Turning NASA Wake-up Calls into data

by @beet_keeper

For a while back then I was into space flight again. Scientists, science communicators, and engineers were all excited for a new era of rocket launches and the potential unification of the human race as we look towards the future.

During that time I discovered Colin Fries’ work in the NASA History Division to document all NASA “Wake-up calls”. A wake-up call is simply a piece of music used to wake astronauts on missions, a different piece of music, daily, for the duration of the flight.

Take, for example, the last Space Shuttle mission (Space Transportation System) STS-135; it was in flight for 13 days, and the wake-up call on day one was Coldplay’s Viva la Vida, while on day 13 it was Kate Smith singing God Bless America.

As a huge music buff who has the radio or music television on 18 hours a day, I really wanted to delve into this further. While Colin’s work is great, it’s just a PDF file (@wtfpdf). A PDF is not an ideal file format for querying data and gleaning new insights. So, while I wanted to explore it, I first decided to turn it into a true dataset. The result was a set of resources, a website, a JSON, a CSV, and an SQLite database which are each more functional and more maintainable over time.

Lets take a look at the results and https://nasawakeupcalls.github.io below!

#ApacheTika #Code #Coding #DataWrangling #Datasette #DatasetteLite #DH #DigitalHumanities #glam #harkive #NASA #NASAWakeUpCall #NASAWakeUpCalls #OpenData #PersonalProjects #Science #Space #SpaceHistory #Twitter #WakeUpCall

Portable Network Graphics (PNG) Specification (Third Edition) is now a W3C Recommendation

This document describes PNG, an extensible file format for the lossless, portable, well-compressed storage of static and animated raster images. PNG provides a patent-free replacement for GIF and can also replace many common uses of TIFF.

The Third Edition adds Animated PNG and High Dynamic Range (HDR) PNG.
https://www.w3.org/news/2025/portable-network-graphics-png-specification-third-edition-is-now-a-w3c-recommendation/

Someone pointed me to a new PDF to HTML conversion tool that they had helped with. I've now lost that link and can't remember the connection.

So hivemind, what PDF to HTML tools do you recommend for those who want to convert a PDF as an accessible HTML file.

#accessibility #PDF

Talk is cheap, send patches.

#opensource #FLOSS #ffmpeg