This week saw GroupSmarts release an interesting update to their MemoryMiner social photo organiser application. MemoryMiner is a social photo organiser for Mac OS X, allowing users to tag imported photos by who appears in them (the ability to draw a marquee around a subject in a photo is somewhat similar to Facebook’s photo tagging service). Memory Miner also incorporates time-based selection, tagging and geotagging.

If you’d like to see a visual demo, check out MacBreak’s video interview with GroupSmarts [QuickTime movie, 93.6MB]. Warning: Merlin Mann present. I don’t mind him but I know that many do…

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(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.

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).

Clever stuff.

Mining the Hive Mind, Wikipedia-style: “One of many Wikipedia-based applications, Omnipelagos mines the hive mind to map the connections between two things.”

(Via MetaFilter.)

Partisan Jab: DICK CHENEY’S ALIVE! – Music For America A nice little parody of Dick Cheney’s impersonal style and dubious corporate connections. Shame I only heard about it today! The movie is a 10.7MB QuickTime file, take a look.