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How to stop the zero day cams of movies?

I dunno if this would work across the board, but here is how I would short-term thwart people camcording movies in the theater. I’m not in the habit of bringing camcorders to the theater, so this is theory only, totally untested.

One of the challenges to the movie industry is people brining camcorders into the theaters, filiming the movie, then uploading to the internet.

My Sony camcorder is sensitive to Infrared light. This means, for example, that if I were to point a remote control at the camera and press a button, I can see the LED inside the remote light up. Could you, therefore, hook an array of bright infrared lights placed right behind pinholes in the screen, and tie the operation of the projector to the lights, such that the projector won’t work if the lights are not engaged. As long as the reels are turning. an array of these infrared lights would twinkle away pulsing randomly all over the screen. The in-theaters viewers would never see it, because our eyes are not sensitive to intrared. It could just play havoc with the camcorder version, though.

Are most camcorders sensitive to Infrared, or is that unique to Sony nightshot?

Using Picasa and AutoHotKey to scan Photo Albums Part 2

As I mentioned in Part 1, I am currently digitizing all my family’s photo albums. This is to try and stop the deterioration process, and so that each of my siblings can have ca copy of the albums. In Part 1 we covered how to get the full page scans into Picasa, and eased our repetition a bit using a macro recorded with AutoHotKey.

Now that we have full pages of albums scanned, we need to separate each of the photos into individual shots.

In Picasa, that would involve the following steps in the individual photo screen

1. Click Crop
2. Click and Drag the outline of the individual scrop
3. Apply the crop
4. File, Save A Copy
5. Undo the Crop.
6. Repeat.

Many of those steps can be easily automated. Pretty much everything but the click and drag portion. Let’s see how.

Step 1: Create the Macro.

To make this easier, we are going to record our macro beginning at step 3, then record all the way back around to step 1, make sense?

Here is a little video to show what I mean

1. Open AutoScriptWriter
2. Set up Picasa by getting to the individual photo screen, clicking crop, then clicking and dragging around one of the photos.
3. Click Record on Auto Script Writer.
4. Click “Apply” on the Picasa crop function.
5. When the cropped photo appears in the photo screen, click File then Save A copy. This automatically makes a copy of the cropped area and saves it to a new file in the same directory.
6. Click “Undo Crop” to get the full album page back.
7. Click the “Recrop” button to get you back the crop screen ready to click and drag the next photo.
8. Click “Stop” on AutoScriptWriter.

Step 2: Associate with a Key Combination.

Once you have recorded the macro, associate your macro to a particular key stroke. I use Ctrl+Alt+\ for mine (so that I can keep pne hand on the mouse, and one hand ready to crop.)

1. In the Auto Script Writer window, where you see the steps the
   script recorded, place your cursor on the the First line, and hist
   enter to create a new blank line.
2. On this new line, type “^!\::” (without the quotes). This is the syntax
   to associate with a keystroke. Here the ^ is for Ctrl, and ! is for
   Alt, \ is for the \ key, and :: indicates the end of the sequence.
3. Save the Script in a memorable place (I have created a folder in my
   Documents called “My Hot Keys”) and save it with a memorable name like
   “Picasa Crop”

Now whenever you are cropping photo albums, go to this folder, and double click the script to load in the the system tray.

Step 3: Start Cropping

The first photo you want to crop, you will need to start by clicking “crop” then clicking and dragging. (Remember our macro starts with clicking “Apply”, right?)

Then press Ctrl+Alt+\ To kick off the macro.

Watch in stunned satisfaction as AutoHotKey performs it’s miracle, and sets you up to click and drag the next photo.

technorati tags:picasa, photo, autohotkey, automation, archive, macro, squelly

Using Picasa and AutoHotKey to scan Photo Albums Part 1

I’m in the process of digitizing my family’s photo albums, and since I really hate repetitive processes, I was looking for a way that I could make the process go a little faster.

I also prefer using Picasa as my photo management software. It has just the right combination of power and ease of use that allow me to fix up most pictures quickly. Reserving the more time consuming photoshop for the tougher retouching / color correcting jobs.

Since scanning photo albums is such a time-consuming and repeptitive task, I used AutoHotKey to record many of the mouse clicks and keystrokes needed to perform the scan. In this post we’ll concentrate on getting the full-page scans into the computer, in part 2 we’ll look at how to get the full pages into individual pictures.

Best of all both PIcasa and Autohotkey are free (as in beer)!

You’ll also need a flatbed scanner. You could probably use a camera an tripod to photograph that pages, but then you’ll just need to go to Part 2.

I’ll assume you have downloaded and installed Picasa, Autohot key, attached your scanner, installed it’s drivers and have confirmed you can actually scan with it.

Step 1: Record your Autohotkey Macro.

1. Open Picasa, select File > Import From.
2. Open AutoScriptWriter from your Start menu
3. Click the “Record” button in Auto Script writer.
4. Return to picasa and scan the picture.

Here is a little video of the process:

In my script, I prefer to click the close button on my scanner software
window, which returns to Picasa. You may prefer to include that step in
your recorded macro. Up to you. YMMV.

Step 2: Associate with a Key Combination.
Once you have recorded the macro, associate your macro to a particular key stroke. I use Ctrl+Alt+S for mine.

1. In the Auto Script Writer window, where you see the steps the script recorded, place your cursor on the the First line, and hist enter to create a new blank line.
2. On this new line, type “^!s::” (without the quotes). This is the syntax to associate with a keystroke. Here the ^ is for Ctrl, and ! is for Alt, S is for the S key, and :: indicates the end of the sequence.
3. Save the Script in a memorable place (I have created a folder in my Documents called “My Hot Keys”) and save it with a memorable name like “Scan”

Now whenever you are scanning photo albums, go to this folder, and double click the script to load in the the system tray.

Step 3: Start Scanning.

1. Place your photo album on the scanner bed, and press “Ctrl+Alt+S” and watch in amazement as AutoHotKey clicks all the right buttons.
2. Once the scan is complete click “Import All” in Picasa (again, you could have this as part of your recorded script if you want. )
3. In the “Finish importing” window that appears, select a photo to drop the scan.

Repeat Step three until the photo album has been completely scanned. You can right click the Autohotkey icon in your tray and close down the macro if you are finised your scanning duties for the day.

In the next part, we’ll look at how to separate all the photos on the scanned album page into individual photos.

I always back up the scanned photos right away, too. I have no interest in rescanning the albums. See my post on how to do this with Picasa.

Live versus installed on Unbuntu.

So, all is not well, unfortunately in my Ubuntu installation. But it is a great mystery why.

When I run the Live version of ubuntu, my network card works great. I get right out to the web and all is right witht he world. After I run the installation the network card won’t let me out. I sought help in this thread on ubuntufourms.org but to no avail.

Here is the unfortunate thing. At this point, if the experts are stumped, where does that leave me? Out in the open I guess. Or paying for help.

So. The ubuntu machine is back on the shelf. The real bummer? when it was a windows box, the network card worked.

powered by performancing firefox

Safe mode and Ubuntu

OK, so right away, newbie hacking in Ubuntu resulted in an unusable, unvisible desktop.

I read an article from Linux.org, with Ten tips for new Ubuntu Users. And saw this tip:

7. How to reconfigure X.org

Most of the time, X.org — that’s the software that drives your
video card and provides the foundation for the GUI, whether you’re
running GNOME, KDE, Xfce, or another window manager — “just works”
when you install Ubuntu. In fact, I’d wager that most Ubuntu users
never even have to think about their video settings.

But, sometimes you need to reconfigure X.org because Ubuntu hasn’t
detected your video card and monitor properly, or maybe you’ve just
purchased a shiny new video card and need to get it working with
Ubuntu. Whatever the reason, it’s good to know how to reconfigure X
without having to edit your /etc/X11/xorg.conf by hand.

To run through the configuration, use dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
at the console or in a terminal window. Then you’ll have a chance to
specify your monitor and video card, the resolutions and color depths
you want to run the server at, and so forth.

Since every setup is different, it’s hard to give concrete advice
for configuring X, but it’s generally OK to accept the configuration
defaults. Also, you’ll be given a choice between Advanced, Medium, and
Simple methods for giving your monitor’s specifications. As a rule,
it’s probably best to go with Simple unless you really know what you’re
doing, or the Simple method doesn’t work for you.

Aha! I think. Maybe I can get to the right resolution for my screen, instead of this jaggie 800×600.

I went thru the many questions the reconfigure process asked for, but clearly answered one or more questions wrong, because when I robooted, there was no display at all. When the GUI should have appeared, there was nothin. Just plain black void. Uh oh.

So I crossed my fingers and powered down, then powered up.

Luckily, right after the bios came up a message reading
“GRUB Loading, please wait…
Press ‘ESC’ to enter the menu. “

What the hell, I figure. I pressed it, and got the option to enter the Ubuntu Kernel in Recovery mode.
When it finished it left me at a \root prompt.

I carefully navigated to /etc/x11/ and used to “mv” command to rename the broken xorg.conf file, then used the “cp” command to make a copy of the backup version of the file into the xorg.conf file. Thanks to itcsdocs for this one.

I issued “shutdown -r now” to shutdown and reboot. (Thanks to computerhope)

Ubuntu came back just the way it was before I started diddling with it. 

whew! Maybe I should actually figure out what the RIGHT answers are before reconfiguring, huh?

Ubuntu, Sound and the Dell Inspiron 3200

I’ve been trying to get to know Ubuntu, on an old Dell Inspiron 3200 Laptop. So far the installation has been pretty good. Only the soundcard is not working.

But according to this document, and my level of knowledge, it looks like I’m gonna have a silent computer. Bummer.

Printing and Ubuntu and the Gimp

I’m afraid this one might end poorly.

My printer is a Canon i850 photo printer, for which there appears to be no linux driver.

I can install a printer, from “System” “administration” then “Printers”. According to this document I can designate the Canon BJC 7004 as a close cousin — in Debian, another flavor of Linux. After giving that a try, I am able to print help documents from Ubuntu.

When trying to test the photo printing capabilities using “The GIMP” the Canon i850 and BJC 7004 are nowhere to be seen in the printer list. The GIMP, a photo editor, seems to use its own printing system apart from the printer driver I installed earlier. Trying to print from the Gimp just give me an error “lp:Error- no default destination available.”

Reasearching futher the following works, or seems to — I get printouts anyway.  Here is what I did:
From the Gimp, choose “File” then “Print”
In the print dialog box, click “Setup Printer” Choose “Canon” as printer make, “Canon BJC 7000″ as the model (this was a wild-ass guess) maybe another choice would work too,
Then in Printer Queue, select the named printer I created earlier. Not the “Default Printer”
I was able to print, but at a pretty low resolution, maybe 300×300. Color dithering is apparent in the printout.
But, Hey, I have a printout, so that is good, right?

Way back in the darkest recesses of my basement, there lurks an old — VERY OLD — HP 540 color printer. I might just have to drag that out to see what happens. Assuming it still works.

Printing and Ubuntu and the Gimp

I’m afraid this one might end poorly.

My printer is a Canon i850 photo printer, for which there appears to be no linux driver.

I can install a printer, from “System” “administration” then “Printers”. According to this document I can designate the Canon BJC 7004 as a close cousin — in Debian, another flavor of Linux. After giving that a try, I am able to print help documents from Ubuntu.

When trying to test the photo printing capabilities using “The GIMP” the Canon i850 and BJC 7004 are nowhere to be seen in the printer list. The GIMP, a photo editor, seems to use its own printing system apart from the printer driver I installed earlier. Trying to print from the Gimp just give me an error “lp:Error- no default destination available.”

Reasearching futher the following works, or seems to — I get printouts anyway.  Here is what I did:
From the Gimp, choose “File” then “Print”
In the print dialog box, click “Setup Printer” Choose “Canon” as printer make, “Canon BJC 7000″ as the model (this was a wild-ass guess) maybe another choice would work too,
Then in Printer Queue, select the named printer I created earlier. Not the “Default Printer”
I was able to print, but at a pretty low resolution, maybe 300×300. Color dithering is apparent in the printout.
But, Hey, I have a printout, so that is good, right?

Way back in the darkest recesses of my basement, there lurks an old — VERY OLD — HP 540 color printer. I might just have to drag that out to see what happens. Assuming it still works.

Checking some settings. Setting mouse speed and Screen resolution in Ubuntu

Well, the installation of Ubunt has gone pretty well.

I definetly needed to slow the mouse down on the touch pad. It was waaay too fast.

From the Desktop, which I’m told is something called “Gnome” that may be important later, click the “Sytem Menu” then “Preferences” then “Mouse”. GO to the motion tab and set the acceleration and sesntitivity where they are comforatble for you. It appears the system responds immediately as you adjust the sliders, so set the sliders where you want and just click “close”.

The screen resolution on this old laptop ain’t great either. Kinda jagged. Turns out that Ubuntu only give me two options for screen res, 640×480 and 800×600. Get there via “System” then “Preferences” then “Screen Resolution”.

You can try to smooth out the jagged fonts via “System”  “Font”, but on my 800×600 display, everything is pretty jagged.

The sound preferences are at “System” “Sound”, but alas, the screen is too big for an 800×600 display. So I can’t see the bottom of the window.

and 30 minutes later…

It’s done. I am prompted to remove the restart the computer (and to rememeber to remove the CDROM before I start up again.)

The entire installation took probably 30 minutes, although I did not put a stopwatch to it.

Upon reboot, the computer takes around 3 minutes to boot — that’s not fast, but comparable to the Windows boot up process. But remember, this particular machine is a grumpy old-timer. A Pentium I for grying out loud.

I am prompted to log in using the userID and password that I created during the install. The system is up and ready to go in about another minute after login.

First thing I notice that there is no startup sound. When I try the live CD in a newer computer, I hear the sound. It could be that the soundcard is not supported, or the drivers cannot be found. Also I notice that the text on screen is very jagged. I;m sensing that the display driver may not be quite right either.

I’ll have to see about that.

Installing Ubuntu, Part II

Allrighty, then.

Ubuntu got all started up, running from the CD-ROM. Right now, this is the operating system running from something called a “Live-CD” this means that no changes have been made to the computer I am using. Everything is running from the CD-ROM.

I would like to install this to the hard drive, and make it the permanent, primary OS pf the computer.

Right there on the desktop of my Ubuntu Desktop is an icon labelled “Install”. Lets just press that and see what happens.

At first, a whole bunch of nothing. The CD-ROM spins up, lets give it a minute on this old-timey machine. …

OK. Finally, A screen appears titled “Install”. How helpful. I’d give you screen caps, but, right now I’m live blogging this from from a different machine, don’t ya now. I don’t think I can blog and install concurrently from the same machine. That would be quite a trick!

OK. First option. Select language, “English”

Tsk-Tsk ubuntu. This screen is bigger than the (apparent) resolution of this computer. The continue button is off the bottom of the screen.
Move the window around…. OK. Good. The button is labeled “Forward”. Forward indeed.

Apparently this is Step one of 6.

Next step is Select a city in your Time Zone. What luck NYC is in my time zone and the default choice. I also fixed the Time to reflect my current time. (which apparently you indicate the time in Military Time. OK now plus twelve is…. got it. )

Next step is to indicate keyboard layout. American English it is.

Next step is to tell Ubuntu who I am. Give a name, a user name, a password, and indicate what you would like the computer to be called if it were to be seen on the network (username-ubuntu in my case).  Forward!

Next step is to tell Ubuntu how to set up the hard disk. In my case I will erase the entire disk as I want this to be Ubuntu only. Apparently If I were so inclined I would also do this manually — I guess for dual booting with another OS? Dunno. Erase the entire disk, please, Ubuntu. Forward.

Last step is to confirm everything I just entered.

It says “the following partitions are going to be formatted:
Partition #1 of /dev/hda as ext3
Partition #5 of /dev/hda as swap.”

I wonder what that means. Oh, I see, It think.

Alright. Cross fingers, hold nose, jump in. …. Click “Install”

A progress bar indicating “Installing system” appears. Looks like this could take a while….

Installing Ubuntu

Right. So. I popped the disk in and started up the computer and the old operating system came up. No joy on seeing ubuntu. Hmmm.

OK. Turns out that this computer as not configured to use the CD-ROM as a possible boot option.  OK. That I can fix.

Reboot.
When the very first startup screen appears, press f2 to bring up the Bios. Go the boot menu, change the boot order to put the Cd-ROM before the hard disk. Your mileage and BIOS may vary.

Reboot.

Cross fingers.

Whaddaya know! Looks like ubuntu is starting up! Yay!

Taking the Ubuntu Plunge

For sometime now, I;ve wanted to get better aquainted with Linux. I now have a need to setup a personal machine to handle non-work related tasks. The only computer at my diposal is an old Dell Inspiron 3200 that I got at a “Fire sale” — which pretty much means it was gonna be thrown out.

No way this think meets the specs of an XP install… Pentium 233, 256 Ram, 4GB hard drive. An ancient, slow machine, at best.

I;ve heard time and time again that you can brathe new life into old machines with Linux. We’ll just see about that. Won’t we?

I’ll track my experiences here so that any other newbie here can track along, and maybe learn from my mistakes.

That said, let’s get Ubuntu.
 
As of this writing the current version is 6.06. So I downloaded via bitTorrent the CD-ROM image named: ubuntu-6.06.1-desktop-i386.iso

That clearly means I need another machine, with a CD-ROM burner.  Check.

When you burn an iso file, it is called a disk image. When you are buring an ISO image, make sure the burner knows that you are burning a previously created image. As far as I know if you just add the .iso file to the disk as if you were buring a regular .doc file or ,mp3 file, it will not work. THe ISO is essentially the whole disk already bundled up into one file.

All right. Let’s give this a try.

Solve Sudoku the easy way.

I documented the system I use to solve Sudoku puzzules on instructables last night. If you are into Sudoku, and want to try the system out, I’d love your feedback!

Backing Up your Digital Photos with Picasa

Ever since I switched to a digital camera. I have become far more prolific a photographer. While I take more pictures, I actually print far, far fewer pictures. If I average, say, 300 photos a month, I may print 1 or 2. Most stay in the digital realm — either on the various Ceiva’s I have purchased for relatives, on Flickr, in email, or simply on my hard drive.

This tutorial assumes that you have Picasa and a CD Burner on  your PC.

Many of the photos are precious, and I would hate to lose them, so here is how I take steps to avoid that loss.

I store all the photos I take for a month in a folder on my hard drive, using the following naming convention:
   YYYYMM – Month Year
 Example:   200606 – June 2006

This affords to benefits, the numeric date format allows for chronological sorting and the text date is for easy reading.

At the end of every month, I can select that folder in Picasa, then choose “Gift CD”

Picasa will then bundle up all the photos for that month, into a nice CD.

My personal Preference are the following Settings:

In the Selection and Settings Section Choose:

• Photo Size: Original Size
• Include Slideshow: Checked.

In the “Name the Gift CD” Section.

• Enter the Numeric Date (as above) for the CD title, it will always fit. 
• Include Picasa: Checked. That way If I need to restore to another computer I know I;ll have workflow software to get prints, make adjustents, etc. Hoping, of course in 10 years that PIcasa will still run on the PC I have, but that’s a rick I have to live with.

Once you have your Settings. Click “Burn Disc.”

After the First CD Is complete. Do it again, and burn another one. The extra $0.25 spent on a CD will be worth it if copy number 1 is scratched.

Now, take copy number one and store it in a safe place. I keep mine in a CD binder. Take copy two and store it in a safe place. Like your monthers house. Or your safe deposit box. This is in case of a real disaster at your house, and the primary copy of all your photos are destroyed. You’ll have another copy off site. It’s worth the effort if your memories are important.

Make Fake Headlines

Use the Newspaper Snippet Generator to create fake, but real-ish looking newspapaer headlines.

Tagging is fundamental to the Net? Hmmm….

Smart fellow and all around blogger extraordinaire Fred Wilson (I’m a big fan!) over at the Union Square Ventures blog asserts that tagging is fundamental to the internet.

The way I read it, the post sort of equates del.icio.us to a search engine like Google. I’m not sure that is really the case. The point Fred makes is interesting, but the post only addresses a certain kind of tagging. And paints a too-rosy picture of it to boot. The thematic example in the post is the case of del.icio.us where the user tags are not visible along with the content. The tags are stored on another serveraltogether. But, of course, there are other kinds of tags. Consider Amazon’s foray into tagging, where the user folksonomy appears right along with the contentpiece. Then you have new challenges, that may not be beneficial to the host’s system. Consider what Dan Klynn writes about tagging for retail:

What happens if customers start tagging my products with words like "overpriced" or "ugly" or worse? And what’s the incentive for customers to create and assign tags? Once they’ve been incented to participate, how does a website/system collect and aggregate customer use of these tags to enhance item-level findability and serendipitous connections between customers and products?

As I see it there are tags that are good for the individual, such as the tags I see most commonly on Amazon. They are mostly “To buy” or “For Katie” which don’t help the community much. There are tags that are good for the community, such as the tags on delicious. But it is possible the tags that are good for the community are not good for the host. I certainly would not want these tags on any of the products in my database, especially if the competition could put them there. Its one thing to have those tags on another site, but not right on the product page. A little sabotage could create nightmares for running the business.

In many cases, the only safe way to tag is to allow self tagging where the tags appear along with the content, and user tag where the tags are not. Also, user tagging is probably of less benefit for transient information. Would I tag a Google search result? Would I tag the result of a form submission? Or stuff that expires? No, but people try to. Maybe, but it would be a different type of tagging than tagging a particular blog article.

Fred writes: User tagging is vastly superior to self tagging because it is the consumers who are navigating and trying to find the stuff. The way they describe it is the same way they will try to find it.

Maybe that last sentence should end “find is again.” It seems to me that in most cases it gets found the first time via Google, Yahoo, (where I;m actively searching) or maybe a memetracker like digg, slashdot or reddit or yes, delicious tag feeds (where I'm trolling). We remember it with a tag so we can go back to find it again, or let others find it via a linkroll. I totally admit though, that I could really be wrong about this. I have not studied this stuff the same way Fred has, I’m sure. I’ve never risked gobs of money on it.

Furthermore, user tagging is totally prone to spam right now. Especially when the stuff you are trying to find is a product or a service, and not just ‘information”. I think tagging as we know it right now will become a flash that burned bright, but burned short. Like opt-out "email permission marketing” and “push technology” and "unmoderated blog comments".

for the most part it works. I think that's because the number of people doing it is still Don’t get me wrong. Tagging is cool. I love it. I do it all the time. Joshua Schachter is one of my heroes. And right now, relatively small. That said, I’m not convinced it scales just the way email marketing didn’t scale when the signal to noise ratio got too far out of whack, and RSS was born.

So, tagging. Cool? You betcha. Helpful? Without a doubt. Fundamental? I don’t know. With Google getting so good at figuring out what I mean when I enter my “tag” into their search box, I find I rarely go to delicious to find information the first time. I know, logical fallacy there, just because that’s how I do it doesn’t mean that’s how the world does it. But the point is that delicious is good for making unexpected connections, for trolling for new stuff and good for seeing what other people are thinking about. May be to find the current zeitgeist on topic. But to imply that without tagging the internet loses part of it’s foundation. I’m not convinced.

Fire your worst customers.

Seth Godin asserts that:

 If the customer is wrong, they’re not your customer any more.

In other words, if it’s not worth making the customer right, fire her.

Successful organizations (and I include churches and political parties on the list) fire the 1% of their constituents that cause 95% of the pain.

Which is the perfect context for this article. The gist of the article is that a Chinese food all you can eat buffet “fired” thier customer for being too wasteful. I say Bravo to the restaurant for the guts to do this. It will seem at first an unpopular decision, however if that action keeps the prices down, or allows the shop to continuing the buffet for the other 99% of the folks who are not wasteful than it is a good business decision.

Google Videos on Google Video, sort of.

 Found this link via del.icio.us, which is a bunch of videos apparently hosted at Googles campus on a variety of topics, Marketing, Spftware development, Data integrity, Biofuels, "Inside a Metaverse", and more. I;m currently watching "The Paradox of Choice – Why Less is more" and it is really interesting. 

Create a personalized CD Jacket

Flagrant disregard comes up with another great use for FLickr. This time its a basic template for a CD jacket that you uses a cutout that centers a selected flickr image and you can put the playlist on the back. Clever. I really wish, though that it did not involve sissors, as I use this paper folded CD jacket  ALL the time

Use your digital photographs to make a personalized CD or DVD cover and a lot more. Just choose a photo, add some text (like a playlist or a note or a dedication), and follow the simple printing and folding instructions

Clean off that deaktop already!

AJ’s Blog – Desktop Zen – Reducing Visual Clutter on your Desktop

It’s not unusual for me to go over to a colleague’s desk and see a desktop that looks something like this:

Yup. Totally guilty. I admit it.

So I’ll give AJ’s advise a try to see how things go.

I’m starting to drink the GTD koolaid, this might help.

More and more folks living on boats.

May not be the greatest investment, but according to the Baltimore Sun more and more people, particularly newly single men are taking up residences in boats in local marinas. One boat sales man says to potential cuwstomers : “My pitch to men who are separated is, which sounds better: ‘I live in a condominium in Glen Burnie’ or ‘I live on a boat?”

Home floats – baltimoresun.com

“I’ve got waterfront property,” he said. “I have a great view of the sunrises and sunsets. The sleeping – that gentle rocking – is incredibly relaxing sleep. And if I ever want a change of scenery, I can just go. The flexibility is fantastic.”

Zimmerman paid $3,000 for the 1972 houseboat – a cluttered but seaworthy fixer-upper – and his only monthly expenses are his $240-a-month slip fee, insurance and his electric bill.

“Basically, it’s a shoebox, but it’s comfortable,” said Zimmerman, who works for an environmental company. His sons, 11 and 15, visit regularly, and enjoy the bedroom they share behind the boat’s stairway, even though the space is only about 3 feet high.

Inspiration for any company

I'm not normally one totally prone to link to A-listers, figuring that you've probably already seen what's written there, but Robert Scoble of Microsoft put out a fantastic post today calling for his company to do something revolutionary,

Scobleizer – Microsoft Geek Blogger » How Microsoft can shut down Mini-Microsoft

First, we need a big dream. A moonshot. The kind of challenge that'll keep our newly-hired rock stars minds engaged. That'll give everyone in the company pride when it's accomplished.

Now, this is a pretty Microsoft-specfic post, but change it around. Substitute thier product names for yours, what can you do to revolutionize? What 'moonshot' can you try?

Really thought provoking stuff.

Coll generates photo walkarounds.

PictureCloud.com | Create your free picture cloud now.

Take your pictures.
Shoot around anything you want.
Upload.
Drag n drop the images in 30 sec.
Save or Download.
Save to your free account.
Copy & Paste HTML.
Place picture clouds anywhere on the web

Picture cloud allows you to create “walk around” or circular panoramas,
vaguely reminiscent of of the Quicktime VR tours. Only drawback I see i
that it appears to require an applet to drang and drop the iamges for
upload. Otherwise pretty neat stuff. I can see real estate agents
liking this.

RETS 2.0 RC 1 released.

Today, the RETS working group struggled to a vote on the RETS 2.0 RC1 specification (there was a lot of dicsussion around who had read the spec, and if it had been published long enough to vote on),

The spec is pretty big, and represents a significant amount of work.

I’d like to personally thank the authors for the tremendous effort they have put forth in creating the specification:

• Paula O’Brien (Falcon Technologies Corp., formerly of Avantia Inc.)
• Jeff Brush (Falcon Technologies Corp., formerly of Avantia Inc.)
• Paul Stusiak (Falcon Technologies Corp.)

and

• Bruce Toback (OPT Inc.)

I raise my glass to you folks. Well Done.

Development Abstraction Layer

Joel Spolsky wrote up a great essay called “the Development Abstraction Layer” regarding managing a software company.

From the essay:
Software is a conversation, between the software developer and the
user. But for that conversation to happen requires a lot of work beyond
the software development. It takes marketing, yes, but also sales, and
public relations, and an office, and a network, and infrastructure, and
air conditioning in the office, and customer service, and accounting,
and a bunch of other support tasks.

Great nuggets and takeaways from this essay.

Hand Crank Cell phone charger

I can think of more than one occasion where this would have come in really handy!

Sidewinder, Cell Phone Chargers, Mobile Phone Charger, Phone Charger, Cellular Phone Charger – ProTravelGear.com’s Travel Supplies, Gear, & Accessories.

Charge your mobile phone on the go. The SideWinder is the world’s smallest, most powerful portable phone charger. It weighs just 2.5 ounces and is more powerful than a plug-in charger. A two minute charge gives you more than six minutes of talk time and even more standby time.

Free lens hoods!

Free printable cardboard lens hoods

This site has a huge number of lens hoods that can be printed on your home printer. Just print, cut, tape.
Use of a lens hood can sharpen a picture by reducing flare, or extraneous light from entering the lens.

First look at the Riya Public Beta

Riya – Photo Search is FINALLY availalbe as public beta. I spent some time uploading photos and training as best I could. The site is cool, the potential is really there, and here are my first impressions.

The UI. It’s pretty ajaxy, but I think Ajax is like salt. Overly, or imporperly used, and things go south fast. When viewing a single picture, there is a photo browser of sorts on either side of that image.

Photo Browser: Needs Work
The browser is a grid of little gray outlined boxes, and when you hover them a little window apears with the preview. Not sure if it is just me, but the preview image doesn’t always jibe with the actual photo it represents. Since the boxes are not numbered or a preview, you can lose a picture pretty quick in the browser.

Unexpectedly missing is photo rotate. Perhaps in the world of recognition this is more difficult, but I know a picture rotate is easy. There must be more behind the scenes that makes it more complex. I uploaded a mess of images, not all properly rotated, and I can’t fix them

The facial recogition works as advertized, tho not as well as I had thought it would. I would seem that unless the recognizer can see both eyes a nose and a mouth that it will not recognize it as a face. I uploaded blurred images, rotated images, and many pics with a 3/4 view of a face in many cases Riya did not know there was a face in the pic.

HOWEVER, in one pic there were pictures of a billboard from a distance, and it found the faces on the billboard — cool.

It did do some character recognition of text that was in picture, that was unexpected. Perhaps I’ll find some use for that. Its REALLY spotty tho’ sometimes it finds and recognizes TINY text, but big, clear text gets overlooked. I’l add another post with an example. OK, no I won’t because the see URL and blog this photo feature are still coming soon. If I can figure out how to show the pic I;’m talking about, I’ll follwup up in another post.

They do add a signature to the bottom of every picture. I’m not sure why they do this, and I’m not really sure I like it. It’s off putting, and I don’t like the font.

As I trained on faces, the recognition definelty got better. Although I still have not gotten any one face to be totally recognizeable. They need to work a bit on the training interface. It’s bothersome that every time I tag a face with a name it pops up a window that asks if I would like to train more of the same person. I found myself clicking the same no button over and over again.

I am really excited about what Riya will offer. They are filling a gap that I wanted flickr to do — make it easier to tag images of people with the persons name, Riya does this with simplicity (once the face is trained, and since the training is collaborative, it will get better, faster. )

riyasobetaithuts
riyarox