Wiretap – Who is the Mud Dog? (11 MB MP3) From 2006-02-24 with host Jonathan Goldstein.

Matt just pointed out in the comments of my previous post that the Little Stinker poop bags are a finalist in the Tree Hugger “Waste of Packaging” contest. Right now, the little stinker is in last! Gasp! So head on over and vote. Then when you are done, get your dog to vote too.

Votes as of 2005-02-24 at 11:00 pm:

Wiretap – The Bat and the Weasels (11 MB MP3) From 2005-02-17 with host Jonathan Goldstein.

Back in 1997 I had a sweet PowerMac 6500 that came with a video in/out card and Avid Cinema. Along with Matt Annetts, Jeff Annetts, and others, we shot and created an epic 21 minute ski movie.

I’ve dug the movie, titled, “For Lack of a Better Name”, out of the archives (actually just a cardboard box of tapes) and post it here for a fond look back at our youth.

You can view it on YouTube or Google Video (which lets you download it as well.)

In an attempt to generate interest and buzz, I’ve now been spammed twice by the company Atiz. Spam isn’t unusual, but this spam is actually targeted and slightly customized. Atiz is a company selling an automated book digitizer. I presume they searched blogs mentioning competitors or book digitization, and sent emails to those individuals pushing their product.

And while I would rather not even mention their name due to their unsolicited email, the “BookDrive” does look pretty interesting. Instead of using a digital camera to photograph a book page, they basically are using a scanner head which automatically moves over the page, even adjusting for the curve.

Page turning is handled by an arm which has a sticky roller (I think) which they claim leaves no residue.

The oversized breadbox contraption connects to a Windows PC. There is a video of it in action available here. (warning fairly big MPEG video). The most glaring problem with the product is that it costs somewhere between 35,000 and 50,000 dollars.

Whenever I look at my web server logs, I see a ton of instances where people are linking directly to photos on my site. I initially added a config that simple required the referrer to be from redjar.org. That unfortunately has some annoying consequences. For instance, if you open a bookmark directly to a redjar.org page, there won’t be a referrer, so images won’t load. A quick search turned up this more elegant approach. The tutorial is a bit fancier than I wanted. What I want: if someone links directly to a photo on redjar.org, have that request from the browser redirected to an image that says, “please don’t link directly to my photos”. These few lines, added to your apache config, or an .htaccess file will due just that. However, it gets around the issues that I ran into with my first attempt. It says, if there is no referrer, play it safe and allow it. If the referrer is from redjar.org, bloglines, google, or google’s cache, also allow it.

Everything else redirects the gif, jpeg or, png to an image I made. Here’s the config snippet:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !redjar\.org [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !bloglines\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !google\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !search\?q=cache [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpe?g|png)$ /images/no_direct_linking_please.gif [NC,L]

mpgedit is a nifty open source commandline utility for joining and splitting MP3’s (even variable bitrate). There are also curses and X Window versions available. It can be used for generating “dynamic” MP3’s on the fly. We use it at PRX for adding intro’s and outro’s to our audition MP3’s. Unfortunately there was no version for Mac OS X. It seemed like it might come in handy on my laptop from time to time, so I emailed the developer. He said it probably wouldn’t take much work, but he didn’t have a Mac to develop and test it on. Turned out I had an old Blue and White PowerMac G3 gathering dust. PRX agreed to pay for shipping and a couple months later Adam the developer has released a version for Mac OS X. He also happens to have been a huge help on tracking down and finding a work-around to an obscure iTunes 6.0.2 bug that popped up in connection to lame and mpgedit.

So a big thanks to Adam for all his help.

Winter has returned to Massachusetts. We’ve got over a foot and the snow is still falling. Ketzel and I went out to play in the woods.

These “Little Stinker” poop bags come nicely packed inside a bag, which are then packed inside another bag. The lady at the pet store asked if I wanted a bag for my purchase. I declined.

In my previous post where I mention that the Internet Archive is using ultra-expensive, 16.7 Megapixel digital cameras, I wondered how long it would be before a 16.7 Megapixel camera dropped to an affordable price. A couple hours later, I have a graph, but no answer. It turns out Barbie was right. Math is in fact hard.

I scraped data for digital cameras off of the excellent Digital Photography Review website. I gathered make, model, introduction date, introduction price, max resolution. From there I calculated the exact number of effective pixels. Then I calculated the dollars/megapixel. (Yes, I realize there is a whole lot more to the quality of a photo than the number of megapixels). I graphed the result Dollars/Megapixel on the Y-axis and Date on the X-axis. Added in a trendline and displayed the equation for the trendline. With this equation I should be able to enter a future date, and have it spit out the approximate cost per megapixel. The only problem, I don’t know how to input a normal date into the equation. I know excel has an understanding of dates, or I could convert all the dates to a Unix epoch (number of seconds from 1970-whatever)… but I’ve been staring at this computer too long and suspect there is an easier way that I’m not aware of.

Here’s the graph as it stands now. Click it for a larger version.

Contrary to what I was led to believe in an email from the Director of Books at Internet Archive, the software for their book digitization project is indeed available to the public (under open licenses no less). I was surprised and excited to come across the Scribe project on Sourceforge today. The documention is nearly non-existant, the system looks like a mishmash of software tied together with glue and tape at the moment, but it is available… Now I just wish the Internet Archive would publicize that the software is available for other libraries to potentially use and improve.

Here are additional details that I’ve gleaned since my last post on the topic.

The “Scribe station”, as it is called, uses two Canon EOS 1Ds Mark II digital cameras which I presume makes up the majority of the cost of the station. The camera produces 16.7 megapixel photos for the low low price of $7100 each. One camera photographs the left page of the book, and the other photographs the right page. (Other systems I’ve seen are able to use one camera by the use of moving mirrors, or by moving the camera.)

In an interview, Brewster Kahle has said that they really didn’t want to build the system on their own, but they tried commercial solutions and weren’t satisfied with the results considering the cost. With their home grown station, he estimates that the cost is 10 cents per page. Not sure if that includes only the labor cost of someone flipping the pages, or if it includes the cost of the hardware and software. He also mentions in the interview that they’ve worked a little with Squid Labs in hopes of getting help on the development. You can hear an excerpt of the interview where he discusses the Scribe Station here (2.8 MB MP3). The entire interview is available here.

The station requires two Windows computers (the Canon software used to control the Cameras presumabley doesn’t support multiple cameras). The bulk of the system is written in Java, but PHP, cygwin, Imagemagick and a host of other dependencies are also used. While I don’t expect any other libraries to independently set up their own station using the IA’s work in the near future… if it continues to evolve, I can image 100’s or 1000’s of libraries digitizing books instead of just a handful that we have today. Suddenly the task of digitizing every public domain book wouldn’t be so duanting.

Wiretap – A World of Possibility (11 MB MP3) From 2006-02-10. Host Jonathan Goldstein.

Wiretap – On the Beach (11 MB MP3) From 2006-02-03. Host Jonathan Goldstein.

NPR today announced 8 new podcasts:

• Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!
• Station Showcase with PRX
• This I Believe
• Classicool Kids
• Driveway Moments
• Hourly News Summary
• Not My Job
• Piano Puzzler

They’ve also started hosting podcasts for a bunch more station.

They’ve decided to offer Wait Wait in full form, and just the “Not My Job” segment to gauge if people prefer full programs or shorter bits of content. I’ve always been of the opinion that it doesn’t matter how long content is, as long as it keeps my attention.

Don’t expect Morning Edition or All Things Considered any time soon.