Blog posts tagged tools

Extracting Subjects from Images in Swift (and gRPC)

Extracting Subjects from Images in Swift (and gRPC)

In the Searching Text in Images on the Aviation Collection Website blog post I introduced the swift-text-emboss Swift package, a wrapper library around Apple’s Vision Framework to simplify extracting text from images. In this blog I’d like to introduce the swift-image-emboss Swift package. Like the swift-text-emboss package this is also a wrapper around code provided by Apple’s Vision Framework with the goal simplifying the code necessary to extract, or “lift”, one or more subjects from an image.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on October 31, 2023 and tagged swift, tools, grpc, golang and roboteyes.

Searching Text in Images on the Aviation Collection Website

Searching Text in Images on the Aviation Collection Website

We want to see what these technologies make possible, though, and a very real and immediate opportunity is the ability to index search terms that the curators and registrars haven’t already included in the titles or descriptions for objects in our collection. For example, this travel bag from Canadian Pacific Airlines, covered in the names of cities the airline traveled to, is not included in the search results for the terms “montreal” or “saskatoon” using the default search functionality but it’s the first result when we also search for the text in images.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on September 14, 2023 and tagged search, swift, collection, roboteyes, grpc and tools.

Archiving social media accounts at SFO Museum – Take three

Archiving social media accounts at SFO Museum – Take three

These third-party services that we use offer many benefits but too often we forget that they are not necessarily built for for longevity. Importantly it’s not necessarily their responsibility either. So long as there is a way for SFO Museum to export the things that it posts on a service we can and should take on some of the burden of preserving those efforts for posterity. That is, after all, the business of museums and libraries and archives.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on May 04, 2022 and tagged twitter, instagram, golang, socialmedia and tools.

Reverse-Geocoding in Time at SFO Museum

Reverse-Geocoding in Time at SFO Museum

Have you ever wanted to be able to reverse-geocode a point not just in space but also in time? Have you ever wanted to do that date-filtering with fuzzy or imprecise dates, encoded using the Extended DateTime Format (EDTF) ? Have you ever wanted to do both of these things with an arbitrary subset of location records? Have you ever wanted to be able expose these things as a web application and an API that doesn’t need to talk to a remote database? Have you ever wanted to be able to deploy those applications both locally and as serverless applications running on a cloud-provider’s infrastructure? Now you can.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on March 26, 2021 and tagged golang, tools, edtf, spatial and reverse-geocoding.

Tools for Complex and Ambiguous Dates at SFO Museum

Tools for Complex and Ambiguous Dates at SFO Museum

The EDTF specification does all the work of defining the rules and semantics for encoding complex and ambiguous dates in to well-defined and structured strings and the go-edtf packages do the work of decomposing those strings in to values and flags that can be manipulated by computers.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on January 14, 2021 and tagged golang, tools and edtf.

iOS Multi-screen Starter Kit

iOS Multi-screen Starter Kit

It may be too soon to imagine that we can make everything easy but maybe we can start to make more things at least possible.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on November 18, 2020 and tagged ios, tools and mcn.

NFC Clock

NFC Clock

NFC Clock is not meant to answer the question ‘How should my museum use HCE?’ but only to answer the question ‘Where do I even get started with HCE?’

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on November 09, 2020 and tagged android, nfc and tools.

Archiving social media accounts at SFO Museum – Take two

Archiving social media accounts at SFO Museum – Take two

It fosters a practice of actively requesting backups of our activity on these services, as opposed to relying on a mysterious automated system running in the background. I also like that it mirrors our own practice of building services and functionality, like the Mills Field website, from the same open data that we publish for other people to use.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on October 28, 2020 and tagged twitter, instagram, golang, socialmedia and tools.

Small focused tools

Small focused tools

In that spirit this blog post is about four small command-line utilities we’ve written to do our work and are sharing with the wider cultural heritage sector. These tools aren’t specific to SFO Museum and might be useful or helpful to other organizations using a similar infrastructure as ours.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on August 04, 2020 and tagged golang and tools.