blog.mignault.net

Still no E-Z book ripper

Levy: Rip This Book? Not Yet. | Newsweek Voices – Steven Levy | Newsweek.com:

“Then I tested a BookSnap for myself. Short verdict: not a revolution. More a thud than a snap, the device—an ominous three-foot high construction draped with a thick black darkroom-style shade—looks like a Goth puppet theater and weighs 44 pounds. Under the shade is an angled cradle for a book and a glass platen to hold the pages down during scanning. You turn the pages yourself. It costs $1,600, not including the two Canon digital cameras (about $500 each) necessary to capture the page images and send them to your computer, where software transforms the pictures into files that can be read on a screen or an e-book reader. It takes considerable fiddling to get images set up properly. Supposedly, once you get started you can digitize 500 pages per hour, much faster and at higher quality than with flatbed scanners (which are much cheaper but not optimized for book scanning). I never got that far, but I imagine such a feat would require considerable caffeination.”

It’s almost impossible to sell self-digitization to the iPod generation, because – as Levy points out here – it’s so much more labor-intensive than ripping a CD. Even ripping vinyl albums to MP3 is much easier and can also be started and then run mostly unattended. Scanning a book is a tedious process and you can’t really do anything else (well, maybe rip CDs) while you’re doing it. Atiz is commendably trying to get to an appliance model for book scanners, but the BookSnap isn’t it. You’d really need something along the lines of the Kirtas technology for that.

(Via Digitization 101.)

Technorati Tags:
libraries, digitization, e-books

Written on the body

Ariana Page Russell has a skin disease which enables her to write and draw on her own skin:

My own skin frequently blushes and swells. I have dermatographia, a condition in which one’s immune system exhibits hypersensitivity, via skin, that releases excessive amounts of histamine, causing capillaries to dilate and welts to appear (lasting about thirty minutes) when the skin’s surface is lightly scratched. This allows me to painlessly draw patterns and words on my skin, which I then photograph.

It’s simultaneously creepy and beautiful at once.

(Via Kirsty Hall.)

Technorati Tags:
art, writing

NYPL’s new MyLibraryDV and Macs

Reading the NYPL monthly newsletter this morning, I saw what looked like a great new service: MyLibraryDV. From the newsletter:

Download classic films, Hollywood hits, lifestyle programs, and more — for free! All you need is your NYPL library card, high-speed Internet access, and MyLibraryDV to access more than 1,000 movies and TV series, including favorites like Antiques Roadshow and America’s Test Kitchen.

Well, that, and a Windows machine, or an Intel-equipped Mac with BootCamp, Parallels, or VMWare Fusion:

Can I use a Mac with the service?

The Download Manager for MyLibraryDV is a Windows .exe file that can only be installed on computers running Windows 2000 with SP4 or Windows XP with SP2, which enables you to run Windows Media Player. You can use a Mac to operate the Download Manager and view videos if you have an Intel processor and Windows 2000 with SP4 or Windows XP with SP2 operating system installed and running. Macs without this capability will not be able to install and use the Download Manager.

So the answer here is “not really,” though of course you can make the case that a Mac running Windows does it better and more stably than a PC. (Ask me sometime about the epic struggle it was to burn 3 Word docs to a CD on a Windows laptop yesterday. Why people put up with this stuff is beyond my comprehension. Well, besides “they have to.”) But anybody with a G* is out of luck. NYPL, you’re better than this. Really.

Technorati Tags:
libraries, mac, nypl

testing

this is a test post, please ignore.

RIP Capt Bike

Sadly, Sheldon Brown has died from a massive heart attack at the age of 63. He had been diagnosed with MS recently, and it had greatly limited his biking. The words “encyclopedic” (though he was indeed the Encyclopedia Brown of bicycling) or “comprehensive” to describe the enormous amount of cycling wisdom Sheldon Brown put into his website are wholly inadequate. I never met the man nor corresponded with him, but I learned so much from his site and his presence on mailing lists. My deepest sympathies go out to his family, and the cycling/human-powered vehicles/whatever you want to call it community has suffered a truly enormous loss. I am very sad.

The Fischer Prince

Bobby Fischer, Chess Master, Dies at 64 – New York Times:

When I was 12, Fischer was responsible for my wanting to play chess. Of course, he had not yet become a raving lunatic.

Technorati Tags: chess, obits

Elseware

I like Achewood, but the Chris Ware “parody” (for want of a better word) is just bad.

Technorati Tags: art, comics

Correspondence

Paul Greenleaf – Photographer:

An interesting exhibition where the photographer photographed scenes from old postcards in the present day:

I aim to highlight how the land has changed physically, by neglect, ‘development’ or sometimes coastal erosion, and the way the landscape has changed culturally, illustrating changing trends. The work exposes clichés within these rose-tinted tourist towns and offers a modern day alternative to the picturesque.

The written notes from the cards, with all their inherent idiosyncrasies are integral to the work, providing a narrative to the photograph and a unique insight into people’s lives.

With the original postcards exhibited alongside the photographs, I invite a direct comparison between the past and present, both being subjective viewpoints. The 21st century ‘reality’ of the locations offers a stark contrast to the often vibrantly coloured dream-like postcard images, revealing a personal view of contemporary Britain.’

Technorati Tags: art, photography

Monster truck info

We have recently begun sending Biodiversity Heritage Library materials to the Internet Archive scanning pod at NYPL. We’re currently trying to get the workflow in place, and so we recently purchased one of these Samson Book Carts to send stuff down. They’re perfect in a lot of ways: rugged, collapsible, huge capacity. Unfortunately, it’s also too tall (by about 4″) to fit in the van we’re using to transport books. I’ve been researching big book carts to no avail – if anyone knows of one similar, but a little shorter, than the samson I’d appreciate knowing about it. Thanks. Isn’t it interesting how 90% of digitization works out to be logistics?

Technorati Tags: digitization, libraries, mpow

“Smugness and safety”

Bike Snob NYC: The BSNYC Holiday Gift Guide:

Commuters

Commuting by bicycle is all about two things: smugness and safety. And while your favorite bicycle commuter probably already has all the “One Less Car” stickers and t-shirts he needs, he can always be safer. Now he can burn with the brightness of a thousand suns–or at least three million candlepower units–with a hand-held spotlight! There won’t just be One Less Car–there’ll be like fifty less cars when he blinds oncoming drivers with an output equivalent to roughly thirty automotive headlights and runs them clear off the road. Why not help him take back the streets by taking away someone’s retinas this holiday season?

I do need some Cars R Coffins stickers, though.

Technorati Tags: bicycling, bike commuting, commuting