fnt (fascinating new thing)

Courtesy of Dan, I now have an Atom feed!

[Mon May 24 14:41:43 2010] p
Aside from the obviously awesome OK Go show, my other favorite things at Maker Faire:

Watching/helping Noah work through "Tinker Your Way Out of This 2.0" (http://www.tinkeringschool.com/)
Charming homemade 3D dome made out of (I'm guessing) plastic garbage bags and I guess a bunch of fans. Made by a guy from Japan who read his English introduction from a book, and after passing out classic red/blue glasses, killed the lights and put on a really great 3D shadow puppet demo w/ models from Star Trek/Wars, BSG, and other random objects. Really really great. So glad he made it. Noah dug it too.
Successfully picking a lock for the first time! http://toool.us/

[Thu Apr 22 01:18:28 2010] p

Got a Light?
So Glady got me a Kindle for Christmas. I finally finished reading my first real purchase on the thing, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Really good read. If you're going to read it (on paper or on the Kindle), I recommend grabbing and printing the translation of the maps that were in the original Swedish editions, but were inexplicably omitted from the English translation: Missing Maps.

But hey look, Kindle has tons of free books, thanks to Project Gutenberg, including Glady's favorite, Jane Austen. So far she's read Northanger Abbey and Emma, and now she's reading Mansfield Park. It's a lot more convenient to read on a Kindle as opposed to her 1336 page (!) Complete Novels of Jane Austen that weighs over 3 lbs.

Unfortunately, I also loaded up a 3-pound book onto the Kindle: David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, a book that has been taunting me from atop the old Mac tower in the backroom for over 10 years, or whenever I borrowed it from Senjou. I really want to finish this book before I turn 40.

So yes, we are fighting over the Kindle.

Luckily the Kobo eReader is supposed to be coming to Borders this summer, and at $150, with 100 free eBooks preloaded (I'm guessing Jane Austen will be well-represented), it seems like a no-brainer. Kobo is already available as an app on the iPhone, iPad, WebOS (yes!), and Blackberry, and their on-line bookstore is pretty well-stocked. Probably second only to the Kindle store. And yes, it has all of the Jane Austen novels for free as well, just in case they don't pre-load all of her lesser works too.

Speaking of the iPad, here's a great review of the various eBook apps available for it.

But ugh, I'm not paying $500 for an iPad, as drool-worthy as it may be, sorry
But I would like to occasionally read a book I purchased for my Kindle even if Glady is reading Jane Austen on it. Now there is a Kindle App for the iPhone and Blackberry, and also readers for Mac and Windows. But um, I carry a Palm Pre. So... hey look, Amazon's file format is actually Mobipocket with some DRM nonsense added. And hey, there's a couple of ereader apps for the Pre that support non-DRM Mobipocket files. I wonder if...

Hrm, it looks like hypothetically speaking one could use something handy like unswindle.pyw and mobidedrm.py (Bundled here.) to strip the DRM off of any Kindle book that you've purchased and want to read on a non-Kindle Mobipocket-compatible reader.

Speaking of differently-formatted books, it turns out I actually bought a copy of Cryptonomicon in 2003 to read on my Palm Zire 71. It was purchased from Palm Digital Media (Palm Inc. had acquired Peanut Press), and was in the eReader format. Remarkably, eReader.com still has my purchase information for this book. That's after 3 or 4 acquisitions. Crazy.

Turns out that hypothetically speaking there are tools like erdr2pml.py that can convert the eReader format (if you have your original credit card number used to purchase the book. No really, that's the hash key!) into the PML (Palm Markup Language).

There is an amazing tool called Calibre that can convert pretty much any ebook format to another. So it can take a PML file and oh look at that, convert it into the Mobipocket format that a Kindle can read.

Last bits... that Kobo eReader I was talking about, and the various apps the store supports? It uses yet another format, ePub. Adobe provides DRM for this format through its Digital Editions ereader for Mac and Windows. Interestingly, there are again, some scripts, cleverly named ineptkey and ineptepub (a play on the name of the DRM scheme, "ADEPT") that hypothetically should allow you to strip the DRM off of books purchased from Kobo and downloaded via Digital Editions. And why yes, in theory Calibre should be able to convert this unprotected ePub into the Mobipocket format for reading on a Kindle.

Note that legally speaking, breaking any DRM scheme is illegal. But hello -- is it really that different than taping your vinyl? Or heck, converting your vinyl to MP3s? When you buy a physical book, it doesn't "go bad" after 7 years. I'm exceedingly happy that in theory a copy of Cryptonomicon purchased to be read on a tiny 320x320 color screen can now be read on the latest E Ink technology in the Kindle.

Last bit - Kobo used to offer $2-off and $3-off coupons off of all their books. Amazon used to offer $9.99 pricing on all New York Times best-sellers. As of April 1, they no longer can do this. because of something slimy called the agency pricing model. Book publishers want to impose price-fixing, much like they do in physical bookstores. (Hardbacks are annoyingly expensive when they're first released, then get marked down, and finally when the paperbacks come out they're a lot cheaper.) Now smaller booksellers like Kobo and Apple are happy about this, it prevents Amazon from continuing to sell e-books at a loss. (Amazon's $9.99 price was often less than what they paid the publisher for the "book". It's hard to wrap your head around this, I know.) The New Yorker has a piece on how this agency thing is working out. I'm going to go read it now. Or maybe I'll send it to my Kindle.

OH, also: A number of libraries offer ebooks in PDF and Mobipocket format. With the appropriate reader, the books can be read for a certain period of time (8 days, for example), and then they "expire", just like regular books, except they actually stop being readable. And wouldn't you know it, the Kindle can't read these books, even though they're in Mobipocket or PDF format. Unless there was some kind of script that let you generate a unique Mobipocket ID from your Kindle's serial number so that the books can properly expire, and then some other script that tweaked the files just a bit so that the Kindle didn't outright reject them.

Also of interest, in a manifesto kind of way: The Right to Read.

[Wed Jan 20 12:22:10 2010] p

Too much good music, and too many great links to let them get washed away in the torrent of constant information overload that is Facebook

It all started with some photos by Michelle that led me to check out her ACCOUSTIC Galleries

What? There was some kind of Asian-Am Art/Music show back in... December 2008 at Broadway Studios (where Michelle's the house photographer)? Ok. Oh hey Vienna Teng, and who's this Goh Nakamura guy? Oh wow, he's good. His cover of "We Can Work It Out" is solid. Hrm, playing at an As-Am Variety Concert Feb 5 at the Palace of Fine Arts? Oh yeh, and his newest album is available as a free download.

But wait -- Julie Plug? Why does that name sound familiar? OH RIGHT. Late 90s -- last time As-Am bands were all the craze. Or well, I guess they've always been grinding away. Well heck, the music is still GREAT. Just listened to everything up on their MySpace. Man, what was the name of that club on the corner of 11th and Mission where Glady reminded me that we *saw* Julie Plug? Ah right, the Paradise Lounge!

A lot of times I'll bemoan the fact that I never got to see this band or this artist back when they were still playing or still together, or still alive. But I'm trying to get over that and be content with the fact that the music will still live on even if the band or artist doesn't. [Oh look -- it's Cub's "Come out Come out" CD on my desk. If it was an LP it would be worn to death. Also, it would be much harder to play in iTunes. I missed seeing them as part of the Ear of the Dragon when they made it to L.A. because Cub wasn't on the bill anymore at that point. But still, "It was good!"] Well, Cub's long gone, but apparently Julie Plug stil plays from time to time. (The Make Out room back in April 2009). Hrm, and that show was with drummer Rob Uytingco's new band Sugarspun, and they're playing The Make Out room Feb 27. A little lighter than Julie Plug, but still great tunes. Oh, and what's this, Julie Plug headlined the "Social Disturbance" music fest back in May? And who are all these bands? Oh, down the rabbit hole...

Oh, before my disovery of Goh and rediscovery of Julie Plug, I was watching a video of powder riding up at Homewood. Oh who's this singing "Simple Things"? Julie Collings? Wow, that's some nice stuff too.

Back when JetBlue offered their $599 all-you-can-fly pass, these two artists bought passes and decided to tour like crazy. Brilliant! Followyourwhim.com

[Fri Sep 25 17:03:43 2009] p

Finally...
...face recognition for the rest of us: Picasa 3.5.

And woot, unlike iPhoto, the data is a little easier to get at in case you wanted to programatically turn those "Name Tags" into IPTC Keywords. Check out the .picasa.ini file in each directory of photos you've imported into Picasa. Then compare those UIDs against what's in ~/Local Settings/Application Data/Google/Picasa2/contacts/contacts.xml
The rest is left as an exercise for the reader. (Hint: Add a bit of Perl and exiftool and stir liberally.)

[Tue Sep 22 00:40:39 2009] p

World's shortest-lived blog: http://thisamericanmusic.wordpress.com/

[Mon Jul 13 22:55:19 2009] p

Kindle

I want one. Glady wants one.

But even reduced to $299, it's *too much*. I mean, I'm going to be buying books on it. Lots of books, I reckon. First chapter free? Isn't that what a drug dealer says? "C'mon, the first taste is free..."

So why isn't the Kindle subsidized, a la cell phones? You know, where it's $49-$99 if I agree to be locked me in to Book of the Month club or join Oprah's Favorite Books for 2 years. Or remember the old Columbia House CD deals where you'd get 12 CDs for a penny but then you have to buy one CD a month for the next year or two? Or "return it at no cost" (except shipping and handling). I'd *totally* agree to buy 12 NYT Bestsellers in the next year. Boom, $120 right there. Please give me my $99 Kindle.

I'd even, maybe, consider getting a subscription to the New York Times to get a cheaper Kindle, except that apparently that offer is only valid if you can't get local delivery. What? Only folks that live in the sticks can get cheap Kindles with their NYT subscriptions? Who in the sticks wants the NYT? (Apologies to sophisticated yokels.)

Ok, so they're offering them free to... 6 colleges. Great. Also, duh, why didn't you do that in the first place? Oh wait, because the textbook market is a racket. Still, it would be great for those "course readers" (assuming the greedy copyright owners don't try to extract royalties for printing a single article, which is also an ongoing fight.

ANYways. Googling for what I thought was an obvious idea, I found an article arguing that the high cost of Kindle hardware is actually subsidizing cheap e-books. It's an interesting take that I hadn't even thought of. I don't know if I buy it, but it would explain why Amazon are being such jerks.

Also, here's a detailed analysis of the actual costs of a book vs. an e-book. After a while my eyes started to glaze over. But it seems to say that publishers are *not* really losing money at $9.99 a title, which contradicts the "hardware subsidizes cheap books" argument above.

A few last links: analysis of how much it costs to print the NYT and a nice in-depth review of the experience of reading the NYT on a Kindle 2

So yeah, did I mention I really want one?

[Wed May 20 11:55:28 2009] p
Perl helps me vote:

if ($argument_text_in_voter_guide =~ /(\b[^\Wa-z0-9_]+\b/g) { &vote_for_other_side ; }

(That regexp is blatantly stolen from the Perl Cookbook. What I came up was far less elegant: /[A-Z][A-Z]+/g) [Um... I guess this might need some explanation. That bit of code in between the /slashes/ looks for anything written in ALL CAPS, which is often found in hysterical Voter Guide arguments for or against a particular measure/proposition.]

[Mon Apr 27 23:52:47 2009] p

Faces

I'm currently obsessed with face recognition because I've always thought tagging was way too much work. But letting a computer do it for me with a bit of training? That's both incredibly geeky and lazy!

iPhoto '09 does it but you're stuck with the face data all being in iPhoto. The underlying database is sqlite though, so there's a possibility of hacking the tags from there and either embedding them in the JPEGs as IPTC Keywords or now I'm looking at XMP. (Wait, can you do sidecar files for JPEGs? I'm too lazy and cheap to shoot RAW.)

Oh, there's face recognition in Picasa Web Albums, but alas, that data is not currently accessible via the API, even though plenty of people want it.

Recently I found a new site called Polar Rose that will import your Flickr photos, let you tag them (ideally with your Facebook contacts), and if the tagged parties join Polar Rose and consent (guuuuh, darned viral marketing), those names will get pushed back to Flickr as notes (guh, X-Y coordinates are cute, but IMHO, unnecessary. Just give me the names, please.) So... there's a lot of things that have to happen before your tags show up. Friends tagged must 1) have Facebook accounts 2) join Polar Rose, 3) consent to your tagging them. So uh, tagging your kids? Not going to work unless you're comfortable with your 5-year old having a Facebook account. Apparently Polar Rose is also flirted with Glowfoto.com, Jalbum.net, 23hq.com and Gallery but of course (duh) the big target would be Facebook with their ginormous userbase but there's some issue with a FB policy prohibiting storing their data for more than 24 hours.

Finally, a company called Face.com announced a FB app called Photo Finder that purportedly lets you run facial recognition across your FB galleries. It's still in alpha though, and frankly, I think facial recognition for Facebook is largely superfluous because 1) people are much more selective about what they upload to FB, so they are more likely to tag the photos right after uploading, 2) FB has made the tagging interface so easy, that it's almost hard not to tag, 3) FB has made tagging collaborative by letting your friends tag themselves and others.

Bottom line: Facebook photos usually get tagged by you and your friends -- you don't need a computer to do that work for you. What you need is for a computer to go through the piles of photos in your hard drive and tag all the old photos of your family/friends from the last 5 years so that you can post the embarrassing ones to Facebook.

Speaking of which, yet another reason Facebook sucks -- it ignores existing IPTC Captions or Keywords when uploading.

[Sun Nov 2 01:53:21 2008] p

Free Safari!
No, not the Mac web browser. Safari, O'Reilly's on-line archive of every book they've ever published (I think), is available to any resident of California, if you get a Sunnyvale Library Card.

Oh man. Nerd heaven.

(An annual subscription to the Safari Library with Unlimited Access would be $472.89!!)

(Now reading Perl Hacks, if you must know.)

Oh phooey. Not everything is available. Notably, Programming Perl and Perl Cookbook are absent. This must be some kind of lame "public library" version of Safari. Weak! Oooh, I see, it's something called "Safari Select", which is a subset of the full Safari collection. Again, weak. :-{

[Wed Oct 22 01:16:53 2008] p

Every day is exactly the same

Ok, so now that Dan has updated his layout to not include images (or like, line breaks), a reference to this blog entry doesn't make as much sense, but anyways, the point is, California sure can be boring sometimes:

*[It's a Semisonic song, ya know? It's not like my life is fascinating. i just had to put something up there.]
>:P
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Yeah, sorry, this is it. i know, i know, all that hype for this?
Well, i still have the geek page, but i won't be updating it. Sorry.
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Oh yeah, your feedback, as always, is welcome.