The famous photo of George Costanza (taken by Cosmo Kramer) on the Seinfeld show was clearly inspired by this glamor shot of Corin (circa 1980)

Sometime today, the number of photos posted to Flickr under a Creative Commons license hit 50 million.

Here’s an updated graph of Creative Commons photo growth on Flickr.

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Previous related blog posts: one, two, three

It is pretty easy to guess what one dog home alone does all day… sleep. But what if there are two dogs? Turns out, they seem to just sleep too. Jack, who lives up the road, came over to keep Ketzel company yesterday. Click for a time lapse video of their day (6.2 MB QuickTime).

I tried out the Snapter demo recently. Snapter is an intriguing piece of software that aims to ease the digitization of books, magazines, whiteboard photos, etc. You photograph your page with a digital camera, feed it into Snapter, and boom, you are presented with a beautiful PDF… or that is the idea. In practice, things don’t seem to work so well.

I photographed a magazine (about 50 pages). Then ran them through Snapter. The interface and workflow are still a little rough, but the more fundamental problem is the page detection. The program is suppose to detect the edges of the page. Using this information, it can than warp the image to deal with things like page curl, or crooked photos. On most pages, it wasn’t even close, comically so. The page detection algorithm appears to just look for high contrast and forgets that a the edge of a page is almost always a straight line, or close to a straight line. To add insult to injury, the interface gives you the opportunity to correct the page detection by dragging the handles to the true edge, however, when dragging the handles, it would refuse to move where I dragged the cursor.

The above photo is an example of Snapter doing a decent job of page detection thanks to the very simple layout of the pages, with high contrast between the page and the background. It has correctly found the center of the magazine (yellow vertical line). The red line has a minor blip on the lower left, and also didn’t quite find the left side. I imagine, it would do a decent job on a book with no color and no photos or illustrations.

On this set of pages, Snapter fails miserably. These pages are trickier than above, but there are still distinct page edges. Snapter has made comical wavy lines desperately trying to find the edge. Attempts to drag the handles to the true page edges is mostly ignored and just ends in frustration.

On top of these issues, Snapter is overpriced (for a consumer application) at $50 and only available for Windows. Here’s hoping for Snapter 3 soon.

Testing out iMovie ‘08 using my entertaining visit to Gray’s Auction in Fairlee, VT.

YouTube video. Photo Gallery.

Three quick radio tidbits…

Fresh Air with Terry Gross is now podcasting full episodes. Actually happened in late January. One less show to record manually.

Fair Game is a new show that has found its way onto my podcast subscription list. Distributed by PRI and aiming at the Daily Show demographic. I find myself fast forwarding a fair amount, but that’s the beauty of podcasts.

This American Life has posted a trailer for the upcoming TV series. The show will premiere on Showtime on March 22. Ira and his posse are also going on tour. Corin and I are going to see them do a live show on Feb. 27 in Boston.

Most people know that Fiber Optic is has much higher capacity than copper lines, but I was really amazed from the comparison made in the “Light Speed” episode of the PBS show “Innovation”.

That red line on the right of this photo is a single strand of fiber optic cable…

It has the same bandwidth capacity as all these bundles of copper:

Just noticed that Public Radio International will start distributing WireTap on January 5th.  No info on how many US public radio stations will pick it up.

PRI announcement page. 

Yesterday I found out that The Be Good Tanyas newest album, “Hello Love”, was going to be reviewed on NPR’s, “All Things Considered” (link to review).  A few minutes before the review aired (4:47 pm to be precise), I headed over to Amazon.com to see the Amazon Sales Rank for the album.  It was #244.

This morning, I checked at 8:33 and the sales rank is now #23.

Just about every USGS DRG topographic map that was liberated is now available on the Internet Archive. This weekend I updated the Libre Map Project web site to point to the Internet Archive hosted DRG’s. I also splurged and bought libremap.org which is where the site now resides.

You can now use libremap.org to search geonames (towns, mountains, etc.) and it will return the appropriate DRG. Or you can just get a listing of the every DRG map for each state.

It is nice to finally make these maps available. Thanks again to the 100+ contributors that helped liberate these Public Domain maps. Happy downloading!

Big name Public Radio podcasts are starting to come out at a steady pace.  American Public Media announced in a press release today that they will be offering additional Podcasts of their programming including:

• Marketplace
• Marketplace Money
• Word for Word
• American RadioWorks documentaries
• The Splendid Table (available in Podcast form in November)

You can get the feeds to the above and there other podcasts on the American Public Media Podcast page.

To test out Flickr’s new geotagging feature, I just finished up “mapping” all our 251 Club photos with Flickr. For a first attempt, they’ve done a great job of making it easy to geotag photos.  It isn’t always great at finding street addresses (in Vermont at least), but the drag-and-drop functionality is very smooth.

Another annoyance is that, in order for the map to be useable, they have to limit the number of photos that are shown on any given map.  They seem to be very conservative with how many dots per page they show.  This means you have to page through all the photos, which takes time to refresh. So the process is a bit slow.
As more people geotag photos, this has the potential of providing a way to find interesting sites in particular areas.

Click here for my geotagged photos around Vermont.

In less than 24 hours the Ransom has been met!  Over 100 awesome, generous, Map Liberators donated or bought maps on DVD.

It’s been a great day.  I’m exhuasted.

Two and a half years ago I started the Libre Map Project. My goal was to make maps and GIS data freely available on one centralized web site. During that time I contaced the USGS in hopes that they would coolaborate by sharing data with me. That approach was basically met with silence. Next, I decided to submit multiple Freedom of Information Act requests trying to get Public Domain maps without having to pay thousands of dollars. Those were denied as well.

I’m now announcing a ransom. Instead of spending years trying to get the USGS to hand over the data, I have purchased every 1:24,000 scale DRG topographic maps from a USGS business partner. The Internet Archive has also agreed to host these maps so anyone can download them for free. But wait! Before I hand the data over to the Internet Archive, I am looking to the Internet community to help me recoup my costs.

Meet the $1600 ransom by donating or buying maps on DVD, and these maps will be liberated forever.

Read More on the Map Ransom page…