OS DataMercs
Welcome to OS DataMercs
OS DataMercs is inspired to elevate the publishing industry by consulting, teaching and providing most recognized metadata services.
GitHub Desktop window not launching
GitHub Desktop seems to be launching on double click, but no UI window opens. This is a quick reminder on how to fix this.
rough guide to Git Large File Storage (LFS)
Git Large File Storage (LFS) allows for versioning files larger than 100MB on GitHub. While this seems like a no brainer at first glance, it also comes with some draw backs. Thus, here's a rough guide on howto set-up Git-LFS and uninstall from a project again.
A rough guide to VPNs
Since YouTube influencer marketing you know you need a VPN (i.e. virtual private network). There many of services, mostly commercial, but also some free and academic options. While VPNs are a solid solution in an institutional environment to access one's company's network, or for circumventing censorship or geo-blocking, there're wild claims being made when it comes to potential capabilities of VPNs or internet threats in general. This article is not intended to deeply elaborate on that, but serves as a personal memo as well as a *thought piece*.
Wie erhalte ich falsch erhobene Zoll-Einfuhrabgaben sowie die DHL-Auslagepauschale zurück?
Seitdem am 1. Juli 2021 die bisherige 22-Euro-Freigrenze für Waren aus dem Nicht-EU-Ausland entfiel, werden scheinbar auch Geschenksendungen, die weiter bis zu einem Wert von 45 EUR zoll- und einfuhrumsatzsteuerfrei sind, systematisch abgerechnet, zumal die Post den "Service" der Zollanmeldung übernommen hat und jegliche Gebühren - plus 6 EUR Auslagenpauschale - fraglos vorstreckt und dann per Postboten eintreibt, auch wenn die Pakete klar als Geschenk gekennzeichnet sind. Hier wird erklärt, wie man sich Zoll und DHL-Auslagenpauschale in drei Schritten zurückholt.
Z39.50 for Dummies
This (cleaning up the vaults) is a shameless re-post of a now no longer available blogpost by Wolfram Schneider from Index Data, originally posted in 5 parts 2009/08/27-2010/01/13, which taught me a lot about implementing Z39.50 and the YAZ toolkit. I even printed it out back in the day and it is still worth reading today!
Win Task Scheduler for cygwin
HowTo run bash scripts via Cygwin as Scheduled Task (i.e. "Aufgabenplanung") in Windows
download YouTube (videos | mp3) without browser extension using only VLC
There is a multitude of browser add-ons and extensions available for downloading YouTube videos or converting to mp3 that are usually somewhat obscure, but there is actually nothing more needed than the popular VLC player. Here is how!
rbbKultur - Mediathek-Downloader
HowTo download "Mediathek" features for archival purposes
bash 'test' command
A mental note and short reminder on how to use the "test" command in bash if-loops or using the && and || operators for conditional scripting.
bash 'cat' - the poor man's text editor
Not many people realize that on bash you do not necessarily need a full blown text editor like vim, emacs or nano, or need to remember the heredoc logic to write text on the command line: All you need is some "cat magic" Here is how!
Howto batch rename on the command line
Renaming files is one of the everyday tasks, for which many people genuinely scramble and download the most dubious programs from the internet, while one could actually do this pretty easy with command line tools. Here we will put down some quick and easy bash and PowerShell examples that anybody can do!
Open source OCR on bash with ImageMagick and Tesseract
Handy script to ocr PDFs on the commandline with nothing but the FOSS tools ImageMagick and tesseract.
RDA - the librarian's (double) standard
While librarians call for openess when it comes to standards and access - the current standard is de facto closed, i.e. hidden behind a pay wall. Nevertheless we'll try implenting and look behind the scenes in this workshop report.
Working with KBART files
KBART files are standardized title lists in .TXT format, that specify electronic collections. This is to provide a short overview on what to expect from this metadata format and how to work with it as publisher or librarian.
A rough guide to cold brew
While to the common librarian Cory Doctorow is merely known as champion for Open Access, the Creative Commons, the EFF etc., he is also a hell of a barrista, introducing many a young scholar - the author included - to the carnality of cold brew. So, here is the rough guide for future reference.
MarcEdit under Ubuntu Linux
HowTo install MarcEdit under Ubuntu 13.04, via Mono or Wine