Earth: Mostly Harmless

In-train WiFi

Taken a couple of weeks ago on my way down to visit Andrew Gruen. GNER’s in-train WiFi is really very nice. And the page which contains this tracker is free to visit.

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.

Lawsuits? We don’t need no stinkin’ lawsuits!

You gotta love the Pirate Bay guys for pure guts and obnoxiousness.

Pirate Bay trying to buy Sealand, offering citizenship:

Cory Doctorow:

The Pirate Bay is raising money to buy the tiny, bankrupt “island” of Sealand. Sealand is the abandoned drilling platform gun battery near the UK that was occupied, declared soveriegn, and turned into a offshore data-center for sensitive information. Sealand’s owners have put the “country” on the block, and the Pirate Bay, Sweden’s gutsy, notorious BitTorrent tracker, is soliciting donations to buy it. They’re even promising citizenship to donors. If they don’t get enough to buy Sealand, they’re promising to buy another island somewhere.

Link

(Via BoingBoing).

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.

[Read this article] [Comment on this article]

(Via MAKE Magazine).

Arrival

Well, I got MacBook #3 (at last) two days ago. Seems to be running fine.

In celebration of this fine moment I would like to present to you the best/most terrifying photo ever taken (depending on your generation and disposition)