I recently found an excellent deal on a Canon Elph SD550. Corin has been itching for a camera to call her own to use in her classroom. So I picked up the SD550 and she gets the hand-me-down ELPH S400.

I’ve only spent a little time with the SD550, but so far, it is a pretty sweet upgrade.

• 7.1 Megapixel (same as my Digital Rebel, but it fits in my pocket)
• Start-up time is much snappier than the S400.
• Big 2.5″ LCD. Changes the user experience more than I expected.
• Refined interface that takes advantage of the bigger screen. I thought this meant that items would be buried in sub-menus, but that isn’t the case.
• Records video at 640×480 30fps video with sound
• LCD screen: 2.5 in. approximately 115,000 pixels

On the downsides:

• I prefer CompactFlash over SD flash memory
• The battery is lower capacity than the S400 (790mAh vs the S400’s 840mAh). Combine that with the much larger LCD, and I suspect the battery life won’t be too great.

I started playing with shooting video, then playing it back on the LCD. I then realized in theory I could put videos on to this camera and use it to watch movies during my commute. It apparently has a higher resolution than a video iPod (115,000 pixels vs. the iPods 76,800 pixels. I haven’t gotten much further than that, but it is an intriguing idea.

According to the Quicktime player, the video that the camera shoots is in an AVI container with Motion JPEG video and Unsigned Integer audio.
Quicktime Pro allows you to export a quicktime video using Motion JPEG, but I’m not sure about “Unsigned Interger” audio. Motion JPEG also isn’t an option when exporting in an AVI container.

The other three practical issues are:

• Getting video back on the camera. I think that each image and movie has a corresponding metadata file that the camera creates. Not sure what the file contains, or how easy it is to re-create.
• How many minutes of video you could watch before the battery died
• How to get the A/V out port to work with 3.5 mm headphones.

Jessamyn got to attend the Internet Archive’s latest presentation relating to the Open Content Alliance. Basically they announced that more organizations, including Microsoft, are on the bandwagon of digitizing expired-copyright books. Jessamyn and others posted photos of the book scanning machine. I was intrigued as it looked like a custom built system.

I’ve sent a bunch of questions about the scanner to Brewster and the archivist-talk yahoo mailing list. However, Jessamyn was able to provide a handful of details.

• It is in fact a custom-built system
• Page turning is done by a human. No robotic arms, vacuums, or puff’s of air to flip the page.
• The glass platen is operated by a foot pedal
• Software deals with metadata like page number and copyright status

Not sure what is used to capture the image. I suspect a high-end digital camera. The fact that a human has to manually turn the pages is a big bummer. It likely makes things slower and more expensive. On the upside, it makes the system much simpler, and probably more reliable.

Above photo by “ioerror“. More photos of the event from Jessamyn here. For samples of scanned books check out the Open Library website.

A bunch of us PRX’ers along with some old fellow Hampsters (Ben Mauer, Mako Hill, Erik Hopp, and Kellan Elliott-McCrea) went to the Berkman luncheon on Tuesday. The guest was del.ico.us founder Joshua Schachter.

Joshua started his, “presentation” by, “well, I didn’t prepare anything” which is never a good sign. From there is was pretty much all question and answer which is good, except the questions from such gatherings are often a mixed bag.

David Weinberger has a write up about the session.

I noticed that after complaining about Banknorth sending me snail mail spam on this blog, googling for “Banknorth Sucks” now puts my website at the number one spot. So after my interaction with Chase today (who I have a credit card with), let’s see how high I can rank for “Chase Sucks”.

I use my Chase Mastercard occasionally and always pay the balance off in full well before the payment due date. As I went to pay the card on-line, there was a vague “fee” for 35 dollars. I called Chase to see what it was as I never pay late. I always pay on-line, and I always have the payment come directly out of my bank account, which has more than enough funds to cover my small charges.

The woman informed me that they attempted to withdraw funds and the withdrawal fee failed. She didn’t know why. I confirmed the routing and account number with her. Both were correct.

I then asked why I was being charged if they couldn’t get the transaction to work. “Because it failed.” she said. So apparently, if they fail to get something to work, it is my fault and I don’t get a chance to fix it.

“Uh, so why didn’t you inform me before charging me a fee?”

“How would we do that?” she asked.

“You have my email address and my phone number.”

“We can’t do that.”

This went around and around while I tried to express the insanity of this system. With other fun accusations like my payment was late even though I haven’t even received this month’s statement yet, and that my previous payments were made by phone, even though I’ve never called in a payment in my life.

After all this, I said, “Look, this is ridiculous, the failed transaction is your problem, I’ve never payed via phone, your records are crap, please just waive the fee.”

“I’d be glad to waive the fee this one time for you sir.”

So apparently this woman just enjoys arguing, and I could have saved myself 15 minutes if I had just begun with, “Please waive stupid fees from my account.”. “Yes sir right away sir.”

I’ve been keeping an eye the Internet Archive’s recent project to digitize books in collaboration with several other companies and academic institutions. Two thoughts, one related, and one not really.

Why does the project not ever seem to mention Project Gutenberg and the sub project Distributed Proofreaders. I understand that the IA project is different in many ways, but it is a real bummer that PG doesn’t get props, and isn’t involved in the project. I would imagine they could provide some valuable insight, and with Distributed Proofreaders, some valuable resources.

My other thought is one that has been rattling around in my head for a while. Internet Archive is a incredibly cool project. Kahle’s vision is to build a modern day Library of Alexandria to preserve important cultural knowledge. In his presentations he always mentions the need to store the data in multiple locations around the world to avoid the library of Alexandria’s fate (destroyed by means that are not quite clear). It turns out that culturally significant works are already being preserved, and in not just one place, but 10’s of thousands of copies all over the globe. Is it librarians doing this work? Nope, it is the “pirates”. If any work has significant cultural value, pirates will make copies. In a x hundred years when the IA is a faint memory, researchers will come across some pirates ancient hard drive full of DivX movies. And of course, the pirates have a huge advantage over Libraries, Internet Archive, Google print, etc. They don’t have to go through the politics and details of copyright and the DMCA.

I’ve used populicio.us for a while. It provides an RSS feed of recent popular links posted on del.icio.us. However, most entries are just the a title and a link. Without actually clicking the link you can’t even tell what the link is about. And without any context, I’m not very likely to click the link.

To add context, it would be cool to use the link provided by populicio.us, grab the linked page and include the actual page content in a derivative RSS feed.

I’ve returned from the Third Coast Festival in Chicago. Added more pictures from the trip in the gallery. PRX Party album. Around Chicago album. The second album is mostly from when Seth and I took a quick walk around our hotel. It was close by the Apple store so we went and took a look at the new iMac. Turns out the remote is held on to the side of the computer magnetically. It may also re-charge via conduction. Haven’t noticed it mentioned anywhere.

After a full day of sessions and attempting to be helpful at the PRX booth, I am exhausted. I took a lot of crappy pictures, the least crappy of which are in the gallery. Brendan Greeley and Robin Amer from “Open Source Radio”, producer Pejk Malinovski, and Carlos Maeda from Curie Youth Radio are blogging the event over at Transom.org.

The PRX party is just starting over at WBEZ, so I’m about to go venture the streets of Chicago in search of “Navy Pier”.

The PRX gang travelled to Chicago today for the Third Coast International Audio Festival. A get together for radio producers. After a long day of travel and a reception I’ve retreated to the hotel room with a nasty head ache. I need sleep. But I did upload some pictures from today’s travels to the gallery.

Death toll of recent disasters:

You conveniently can’t cancel your Tivo subscription over the web even though they are more than happy to allow you to sign up that way. After going through the annoying voice recognition phone system (how is saying “cancel service” easier than just pressing the “1″ button?), a friendly woman asked why I would ever want to cancel Tivo. An obvious question to ask someone, but then she asked what I planned to do with the Tivo, which I couldn’t figure out.

Tivo had a funeral for the VCR in NYC this past weekend. If it had been in Boston, I would have shown up with my DirecTivo and 40 Hour Standalone Tivo and smashed them on the ground or something dramatic like that. Instead I’ll use them as space heaters around the house.

The Beyond TV setup is working quite nicely. I’m just hoping version 4 comes out soon with it’s promise of DivX support.

My Beyond TV, Beyond Media, and the Firefly Remote arrived yesterday. I was using the trial for a while, but the Remote control really has changed the experience for the better. It all just works and is much closer to a Tivo experience. Plus the remote is RF not IR, so it works without line-of-site. So I can in theory put the box in the other room. Unfortunately, it won’t control the IR based TV and stereo receiver.

So far, I’m not very impressed by the Harmony remote. The setup is this horrible mix of web based configuration with a locally running application that actually sends the config to the remote. The remote itself has plastic buttons instead of the nice rubber buttons like the Tivo and Firefly remote. Not sure which one I’ll end up using.

Beyond Media is surprising cool. I’m not sure how much I’ll use it in practice, but it provides easy access to DVD player, Weather, Live365 streams, Photos, Music, and whole bunch of other things. I thought the fact that it is a separate application from Beyond TV was really annoying. But the remote allows to go back and forth without really noticing it.

After a couple more tweaks, we should be able to do away with the Tivo.

I’m on the Worcester commuter train just about to pass Fenway as I type this. The train conductor just announced the score over the intercom. They love their baseball here. (2-2 in the 5th at the moment)

Corin and I went to see Thumbsucker on Wednesday night. Overall I liked it. I’ve determined that I like movies that are made by humans. That is, I actually like flaws that make it apparent that a real person wrote, directed, shot, and edited a scene.

I’ve complained about it before, but I just can’t get over the price. We had dinner out before the movie and the two movie tickets cost more than our meal. Each ticket was $10. One movie out costs more than a month of Netflix. So I’m considering reactivating our account. Actually, I just noticed Blockbuster’s service allows you to make two free movie rentals at a local Blockbuster store which we now have nearby.

I’ve noticed recently that store credit card machines have been pushing me more and more to use debit instead of credit. I swipe my card, the device will ask whether I want debit or credit, I select credit, and it then asks me for my pin. Typically you have to push a “cancel” button or something. Last night I went through the self-check-out lane at Stop and Shop and it was brought to a whole new level.

Warning One: There was a sign that instructed me to use debit because of great reasons like, “security of a pin”, “no signature required”. Oddly absent was, “saves stop and shop money”.

Warning Two: When I pressed the “done” button, I was instructed to select my payment type. I selected “credit”.

Warning Three: The credit card screen then asked for my pin. I pressed “cancel” or something like that.

Warning Four: I forget exactly how it was stated, but it basically AGAIN asked me to select credit or debit. I again said credit.

Finally I got to enter my signature.

It has never been clear to me what the difference is from the customer perspective. I’ve never seen a charge on my account for using debit at a store. I’d prefer not to enter my ATM pin in front of other people, so I just choose Credit.

Analog Hole

Tired of all the tweaking required for MythTV, I decided to try Snapstream’s Beyond TV. A commercial application that runs on Windows. It has its own set of downsides, including requiring Windows, but if I could get it working quickly, it seemed worth it.

After I received my replacement Hauppauge PVR 500 card, Beyond TV was up and running in about 10 minutes. If you have never used a Tivo, it will likely make you happy. If you know the Tivo interface, you’ll be slightly disappointed. It is like the Windows vs. Mac OS X debate. Yeah the functionality is there, but it just doesn’t feel quite right. Despite my hesitation, I decided to buy it, along with Beyond Media which a separate application from Snapstream that is designed to play DVD’s, movies on your hard drive, play mp3’s, and show photos. It sounds like they have long term plans of integrating the two applications.

Another contender filling in the commercial PVR software market is SageTV. It seems like a slicker design and appears to have Beyond Media functionality built-in. Given more time, I would have demoed it.

One reason I got tired of MythTV was that a bunch of the Ubuntu Breezy packages were old. I checked today, and it appears that they have been updated which is excellent.

Still on the to-do list with Beyond TV is getting the remote control up and running, and getting TV display working correctly. I can’t figure out how to make windows refresh the monitor setup without rebooting. If I connect a monitor or tv to the video card, it doesn’t get recognized without restarting. Also, if I have a monitor and the tv connected, then make Beyond TV full screen, the computer suddenly becomes sluggish in a cyclical way. (e.g. every second it stutters.)