drain"), to nudge clerks into getting their case into a friendly forum.

If the Sacklers hadn't opted for Judge Drain, they might have set their sights on the Houston courthouse presided over by Judge David Jones, the second of of the three most corporate-friendly large bankruptcy judges. Judge Jones is a Texas judge – as in "Texas Two-Step" – and he has a long history of allowing corporate murderers and thieves to escape with their fortunes intact and their victims penniless:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/07/hr-4193/#shoppers-choice

But David Jones's reign of error is now in limbo. It turns out that he was secretly romantically involved with Elizabeth Freeman, a leading Texas corporate bankruptcy lawyer who argues Texas Two-Step cases in front of her boyfriend, Judge David Jones.

Judge Jones doesn't deny that he and Freeman are romantically involved, but said that he didn't think this fact warranted disclosure – let alone recusal – because they aren't married and "he didn't benefit economically from her legal work." He said that he'd only have to disclose if the two owned communal property, but the deed for their house lists them as co-owners:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24032507-general-warranty-deed

(Jones claims they don't live together – rather, he owns the house and pays the utility bills but lets Freeman live there.)

Even if they didn't own communal property, judges should not hear cases where one of the parties is represented by their long term romantic partner. I mean, that is a weird sentence to have to type, but I stand by it.

The case that led to the revelation and Jones's stepping away from his cases while the Fifth Circuit investigates is a ghastly – but typical – corporate murder trial. Corizon is a prison healthcare provider that killed prisoners with neglect, in the most cruel and awful ways imaginable. Their families sued, so Corizon budded off two new companies: YesCare got all the contracts and other assets, while Tehum Care Services got all the liabilities:

https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/prominent-bankruptcy-judge-david-jones-033801325.html

Then, Tehum paid Freeman to tell her boyfriend, Judge Jones, to let it declare bankruptcy, leaving $173m for YesCare and allocating $37m for the victims suing Tehum. Corizon owes more than $1.2b, "including tens of millions of dollars in unpaid invoices and hundreds of malpractice suits filed by prisoners and their families who have alleged negligent care":

https://www.kccllc.net/tehum/document/2390086230522000000000041

Under the deal, if Corizon murdered your family member, you would get $5,000 in compensation. Corizon gets to continue operating, using that $173m to prolong its yearslong murder spree.

The revelation that Jones and Freeman are lovers has derailed this deal. Jones is under investigation and has recused himself from his cases. The US Trustee – who represents creditors in bankruptcy cases – has intervened to block the deal, calling Tehum "a barren estate, one that was stripped of all of its valuable assets as a result of the combination and divisional mergers that occurred prior to the bankruptcy filing."

This is the third high-profile sleazy corporate bankruptcy that had victory snatched from the jaws of defeat this year: there was Johnson and Johnson's attempt to escape from liability from tricking women into powder their vulvas with asbestos (no, really), the Sacklers' attempt to abscond with billions after kicking off the opioid epidemic that's killed 800,000+ Americans and counting, and now this one.

This one might be the most consequential, though – it has the potential to eliminate one third of the major crime-enabling bankruptcy judges serving today.

One down.

Two to go.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/16/texas-two-step/#david-jones

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

[wip]

Hello! Would you ever consider bringing back different post types, especially audio? I appreciate that audio posts now display the artist, song title, and album name, but unfortunately newer audio posts don’t play in Tumblr-based music players like egoisticalgoat.de or robinpx.github.io/boombox because they’re read as text posts. Thank you for reading!

Answer: Hey there, @stepintomusic!

Sadly, the answer here is no. We’ve been moving away from legacy post types and towards the Neue Post Format—a format that allows multiple types of media in the same post—for many years. The new features available in NPF basically guarantee that we won’t ever switch back to the legacy format.

(If you’re interested in peeking behind the scenes here, there are a few posts about NPF over at @engineering.)

Now, to get into the meat of the issue. While it would be amazing if we could support every third-party tool forever, the reality is that we can’t. We’re a surprisingly small team to begin with, and even if we weren’t, that support would come at a cost.

To start, there’s the development tax. Now, would it have been cool to ensure all third-party tools (and all custom themes) worked 100% perfectly with posts stored as NPF before releasing NPF to the public? Yeah, it would have been… for third-party tools and custom themes. For us, it would have meant delaying NPF (and all the features it brings with it) for months, possibly years. Imagine a 2023 where Tumblr still doesn’t have polls: that’s the alternate future we’re talking about here.

And then, there’s our maintenance tax. The engine that powers Tumblr themes is already incredibly complicated—complicated to the point that we’re already finding it difficult to maintain and add things like, as you mentioned, NPF audio metadata. If, every time we found some third-party tool that doesn’t play nice with the latest changes, we tried to make an affordance for it… the engine would just become even more complex. And it would do so quickly, and complex to the point of being impossible to keep up with as a maintainer.

There’s a great article here by a former Mozilla developer about the pitfalls of prioritizing a third-party ecosystem over your own software. Did you know that Firefox was essentially a single-threaded application until 2018? This meant it would still visually lock up when saving files to disk, or collecting crash data. Chrome launched in 2008 and was multiprocess from the start. But it took Firefox ten years to catch up because supporting all existing third-party add-ons was seen as necessary. (Spoiler alert: in the end, they had to drop support for those add-ons anyway.)

My own recommendation around third-party software like this is: get in contact with its developer! If something in their software isn’t working, there’s nobody more qualified to update it. (Or, if they’ve abandoned the project but had made it open-source, maybe someone else could step up to maintain it. Maybe you! You never know until you try.)

I talked about the maintenance tax from the first-party side, but let’s talk about it from the third-party side, too. As a theme author and add-on developer myself, I have long accepted that the cost of maintaining these things can never be zero. When your software interacts with an online service, and that online service is being actively maintained, your software also needs to be maintained.

I hope all this has been enlightening! Thanks for your question, and please, have a great day.

—April

[n7punk]

What’s your beef with Spotify?

It's less beef and more just a product I don't like - because that's what Spotify is, a product. They really don't want you to think of it that way, but at the end of the day it's particularly invasive product packaging around the thing you actually want to listen to, and there are dozens of different ways to listen to music. As far as gripes, though, number 1 is that it doesn't really pay its artists for shit and its objectively kind of shitty audio-quality wise (I'm not a snob on this, but depending on your hardware it can be especially crunchy while other things like Youtube sound just fine). Number 2 is how much it spies on you and tracks your data. Number 3 is the ads. Number 4, and the actual reason I will never use it, is that it's the enshittification of media consumption.

I do, actually, have a Spotify account. I used it for all of a day before never logging in again or verifying my email. Spotify forces you to experience music the way it wants you to, with absolutely no benefit aside from cloud syncing cross-platform for your playlists that I don't actually need, and I'm used to the freedom from the dawn of the accessible mp3 era.

Better Kind Of Best Friend is a single. I bought it as part of the entire The Sex Was Good Until It Wasn't album, so it came with the album artwork. I wanted it to have its single artwork - so I changed it. And now, in MusicBee and on my phone, I see the single artwork because it's in the file metadata. Spotify doesn't give you that option. It's a little thing, maybe, except when it isn't, like when a song's cover art is graphic or otherwise upsetting to look at, or just plain doesn't fit it.

Sometimes I don't agree with a song's "official" genre (usually because the entire album classifies the songs one way while they actually span genres). The range of things that are classified as indie rock is insane. Anyway, other times I use the genre more specifically, such as "Dark Pop", which isn't actually a thing but if I played you Dark Pop songs you would understand what I mean. In MusicBee, I can change genres to be whatever I want, which is important for various auto-playlists in filtering.

I also have a custom tag for any sapphic songs that automatically populates my lesbian love auto-playlist as they're defined, and another playlist that automatically adds all music from my custom-defined list of queer artists to the "Gay Life" playlist. When I buy a new Reinaeiry song, it automatically gets added without me having to do anything.

I can't listen to demos or any music that Spotify has lost licensing to on it, which means that if I want a complete playlist with a demo song on it, I have to have all those songs exported anyway, and at that point why am I bothering to split my listening across platforms? Idk if you heard, but Spotify lost licensing to a giant catalogue of Kpop music at one point because one company pulled out, and all those listeners were fucked. I don't have to wait for an artist to upload their shit to Spotify (although right now I am waiting for Reinaeiry to put Too Sweet up for download - pls queen - this is luckily more rare of an occurrence than me seeing "please add this to Spotify" comments is).

I like music I can keep forever, listen to whenever, and do so without ads or paying three figures a year to hear uninterrupted. I'd rather buy one album a month with the Spotify premium money than pay for it. I like creating folder after subfolder worth of an unlimited number of playlists (admittedly idr if Spotify allows this feature. It varies by online listening platforms and I don't bother to track the ones I don't use). I like being able to drag and drop my playlists from MusicBee into iTunes to instantly listen to them on my phone (and thus cross-play isn't a concern for me as long as I remember to synch my phone). I like the feature of being able to instantly and permanently adjust the volume, as well as the beginning and end point, of any single song I chose (super helpful for when certain albums are inexplicably quieter/louder than others or have a stupid incongruous music or dialogue part in them).

If I want to listen to something without actually getting it, then I do it on Youtube, which has a wider music selection with more control. Don't like album art? Find a lyric video upload with a generic nebula background. Weird movie sample at the beginning? Someone might have cut that out in their upload (shoutout to the person who turned DICTATOR into a part 1 and 2 to match the two different mood halves), but otherwise Sponsorblock will skip the non-music segments. The only downside of Youtube versus Spotify is I can't share the playlists without exposing my name, but again I actually create those playlists in MusicBee 99% of the time so I wouldn't be sharing a link anyway.

[ourjobagency]

Salesforce customization is not merely an option, it's a necessity in today's rapidly changing business landscape.

To Know More Visit Us:

[violetsandshrikes]

Since sharing this post about a usful AI used to compile and graph research papers, I've realised I have a few other resources I can share with people!

Note: I haven't had a chance to use every single one of these. A group of post-grad students has been slowly compiling an online list, and these are some I've picked out that are free (or should be free and also have paid versions). However, other students using them have all verified them as safe.

Inciteful (Using Citations to Explore Academic Literature | Inciteful.xyz) – similar to connectedpapers + researchrabbit. Also allows you to connect two papers and see how they are linked. Currently free.

Spinbot (Spinbot - Article Spinning, Text Rewriting, Content Creation Tool.) – article spinner + paraphraser. Useful for difficult articles/papers. Currently free (ad version).

Elicit (Elicit: The AI Research Assistant)  – AI research assistant, creates workflow. Mainly for lit reviews. Finds relevant papers, summarises + analyses them, finds criticism of them. Free (?)

Natural Reader (AI Voices - NaturalReader Home (naturalreaders.com)) – text to speech. Native speakers. Usually pretty reliable, grain of salt. Free + paid versions.

Otter AI (Otter.ai - Voice Meeting Notes & Real-time Transcription) – takes notes and transcribes video calls. Pretty accurate. Warn people Otter is entering call or it is terrifying. Free + paid versions.

Paper Panda (🐼 PaperPanda — Access millions of research papers in one click) – get research papers free. Chrome extension. Free.

Docsity (About us - Docsity Corporate) – get documents from university students globally. Useful for notes.

Desmos (Desmos | Let's learn together.) – online free graphing calculator. Free (?)

Core (CORE – Aggregating the world’s open access research papers) – open access research paper aggregation.

Writefull (Writefull X: AI applied to academic writing) – Academic AI. Paraphrasing, title generator, abstract generator, apparently ChatGPT detector now. Free.

Photopea (Photopea | Online Photo Editor) – Photoshop copy but run free and online. Same tools. Free.

Draw IO (Flowchart Maker & Online Diagram Software) – Flowchart/diagram maker. Free + paid versions.

Weava (Weava Highlighter - Free Research Tool for PDFs & Webpages (weavatools.com)) – Highlight + annotate webpages and pdfs. Free + paid versions.

Unsplash (Beautiful Free Images & Pictures | Unsplash) – free to use images.

Storyset (Storyset | Customize, animate and download illustration for free) – open source illustrations. Free.

Undraw (unDraw - Open source illustrations for any idea) – open source illustrations. Free.

8mb Video (8mb.video: online compressor FREE) – video compression (to under 8mb). Free.

Just Beam It (JustBeamIt - file transfer made easy) – basically airdrop files quickly and easily between devices. Free.

Jimpl (Online photo metadata and EXIF data viewer | Jimpl) – upload photos to see metadata. Can also remove metadata from images to obscure sensitive information. Free.

TL Draw (tldraw) – web drawing application. Free.

Have I Been Pwned (Have I Been Pwned: Check if your email has been compromised in a data breach) – lets you know if information has been taken in a data breach. If so, change passwords. Free.

If you guys have any feedback about these sites (good or bad), feel free to add on in reblogs or flick me a message and I can add! Same thing with any broken links or additions.

[ofduskanddreams]

How I download fics and give them covers before sending them to my Kindle.

Hi all, I've been considering making a post about this for a while and now seems as good a time as any. I'm not an expert, and there is more than one way you can do this; I'm just going to show you my process using "Call It What You Want To" by @separatist-apologist as an example. [This will only work on computers FYI.]

Part One — Getting Started

Download Calibre (it's free.) Calibre for PC. Calibre for Mac. They also have it for Linux but idk if that's still relevant.

Follow the program's setup instructions, and then those for wirelessly connecting Calibre with your Kindle account. Alternatively, you can connect your Kindle/e-reader to your computer with a cable and transfer files manually or download the file to your hard drive and share it another way. I highly recommend taking a few extra minutes to set up the wireless sharing as I think it's far more convenient.

Create a folder in which to store fanfiction downloads so that you can be an organized human.

Part Two — The Fanfiction

Find the fic you want to download on ao3 and click it so that you're on the fic's first page.

Above the box of metadata (ratings, warning, tags, etc.) on the far right click the "download" option. When prompted to select a file type, choose "MOBI."

Note: Though ao3 has an "EPUB" option I've noticed a bug that removes the chapter navigation from the fic when downloading the EPUB directly from ao3. If you enjoy the "x minutes left in this chapter/book" feature on your e-reader, you will want to download "MOBI" and we will be converting it later in Calibre.

Save the file to the folder you created.

Launch Calibre if it isn't already running.

In Calibre, click "add books" on the toolbar at the top of the screen.

Navigate to the folder you saved the fic in, select the fic, then click "open." Calibre will import the MOBI file to your library.

Now as you can see, "Call It What You Want To" already has a cover when we imported it to the library. That is because the cover image is embedded in the fic on the archive. Some fics will already have covers embedded such as this one.

Calibre is not a genius. If there are multiple images in the fic it will usually take the first one and default it to the cover. In the next section, I will go over how to add/change the cover of a fic in Calibre and how I like to create them.

Note: Even if the fic doesn't have embedded images, covers may have been made by readers and linked to the fic either in the notes or related works sections so it's worth checking if a cover already exists. If a fic is popular enough, a Google search of the fic's title + "cover" or "cover art" will show you if there have been covers already created for it.

Part Three — Making The Cover (I use Canva)

On the Canva homepage click "create a design" then select the "custom size" option. Canva does have a book cover template but I've found that it's awkwardly tall compared to the default size for Kindle books so I make my own.

I set the dimensions of the design to be 1024 pixels wide, and 1600 pixels tall, then click "create new design."

This is where you can get creative, make whatever you want. These basic steps are shown in a gif at the bottom of the section:

One: Choose a background image (you'll want to make sure it's a high enough quality that it won't be pixelated.) I used an image I had already uploaded into Canva, but you can use whatever you would like.

Two: On the sidebar, select "elements" and then "rectangle."

Three: Make sure the rectangle covers the whole design, then change the color. I like using the colors from the photo that Canva suggests and then making them a darker shade. Once you have the color that you want, reduce the transparency of the rectangle to anywhere between 40-50%. (This step ensures that the text we put on top of the image is easily legible, play around with it a bit.)

Four: On the sidebar, select "text" and then "add a text box." Then type in the author's username and change the font, the color, and the size until you like it. Repeat the same steps for the fic's title. I like to center the title on the page and put the author toward the bottom but that's just my preference.

Once your cover looks the way you want it to, click "share" at the top right and follow the steps to download the file as a PNG. I usually just save the image to my desktop so I can grab it easily once I'm in Calibre.

Part Four — Adding the Cover in Calibre

In your Calibre library, hover over the fic and right-click. Then hover over "edit metadata" and click "edit metadata individually."

On the "edit metadata" screen, find the section that says "change cover" and click "browse."

When the file upload dialog box appears, navigate to the PNG you just saved from Canva, select it, and click "open." This will add your cover to the fic. You can use these same steps to add any cover image that you've saved to your computer.

Make sure to click "ok" at the bottom of the screen to save your new cover and navigate back to the library page.

Part Five — Converting to EPUB

In your Calibre library, select the fic and then click "convert books" on the toolbar. At the top right of the converting screen, set the "output format" to "EPUB."

Now, the following steps are unnecessary little things I do to make my reading experience more seamless.

Click "Look & Feel" on the left sidebar. Under the "fonts" tab, I embed the "Georgia" font family. I do this because I prefer reading in Georgia which is not a default option on my PaperWhite*. I have my Calibre conversion settings in place to do this automatically. You can embed any font that you have on your computer.

*It might just be me, but when opening a downloaded fic (following the methods in this post) for the first time on my Kindle the font is always weird. The trick to fix it is to go and change the font from whatever is selected (Baskerville in my case) to "publisher's font" and then I've found that switching it back to "Baskerville" on the font selection screen activates the embedded Georgia... even though it will say that it's Baskerville? Idk why this is, I just wanted to let you know how I fix it.

Calibre defaults to a justified text alignment unless you change the default settings. This appears as "original" in the alignment options. The random too-large spaces between words of a justified alignment give me the ick so to make everything left aligned, I stay on the "look & feel" page but move to the "text" tab where I can change the alignment.

Staying on "look & feel," move to the "layout" tab. To ensure even paragraph spacing regardless of how it appeared on the archive, I select both the "remove spaces between paragraphs" and "insert blank line between paragraphs" options.

On this page, you can also change the indent size of the first line of every paragraph (highlighted pink,) and the size of the blank lines Calibre will insert between paragraphs upon conversion (highlighted green.) I set the indent to 0.0 and leave the line size 0.5 which is the default.

The last thing I do is go to "EPUB output" on the left sidebar and check the box labeled "insert inline table of contents." This just means that Calibre will add a table of contents to the beginning of the EPUB. (By default it puts the TOC at the end which I don't like.)

When everything is set as you'd like it, click "ok" on the bottom right and Calibre will convert the MOBI file you downloaded from ao3 to an EPUB containing the settings we just changed. Both file types will appear in your library when you click on the fic and scroll within the right-side window. I usually delete the MOBI format after I have the EPUB because I don't need it any longer.

And you've done it! Now all you have to do is either right-click and share it to your Kindle, or you can "save to disk" and download the EPUB file to transfer to your e-reader by a method of your choosing.

I hope someone finds this marginally helpful. In truth, I was just bored so I made this post but in light of the recent DDoS attacks against ao3, I think everyone should look into downloading their favorites so that you're never left out in the cold again.

Happy fanfic downloading <3

[punisheddonjuan]

So I finally got around to updating the version of Ubuntu running on my server from 23.03 to 24.01, but being the tremendous moron I am, I forgot to save all of my Plex configuration files to migrate to this fresh installation. Now I have to wait for Plex to rescan everything and then I have to recreate all of my custom collections, download custom poster art for those collections, and manually retag the metadata for a whole bunch of things that the Plex media agent tagged wrongly (including 356 Looney Tunes shorts from the Looney Tunes Golden Collection DVD which is...ugh that's going to take a while). I also had to send new confirmation e-mails to a whole bunch of people because I removed the old server from my account before authorizing them to access the new one, which also whoopsie crumbles.

On the plus side, I did finally get around to doing this, it had been on my list for months, and there's also enough space after repartitioning the boot drive (I had kept the Windows 11 partition intact in case I needed it, but turns out I didn't) that I've got room to enable preview thumbnails.