Having a quick look at what’s happening on Mastodon. I’ve got out of the social media habit this last few years. And to think I used to use Twitter so much back in the day I used to find myself thinking in 140 character chunks.

Heading out to do some fieldwork recording some medieval crosses in high resolution 3D to study their chi-rho inscriptions.

There is hope still for Sketchfab, I think, according to https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/fab-content-marketplace-launches-in-october-publishing-portal-opens-today "Sketchfab’s licensable content will move to Fab over the coming months, while Sketchfab.com will remain dedicated to its services that enable creators to upload 3D models and share them publicly or privately via the web." They need to provide more clarity and reassurance if Sketchfab has a long term future. Let us all learn from this.

@electricarchaeo Oh no indeed. Thomas Flynn (former Sketchfab Cultural Heritage Lead, made redundant earlier this year as a sign of things to come) has compiled some useful info: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GhJ6KUPa5MBgdgAZmB8YrKhPvl7iLESKfG2ArkdvXYA/mobilebasic

I'm a little late finding out that Sketchfab is going to disappear next year. I shouldn't be surprised, but I am disappointed. So many cultural heritage orgs have their amazing content on there. I have used it since 2014. If your org has content currently on Sketchfab - what's your migration strategy?

@tkinias I’m doing similar things with IA PDFs. After Tesseract struggled I started using Claude Haiku via the Anthropic API. Works out to be about 0.3GBP per 300 pages to create txt versions with page numbers using the IA zips of individual page scans. I used Claude to write a quick Python script to automate it all. Its accuracy is superb and it’s dealt with the 19th century sources nicely. It might be possible to extend to creating a PDF text later. Happy to share my script.

@Documentally The camping gear would be rapidly adapted into hang gliding gear! It’s wild out there already.

Tomorrow is supposed to be the first (and maybe only) time I’m being taken by helicopter to do a 3D survey on an island. Except that the weather forecast now reckons heavy heavy rain, 50mph gusts, and the site is on the highest point on the island (45m). Not fancying my chances!