Here’s a few stories, tips, and resources I’ve read, learned about, and enjoyed over the past month.
Hope you enjoy them, too!
What I Found Interesting
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On January 1, 2024, thousands of cultural works will enter the public domain, as their copyright term has expired.
According to Public Domain Review, that includes:
- works by people who died in 1953, for countries with a copyright term of “life plus 70 years” (e.g. UK, Russia, most of EU and South America);
- works by people who died in 1973, for countries with a term of “life plus 50 years” (e.g. New Zealand, and most of Africa and Asia);
- films and books (incl. artworks featured) published in 1928 for the United States.
Which means the works can be mixed and reused in new creative works.
Some of the works that stood out for me includes:
- Steamboat Willie, 1928 animated Walt Disney film
- Millions of Cats, book by Wanda Gág, the oldest American picture book still in print
- House on Pooh Corner, book by A. A. Milne
- I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby song lyrics by Dorothy Fields
- Lights of New York, the first all-talking full-length feature film
You can join a virtual celebration on January 25, 2024 celebrating the new works entering the public domain.
From the description, the 1 1/2 hour event features
an amazing lineup of academics, librarians, musicians, artists and advocates coming together to help illuminate the significance of this new class of works entering the public domain!
Hosted by the Internet Archive, Creative Commons, Authors Alliance, Public Knowledge, Library Futures, SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), and the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain, the online event is free but requires pre-registration.
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Tech tip 1: for folks who use the Firefox browser and get frustrated when you try to access the contextual menu (available on right-click with a mouse) and discover it’s been customized:
Hold the Shift key down while clicking and Firefox will show the built-in context menu.
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Tech tip 2: for folks who use the Discord app, take a moment to review your privacy settings to check you haven’t added a setting that allows people with your phone number in their contacts to add you automatically.
In Discord, go to Settings > Privacy & Safety. Turn off all the checkboxes. In your phone’s main Settings app, revoke Contacts permission from the Discord app.
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Tech tip 3: if you have a smart TV, it knows what you’re watching. The Markup’s Mohamed Al Elew and Gabriel Hongsdusit explain automatic content recognition (ACR), which is technology that collects data about everything you watch and shares it to a database used to display targeted ads to you.
Their story walks you through the steps to turn off ACR on your smart TV and Roku.
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Phew, what an amazing image! NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured a densely packed cluster of stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), which is about 157,000 light-years from Earth.
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Join Michigan’s Department of Natural Resources on Thursday, December 14, 2023 for a free webinar about the Piping Plover comeback over the past 10 years in the Great Lakes region.
Piping Plovers are an endangered species and in 2023 shattered a record: 80 pairs nested in the Great Lakes area! That’s the most since the species was listed as endangered.
I’ve been fortunate to see them along Great Lakes shorelines in Michigan and Ohio.
