John Colagioia

Hi, I work on a variety of things, most of which I talk about more on my blog than on social media. Here, you’ll probably find me talking mostly talking about Free Culture works and sometimes technology.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 23rd, 2023

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  • I’ve been using different versions of SearX for a long while (sometimes on my server, sometimes through a provider like Disroot) as my standard search engine, since I’ve never had great luck with the big names, and it’s decent, but between upstream provider quota limits, and just the fact that it relies on corporate search APIs at all, sometimes the quality craters.

    While I haven’t had the energy to run YaCy on my own, and public instances tend to not have a long life, I don’t have nearly as much experience with it, but when I have gotten to try it out, the search itself looked great, but generally didn’t have as broad or current an index. Long-term, though, it (and its protocol) is probably going to be the way to go, if only because a company can’t randomly tank it like they can with the meta-search systems or their own interfaces.

    Looking at Presearch for the first time now, the search results look almost surprisingly good if poorly sorted, but the fact that I now know orders of magnitude more about their finances and their cryptocurrency token than what and how the thing actually searches makes me worry a bit about its future.


  • I believe that YouTube supports RSS. I haven’t used it in years, but gPodder allowed subscribing to channels.

    Ah, yeah. From this post:

    • Go to the YouTube channel page.
    • Click more for the About box.
    • Scroll down to click Share channel. Choose Copy channel ID.
    • Get the feed from https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id plus that channel ID from the previous step.

    From there, something (like a podcast client) needs to grab the video.

    Otherwise, I’ve been using Tartube to download to my media server, which is not great but fine, except for needing to delete the lock file when it (or the computer) crashes, and the fact that the media server hasn’t the foggiest idea of how to organize the “episodes.”






  • Always good to see more effort to surface these things. A couple of possible enhancements come to mind.

    • Pepper & Carrot probably belongs under comics, and/or comics belongs as a subset of fiction.
    • It’d be great to filter by license, maybe similar to what Openverse (which you already have listed) does. I know that Creative Commons doesn’t see a problem with incompatible licenses, but I feel like people in the space have strong feelings about how “free/libre” it is to say that something can’t be used commercially (whatever that means) or can’t be altered.
    • If you want a pile of fiction of various sorts, at the risk of self-promoting, I spotlight (and ideally have discussions around) Free Culture works on Saturdays. https://john.colagioia.net/blog/tag/bookclub/ (And a bunch of the links actually lead to collections.)
    • Another pile, you’ll need to figure out how to sift through on your own (I haven’t had the time to figure out how to parse it), but Chris “Sanglorian” Sakkas posted the (I imagine) final backup of his Free and Open Works wiki, sort of your predecessor project. (Edit: I stupidly forgot the link https://archive.org/details/freeand-open-works-20200811084450)
    • Too much manual labor, I realize, especially as the list expands, but ideally, it’d be nice to have some idea of what lives at the other end of a link beyond the format. The videos especially could plausibly be anything…

    Thanks for getting this rolling!