Silver Case

On Tuesday I was asked how much of my house is finished. I answered 50% and then on reflection said maybe more like 60%.  I think I grossly underestimated.  Yesterday I was at the house when all the built in cabinetry was arriving, and when the stairs and wood flooring was finished.  In fact, the house is very close to being done, perhaps 80% now.  There was an absolute mountain of cabinets in the living room, waiting to be installed into the bedrooms and kitchen.  If it weren’t for imminent Chinese New Year, the house would be finished by the end of February.
This reality, and the fact that tomorrow morning I’m leaving for a month in the USA, keeps pushing me to throw away more and more stuff from the basement storage. I’ve managed to reduce my books library by 90%.   My computer and old electronics rubbish, by 98%.   Practically the only thing I haven’t culled has been my collections of old memories and photographs.  I have trunks full of slide albums.

But having slides today is sort of like having Han Solo in ice.  I really have to want a photo to go to the trouble of re-installing my slide scanner and processing the slide. So much so that I haven’t scanned a slide in close to five years.

Thinking about this, I realized a great double-blow solution would be to use the Scan Cafe service.  I could get electronic scans of all these immobilized images. Then I’d (1) have access to them electronically, which is vastly more useful  (2) be able to throw out at least fifty pounds of crap from my house.

The Scan Cafe service comes well-recommended by Kevin Kelly Cool Tools.  I will want to do some more due diligence on their service, but I am very tempted to try this out.  If it works, maybe I’ll sponsor to have other family collections electronically thawed.  Dad has piles of carouselled slides somewhere in the attic.  They also scan photos, and I’d be thrilled to have a bigger library of photos of Pa and Nanny, for example.

I’ve got more important things I should be working on, but for the hell of it I made myself an account with Twitter.  It’s basically a one or two sentence blogging engine.  You can post to it from the web (zzzzzz…), IM clients (better), and SMS text messages (best).   I do lots and lots of SMS’g (my record was the day I resigned, I had close to 180 SMSs in my inbox) so it’s trivial to add a few more during the course of a day.  I was given a +44 (UK) phone number to SMS.  I presume there is one for the US, as well, and I’ll use that when I’m over there.  My twitter page also has an RSS feed.

I have a few collections of fonts totaling six or seven thousand different font samples. Of course there is no useful categorization or naming conventions for it. It’s a flat file. All I can do is randomly walk through it looking for something that catches my eye.

Font.com’s Search By Sight promised that by answering some questions it would give me the font I needed. I’ve thought about this idea before, so I was curious to try.

My thoughts are based on the premise that I am not a type designer and am never going to learn the terms and taxonomy of type design. When I read through the fonts, I have a certain impression I’m looking for (’1950s Heavy Industry’, ‘typewriter’, ‘Neuromancer’, ‘old letter’, ‘Soviet military map’, etc) Don’t expect me to want to search for fonts by type feature (serifs, spacing, etc) — I don’t know what they are, and they wouldn’t necessarily help me find what I am looking for.

That’s why this font finding expert system was so disappointing. To test it I decided I’d use it to help me find a font that looked like it came from a galvanometer made in 1935. It was hopeless. The system just asked me fifteen tedious questions about the font I wanted, but never anything that got to the heart of what I wanted. Honestly, the critical element of a 1935 galvanometer font isn’t how the tail crosses the upper-case ‘Q’. It’s probably something more like the font being relatively thin relative to its height, for being very unadorned, for having a consistent line width, etc.

I’m not taking the piss out of the system, but this is literally the recommendation it gave me:

Sinaloa? Please. This is more like 1925 Ritz-Carlton New Year’s Eve drinking champagne in a Dusenberg font, not austere scientific equipment of the 30′s.

I have a better idea for a font finder. The interface would be much easier, too.

The artist gives some sample text, and then is shown a list of ten fonts of a wide range. Click on any ones that, for any reason, are close to what you are looking for. Then the system, sees what you liked, what you didn’t, and shows you another selection, repeating the cycle, and narrowing down to a few best choices for the font you want.

The trick here is that as the system shows many iterations of fonts that users choose/discard, it can imply groupings of fonts that transcend their type family or other standard categorization methods. The categorization is implicit and invisible.

Problems with this?

• Would take a long time to build up enough iterations to get any meaningful grouping. (6000 fonts, in iterations of 10 each, is 600 iterations to see each font just once). One solution would be for the system to have an underlying understanding of type and be smart enough to show a variety of fonts from widely different font types. I don’t need to see six examples of Arial in my initial iterations.
• If you mingle different users’ iterations, you might just turn the grouping data into a murky, gray soup. The categorization might just be too person-specific.
• You’d have to be careful in your seeding of fonts to the users to prevent them from consistently running down the same choice paths and choosing similar fonts every time.

There are probably some good computational methods for doing this sort of matching stuff, but I think the key issue is building up the database of comparison results.

The remnants of my old PC system continue to decay.  See today that my APC UPS backup has blinking “overload” and “replace battery” red lights  and will no longer even pass current, let alone preserve line voltage.  Piece of shit.

So far, the only complaint I have about my iMac is that the space bar is a bit sticky and jammy.  I think the UI drives Ling a bit nuts. I have the ‘corners’ of the screen set up to do different actions, and I think she keeps bringing her mouse to the lower right-hand which shows and exploded view of the whole computer — sort of like a graphical task manager.  I heard her cursing about it last night, in fact.

New printer I bought has a color scanner in it, which is nice for sucking in documents and mailing them around. Was nice lately for sending house-related stuff to the lawyer.

Quick update.

Luke and Ling got back from Perth this afternoon.  Don’t know whether it’s an illusion or not, but Luke looks bigger. I’ve only seen him a few hours total in the last ten days.  One thing is for certain, however, and that is he’s trying to talk much much more.  Lots of long extended babbling repeats of things we say.  Matt comes over next month and I’m guessing by then he will be making some serious noise.

Okonomiyaki is sometimes called Japanese pizza. Tonight we had both Okonomiyaki and italian pizza.  I used the end of the pizza dough from the other day (I didn’t achieve as fluffy a crust as I wanted. I think because I blind-baked the crust in the middle of the oven, not on the bottom element) and used up left over batters from a kimchi okonomiyaki and a seafood okonomiyaki.  I bought several liters of sake, some umeshu, and two cases of Japanese beer for the party sunday. Still to arrange is the sashimi and spare okonomiyaki parts.

My green coffee beans are ready for collection tomorrow. Looking forward to playing with my iRoast 2 roaster.  I used some mocha java recently and it made decent espresso, bit darker than sumatran stuff I’ve been using.

Downloaded several Bruce Sterling and William Gibson books onto my n73 today. It appears that MobiReader only will read its own books purchased from its store. Death Penalty.  QReader appears to read .txt (but not .rtf) and refuses to read .pdfs, so I need to convert the rtf and pdfs to text before copying them over.

Still bumbling along with Japanese.  I’ve been having my teacher come over and give me private lessons instead of the class. I fell behind when I was travelling, so am racing to catch up. Actually I’m not even racing. The class is a giant grammar-cram and I don’t get a chance to practice my speaking. With a tutor, I can practice and work over stuff a lot more, so I am happy with that arrangement.

And I think that is about it.

My ride to the airport came early last week and caught me scrambling to find some books to bring on the plane.  In haste I grabbed a random Phillip K Dick (Simulacra) and a William Gibson (Count Zero).  Grabbing a random PKD without a backup is a dangerous game. Last time I did it, I was trapped in a dull thai resort with nothing to do except finish the remarkably irritating novel VALIS.

Turns out I had already read half of Simulacra another time.  I didn’t really enjoy it much at all (either time), but it wasn’t nearly as dreadful as VALIS.  I did, however, love Count Zero.  While in Dubai I tried to buy more Gibson books for the return flight. All I managed to get was Idoru.  Further searches through Singapore didn’t turn up much else.

So I turned to the warez world, and within hours had text and pdf copies of all Bruce Sterling’s and William Gibson’s novels.   Definitely a book form is nicer, and reading badly-formatted textfiles not a lot of fun, but on other hand, this stuff is available.

It got me thinking, “how am I going to read this stuff?  what is the state of ebook readers?”

From what I can tell, it’s not in a very good state.  Your choices seem to be to use a backlit PDA or to wish you had an e-ink device.

Well, I’m just going to stipulate right now that I hate PDAs and have no intention of carrying one around.  I actually loathe things like GPS’s and PDA’s because they tend to be so unreliable.  Plus I don’t have a whole lot of reason to carry one around.  My Nokia N73 phone does basically everything I need already.

E-ink is a really cool technology that displays very high-contrast text and uses almost no battery power.  The pity is that currently on the Sony Librie uses it. (ignoring some strange French and Chinese machines)  Being Sony, it is crippled with DRM and Sony’s always-expensive hardware.  I’d really prefer not to tangle myself in Sony’s net.

Where’s that leave me then?  Waiting.  Waiting for either the LoveTrust to finish the  NAEB Reader (this could take years I imagine) or for Amazon to offer their mysterious Kindle ebook reader for $50.  Of course this would be potentially the best outcome, inexpensive, high quality, and hopefully unencumbered by too much DRM BS.
But in the meantime, I did say I have a Nokia N73, which features the reasonably powerful Symbian OS.  So I downloaded a couple ebook readers that should more nicely display text on my screen. I haven’t loaded anything on yet.  I’m a bit doubtful that anything can display a novel on a 2″x3″ display in a way that isn’t exhausting, but I’ll give it a shot.  I’ve downloaded MobiReader and QReader.

Anyone else have any clever ideas?

If you browse a magazine or see a promotional flyer in Japan, you’ll notice many have a square image that looks something like a two-dimensional UPC code. It’s called a QR (Quick Response) code. It encodes anywhere from 1800 to 7500 characters, depending on what set you’re writing. Used for inventory management since 1994, clever Japanese added functionality to handphones allowing consumers photograph these codes and read the data. So now many advertisements include a QR code with all the relevant shop/event data.

I’m going to Tokyo next week, and I wanted to add this functionality to my Nokia N73.

Digging around, I found a downloadable app on the Taiwanese N73 support site. Apparently an earlier app published by Nokia was a real piece of crap and they cancelled it.

I found a second app, Kaywa Reader, that is a little sexier than the Nokia app, Scanlife, but basically does the same thing. They support a lot of phone platforms and it’s a simple matter to install this to my Nokia, which has a Symbian OS.

I installed both; they don’t conflict.

So that’s neat enough, now I can pull directions and contact details more easily in Tokyo. But I also discovered some other interesting functions:

Here’s where you can generate your own QR Codes.

Kaywa also will take your RSS syndication feeds and render them in a mobile phone-friendly format. It renders very nicely (albeit tiny font) on my Nokia.

This afternoon Luke and the dogs wanted to play in the garden. I pulled out my old Sony DCR-PC100 Handy Cam video camera. The eyepiece was still encrusted with the blood rest dust of Central Australia, reminding me that I last used it in June 2003 for the video downlink of KAP Kite Aerial Photography shooting.

I plugged in the monstrous Lithium Ion battery that i purchased for it, and the camera, surpisingly, booted up ready and willing.

I chased Luke and dogs around the garden and now i have a half hour’s footage sitting on the recorder waiting to be sucked off a firewire cable.

My question is: what video editing software should I use? Long ago I used Windows Movie Maker. When I just checked, I see the last update of it was August 2004. That doesn’t sound very inspiring, so I’m wondering if there is something else someone could recommend. I don’t want anything very complicated, just simple editing is all I require.

I tried to use my monopod as a poor man’s steadicam, but it was too light to nicely balance the video camera. I’ll dig out my heavier tripod and try that next, before I start trying to custom fabricate a weighted pole to use as one.

For as appalling as home movies are, I can see that problems are making nice pans and tracking. The zoom/wide switch on this camera is too fast by a factor of at least 10. It moves so briskly that it would only be appropriate for a movie scene where the terrorist is instantly identified in a sea of 100,000 football fans. I need to see if I can slow that factor down. The other trick I tried was not talking. No way to quicker dumbify a video than have me chattering.

update: I realized I do have Movie Maker already installed on my PC. Since the only advice I received was to use iMovie on a Macintosh I don’t own, I figured I might as well try Movie Maker.  It worked well enough for my needs.  It didn’t crash like I remember the old version doing.  Now I am recharging my batteries and thinking about what miniature movies I can make.