Earth: Mostly Harmless

CueCat & LibraryThing - update

(following on from this)

Considering the price, it rocks socks, especially if you de-claw it to make it spit out proper barcodes (you just need a sharp knife, soldering iron or a very small screwdriver to knock out a pin).

There’s a bit of a knack to getting a reliable scan, but it works remarkably well.

I’ve been meaning to post this pic for a while - finally, I have a (tenuously) cat-related post.

CueCatLibraryThing & CueCats - Catalog your books

David mentioned his interesting LibraryThing setup to be just after Christmas and it had me intrigued. He said he had a barcode scanner hooked up. He’s using a CueCat, which as the MAKE magazine story below suggests, is now quite a popular choice among LT users due to a new import system.

For those unaware of it, the CueCat was a late-90s fad launched by a dotcom company hoping to persuade publishers to embed barcodes in magazines and newspapers in place of URLs. A CueCat user would then scan the barcode to visit a referenced website. Unfortunately for the company, the business model of giving the scanners away for free came to little, and a host of negative publicity was incited by the fact the CueCat sent individually-identifiable information along with each scan. But still, they’re eBay fodder and are by far the cheapest type of USB barcode reader to obtain. And easily hacked.

Until now I’ve always used Delicious Library in combination with my iSight to capture barcodes - which worked okay on my iMac with an external iSight and works pretty well on my MacBook.

The main benefit of using a CueCat is speed. The iSight is pretty good at recognising most barcodes, but you still have to do a fair amount of repositioning before it recognises some barcodes. It’s also difficult to get the contrast in the image high enough to tackle books with glossy covers and the like. Using LibraryThing you can scan barcodes straight in using the ‘laser’ inside the CueCat.

LibraryThing have bulk ordered CueCats, and are selling them for $15 with US shipping or $20 with international shipping. £10 seems reasonable for such a thing given that I might find other uses for it, so I’m going to give it a go.

CueCatLibraryThing & CueCats - Catalog your books:

John writes -

“LibraryThing lets you catalog your books, but the coolest part, to me, is that they have a feature that lets you repurpose the CueCat, a late-ninties barcode scanner which was hitherto useless dot com schwag. Now you can use it to scan your books into their system! Very cool.” - Link.

Related:

PalmOne Zire + CueCat = Barcode scanner? - Link.
C.R.T. Cat - Link.
Dialing from a picture frame - Link.
LEGO barcode reader - Link.

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(Via MAKE Magazine).

Publishers Thank Google for Book Sales

The latest chapter in Google’s continuing world-domination book-scanning operations, this is a defence of the programme - a rare publisher’s voice speaking out in favour of it, at a time when the nebulous and highly-successful company is being sued by authors’ associations for copyright infringement over the service. And as for the scheme’s greatest benefit for less well known books - further confirmation of the Long Tail thesis?

I, for one, welcome our digitising, organising, aggregating, comparison shopping, advertising, Mountain View overlords.

Publishers Thank Google for Book Sales:

eldavojohn writes “A few book publishers are actually thanking Google for an apparent rise in sales due to Google’s scan plan. Google is busy defending itself against authors and publishers that have brought lawsuits for ignoring copyrights. The director of the Oxford University Press said, ‘Google Book Search has helped us turn searchers into consumers.’ It seems to work in favor of the smaller publishers: ‘Walter de Gruyter/Mouton-De Gruyter, a German publisher, said its encyclopedia of fairy tales has been viewed 471 times since appearing in the program, with 44 percent of them clicking on the ‘buy this book’ Google link.’ Do you think that Google’s ’sneak peak’ search access increases sales or violates copyrights on intellectual property?”

(Via Slashdot).

Unix for the Beginning Mage

TUAW reports on a new UNIX for newbies eBook, available as a free PDF download. But it’s different from anything else I’ve seen - this one uses the euphemism of magic and spells for commands - something I thought might get quite tiresome after the first few pages but seems to really carry through due to the author’s skills of explanation and analogy. It contains one of the best explanations of relative and absolute paths I’ve ever seen:

Paths

Let’s discuss paths a bit more. Paths are just that: paths. In a forest, we walk along paths so we don’t get lost. In the Tower, we follow paths to different rooms. Filesystem paths are no different; they will lead you to different directories and files.

There are two types of paths to know about: absolute and relative. An absolute path is from the root to your destination. It’s like being at the front door of your house and walking to the kitchen. You are starting from the very beginning of your house. The same is true with a filesystem path — it starts from root ( / ). So any path you see that starts with a slash is an absolute path:

/mudroom/hallway/kitchen

A relative path is from your current location to your destination. For example, if you were in your hallway and wanted to go to your bedroom closet, that is a relative path. You’re not starting at your front door since you’re already in your house.

bedroom/closet

Relative paths do not start with a slash — which is a very easy way to tell the difference between absolute and relative paths!
Now, say you’re in your bedroom, but you wanted to leave and go to the kitchen.

../hallway/kitchen

Notice the dot dot ( .. ). That is a special thing in Unix that says “I am leaving my current room”.
Now that you understand paths better, let’s start walking around the Tower of Nix.

Here’s TUAW’s take on it.

Unix for the Beginning Mage:

Filed under: Terminal Tips, Humor, UNIX / BSD

If you want to learn the OS X command line, but find the available books intimidating, bristle at the thought you should read anything for “dummies,” or just worry that you may by eaten by a grue while plumbing the depths of /dev/random, Unix for the Beginning Mage may be just what you’re looking for. The book, available as a free PDF download, takes a humorous approach to learning some basic features of the unix shell and environment. The premise is that you are a mage in some D&D inspired world learning to cast “spells” from the command line. The better your spellcasting becomes, the farther you advance through the “Tower of Nix.” Best of all, the example commands are all executed in the OS X Terminal.app, although it’s basic enough the examples should work without too much effort on other unices as well. So if you’ve been avoiding the command line, you’re officially out of excuses; drop by and read this very, very gentle introduction to Unix the Unix Mages have put together.

Just keep a Scroll of Kill -9 ready and watch out for that grue.

[thanks Scott!]

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(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).)