Geek: The Digitzation Project
This weekend of scanning
has gotten through a large amount of loose paper and other media scanned in...about 3 grocery bags full, which has been a rather full time job, keeping both the scanners humming in parrallel, and feeders full, while working on other things as they chew slowly, and since they don't have hands can't feed themselves very much. Learned a great deal more about the process, and how it varies from paper type to paper type, and how errors throw giant monkey wrenches in the process (forcing resstarts and occasionally reinstalls (!)). It feels really good to be clean!!!!, these 3 boxes had some of the smalleset most annoying clutter (e.g. movie and concert tickets) and some are really old, e.g. 1980 which is a long time to just sit in a box collecting ...largely parts of other pages decaying. Here's some things that were on the chopping block. This is just in time for a) the housewarming b) the scanner I was using was sold on ebay as I want to invest in the duplex for the rest as it's taking too much time for the double stided stuff feeding it twice. The tickets mostly require a flatbed as they are too small, though the boxes containing them aren't big, there is a fractal like expansion of time as the material to be scanned gets a) smaller, b)higher res, c) color. I had estimated a day....it took closer to 4. But this batch is through and since I'm getting a duplex scanner procrastination may pay off.
I've known forawhile I'm visually dominant, but it's become clearly to me how much visual keys unlock my long term associative memory, that literally seem to be locked in the storage chest of my head. I normaly suck at stories and remembering what I did, but looking at photos a rich storyline unfolds, feel like I should carry flipcards or powerpoint of my life with me. It also makes me wonder what degree that having photos of family is a reminder of them, to keep them presentin ones thoughts.
1954
- a grade school report from my mother (!) in a feathery manilla envelope which has a texture close to chaomois from the time it's spent rubbing against other paper files and blue paper. It actually makes me emotional, because at one time this was touched by my mother, and was in her world, parts of which I can only read through the scripty scrawl from the teacher, and these are aspects I never got to know in real life. She like so many mothers before her, including her own, are largely now is forgotten by everyone except by the child that's left, and often myself, and a generation from now noone will likely care, being as they should focusing on their life, as I am most the time. It's evidence like this that reminds me she's gone, and getting rid of the piece of paper, letting it drop from my hand into the recycle bin to parts unknown, is a alot like having to let go of her hand the last time, cold and stiff as it was, from passing quietly in her sleep at home. It's a poor approximation of the life that was, but yet still a physical remnant that is tangible, graspible, and that texture isn't yet scannable or displayable. Yet the digital version is like heaven in someways, potentially eternal, backupable so if LA perishes in a giant earthquake it can live on, brighter clearer and accessible anywhere.
The 2nd grade report card leaves mysteries. It was signed by my grandmother who I never met and grandfather who I only got to touch a bit of. My mom was missing from school in 2 quarters of the 35/45 days (!). I know she had a rough life, it's amazing how stable she was and what a wonderful mother, both her parents were alcoholics, and she was taken away (actually the family was split up) and spent the rest of her life with her aunt (who I grew up calling grandma)
My eyes actually sting from the change in tear composition.
-1983 a picture of my mother from a trip to germany, standing on a cathedral staircase brightly smiling. I have less issues with getting rid of the photos, as after scanning and cleaning up, they usually look better than the 'real thing'. and at 48bit color and 1200 dpi, I'm pretty sure that there is significantly more information in the scan than the native resolution of the photograph. Size is expensive uncompressed, e.g. A small 2x3 high school prom picture took 70 Megabytes., but storage space in a few years will make this a non-issue if it can even beconsidered an issue now.
1992
- senior ball photograph, me being rather lanky. I was with a friend Emily as I didn't have a date. She has said in the past that she was tempted to rape me that evening, but for all the things I was ahead of my age, being sexually aggressive wasn't one of them :)
2001
- stuff from a trip to ireland. Brouchures of trips I took, city guide.
2003
- several CD's on leadership and some music that my stepmom had in her office when my father and I visited to clear it out. Some of the CD's are really good and I can see why she wanted to become a public leadership motivational speaker. She would have been good at it. I actually think it's something I'd like as well.
-- one is a PHD who studies leadership, he's definately not a great public speaker, but has great content when he's not stumbling over it, his first person, get the audience to pretend as the leaders in a giving example are pretty powerful, he's also got a great understanind of leadership in various times (e.g. civil war, corporate).
2005
- an audio copy of my stepmothers funeral. Including the talk my father, brother and I gave. The talk I gave was pretty good content wise by the stress made me rather weak vocally until about halfway in. I couldn't listen to all of it. It's just conflicts with my choice to look back happily.
Future:
While the smallest crap is gone (I assumed it would take a day, it's closer to 3!) , I still have about (20ft^3) spread across several binders, boxes and a filecabinet to take care of...guess i'll have to buy potentially more than one harddrive, plus backinging up locally and remotely is getting more important. Most of this pile is monochrome/grayscale duplex 8.5x11 so hopefully it should go smoothly being fairly standard and closer to what the scanenrs were designed for, as they chug at higher res color. The flatbed and fax-like scanner are like a fork and spoon, they each have times they are useful. The rollers of the fax-scanner are good at handling crumpled paper, but can't bend stiff paper, and tend to curl photographs (in addition to having mediocre color and a hard time with shiney paper) so I have to use both on some things. The Xerox is a good workhorse, and looking at it's properties page has gotten 1.5 million scans so far in it's life (doesn't look like it), and the rubber parts are still pretty grippy! A super nice feature of the Xerox scanner is it autocrops images (even does business cards and reciepts, the only thing it doesn't do well is glossy magazines, ans is limited to legal sized), and the Finereader autorotates which make for a good combo, if they only had a decent prescan to optimize contrast ratios and color saturation (there is software out there to do this but it's expensive) it would be really awesome instead of just pretty good.
While trying several software out (most crap), http://www.abbyy.com/ is the software I've been using it's recognition has been really good for the quality I need (some documents are hard to read), and the formatting is excellent (as well as parsing tables) and mostly happy with despite it's workflow not being quite what I need. Version 8 supports digitizing from digital cameras (4MP and above preferred), and also business cards from Mobile Camera Devices. Nifty. Also Tagged PDF output (for use on mobile devices, oddly enough I doubt I'll be using a 'mobile device' in 3 years). At $180 for the upgrade, it's too expensive for the feature increases, especially when I'd rather have a duplex scanner, which is $530, I've decidined to get after succesully selling my existing scanner on ebay for the same price I bought it (minus shipping and ebay fees of course). The biggest issue I've found is occasionally the scanner will stop on a page with some feeder error and this will crash whatever Twain bridge forcing a restart, which is annoying as it happens often.
Eventually I'll get into my books that I a) I don't find super visually compelling or shareable requiring a physical medium b) I want to carry on my PDA to actually read (about 70% of my book shelf hasn't been read). For fun I tried taking off the binder using a scroll saw (Rotozip) and while it works, it creates a pretty big mess, and is kinda hard to cut straight. The paperbacks will go first, if I can't find ebooks online first as that is probably 10ft^3 of space, and also decaying the fastest, being on cheap rapidly yellowing pulp. Curious seeing what's happening in the commercial areana in this area ran across, http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/05/19/BU52555.DTL says that books are costing $1 - $4 to digitize, mostly by shipping over to india etc.. Car sized robots are doing this non-destructively for libraries like Stanford University, which had the nice thought of "giving kids in Africa access to our libraries" which if $100 crank laptops become available might be possible, which is exciting. But for me I still have to do it by hand. As much as I would love to delegate, the classification still requires my input.
Kinda like email, keeping this inbox empty requires vigilance. In the past I usually stacked things into a folder, which would eventually overflow and then I would take several hours to take care of it. I discovered that Firereader supports an always on, scan document on insert into feeder mode. Which means coming home I can drop a card/reciept in and it can go directly into the computer to be saved as searchable PDF, xls or whatever.
has gotten through a large amount of loose paper and other media scanned in...about 3 grocery bags full, which has been a rather full time job, keeping both the scanners humming in parrallel, and feeders full, while working on other things as they chew slowly, and since they don't have hands can't feed themselves very much. Learned a great deal more about the process, and how it varies from paper type to paper type, and how errors throw giant monkey wrenches in the process (forcing resstarts and occasionally reinstalls (!)). It feels really good to be clean!!!!, these 3 boxes had some of the smalleset most annoying clutter (e.g. movie and concert tickets) and some are really old, e.g. 1980 which is a long time to just sit in a box collecting ...largely parts of other pages decaying. Here's some things that were on the chopping block. This is just in time for a) the housewarming b) the scanner I was using was sold on ebay as I want to invest in the duplex for the rest as it's taking too much time for the double stided stuff feeding it twice. The tickets mostly require a flatbed as they are too small, though the boxes containing them aren't big, there is a fractal like expansion of time as the material to be scanned gets a) smaller, b)higher res, c) color. I had estimated a day....it took closer to 4. But this batch is through and since I'm getting a duplex scanner procrastination may pay off.
I've known forawhile I'm visually dominant, but it's become clearly to me how much visual keys unlock my long term associative memory, that literally seem to be locked in the storage chest of my head. I normaly suck at stories and remembering what I did, but looking at photos a rich storyline unfolds, feel like I should carry flipcards or powerpoint of my life with me. It also makes me wonder what degree that having photos of family is a reminder of them, to keep them presentin ones thoughts.
1954
- a grade school report from my mother (!) in a feathery manilla envelope which has a texture close to chaomois from the time it's spent rubbing against other paper files and blue paper. It actually makes me emotional, because at one time this was touched by my mother, and was in her world, parts of which I can only read through the scripty scrawl from the teacher, and these are aspects I never got to know in real life. She like so many mothers before her, including her own, are largely now is forgotten by everyone except by the child that's left, and often myself, and a generation from now noone will likely care, being as they should focusing on their life, as I am most the time. It's evidence like this that reminds me she's gone, and getting rid of the piece of paper, letting it drop from my hand into the recycle bin to parts unknown, is a alot like having to let go of her hand the last time, cold and stiff as it was, from passing quietly in her sleep at home. It's a poor approximation of the life that was, but yet still a physical remnant that is tangible, graspible, and that texture isn't yet scannable or displayable. Yet the digital version is like heaven in someways, potentially eternal, backupable so if LA perishes in a giant earthquake it can live on, brighter clearer and accessible anywhere.
The 2nd grade report card leaves mysteries. It was signed by my grandmother who I never met and grandfather who I only got to touch a bit of. My mom was missing from school in 2 quarters of the 35/45 days (!). I know she had a rough life, it's amazing how stable she was and what a wonderful mother, both her parents were alcoholics, and she was taken away (actually the family was split up) and spent the rest of her life with her aunt (who I grew up calling grandma)
My eyes actually sting from the change in tear composition.
-1983 a picture of my mother from a trip to germany, standing on a cathedral staircase brightly smiling. I have less issues with getting rid of the photos, as after scanning and cleaning up, they usually look better than the 'real thing'. and at 48bit color and 1200 dpi, I'm pretty sure that there is significantly more information in the scan than the native resolution of the photograph. Size is expensive uncompressed, e.g. A small 2x3 high school prom picture took 70 Megabytes., but storage space in a few years will make this a non-issue if it can even beconsidered an issue now.
1992
- senior ball photograph, me being rather lanky. I was with a friend Emily as I didn't have a date. She has said in the past that she was tempted to rape me that evening, but for all the things I was ahead of my age, being sexually aggressive wasn't one of them :)
2001
- stuff from a trip to ireland. Brouchures of trips I took, city guide.
2003
- several CD's on leadership and some music that my stepmom had in her office when my father and I visited to clear it out. Some of the CD's are really good and I can see why she wanted to become a public leadership motivational speaker. She would have been good at it. I actually think it's something I'd like as well.
-- one is a PHD who studies leadership, he's definately not a great public speaker, but has great content when he's not stumbling over it, his first person, get the audience to pretend as the leaders in a giving example are pretty powerful, he's also got a great understanind of leadership in various times (e.g. civil war, corporate).
2005
- an audio copy of my stepmothers funeral. Including the talk my father, brother and I gave. The talk I gave was pretty good content wise by the stress made me rather weak vocally until about halfway in. I couldn't listen to all of it. It's just conflicts with my choice to look back happily.
Future:
While the smallest crap is gone (I assumed it would take a day, it's closer to 3!) , I still have about (20ft^3) spread across several binders, boxes and a filecabinet to take care of...guess i'll have to buy potentially more than one harddrive, plus backinging up locally and remotely is getting more important. Most of this pile is monochrome/grayscale duplex 8.5x11 so hopefully it should go smoothly being fairly standard and closer to what the scanenrs were designed for, as they chug at higher res color. The flatbed and fax-like scanner are like a fork and spoon, they each have times they are useful. The rollers of the fax-scanner are good at handling crumpled paper, but can't bend stiff paper, and tend to curl photographs (in addition to having mediocre color and a hard time with shiney paper) so I have to use both on some things. The Xerox is a good workhorse, and looking at it's properties page has gotten 1.5 million scans so far in it's life (doesn't look like it), and the rubber parts are still pretty grippy! A super nice feature of the Xerox scanner is it autocrops images (even does business cards and reciepts, the only thing it doesn't do well is glossy magazines, ans is limited to legal sized), and the Finereader autorotates which make for a good combo, if they only had a decent prescan to optimize contrast ratios and color saturation (there is software out there to do this but it's expensive) it would be really awesome instead of just pretty good.
While trying several software out (most crap), http://www.abbyy.com/ is the software I've been using it's recognition has been really good for the quality I need (some documents are hard to read), and the formatting is excellent (as well as parsing tables) and mostly happy with despite it's workflow not being quite what I need. Version 8 supports digitizing from digital cameras (4MP and above preferred), and also business cards from Mobile Camera Devices. Nifty. Also Tagged PDF output (for use on mobile devices, oddly enough I doubt I'll be using a 'mobile device' in 3 years). At $180 for the upgrade, it's too expensive for the feature increases, especially when I'd rather have a duplex scanner, which is $530, I've decidined to get after succesully selling my existing scanner on ebay for the same price I bought it (minus shipping and ebay fees of course). The biggest issue I've found is occasionally the scanner will stop on a page with some feeder error and this will crash whatever Twain bridge forcing a restart, which is annoying as it happens often.
Eventually I'll get into my books that I a) I don't find super visually compelling or shareable requiring a physical medium b) I want to carry on my PDA to actually read (about 70% of my book shelf hasn't been read). For fun I tried taking off the binder using a scroll saw (Rotozip) and while it works, it creates a pretty big mess, and is kinda hard to cut straight. The paperbacks will go first, if I can't find ebooks online first as that is probably 10ft^3 of space, and also decaying the fastest, being on cheap rapidly yellowing pulp. Curious seeing what's happening in the commercial areana in this area ran across, http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/05/19/BU52555.DTL says that books are costing $1 - $4 to digitize, mostly by shipping over to india etc.. Car sized robots are doing this non-destructively for libraries like Stanford University, which had the nice thought of "giving kids in Africa access to our libraries" which if $100 crank laptops become available might be possible, which is exciting. But for me I still have to do it by hand. As much as I would love to delegate, the classification still requires my input.
Kinda like email, keeping this inbox empty requires vigilance. In the past I usually stacked things into a folder, which would eventually overflow and then I would take several hours to take care of it. I discovered that Firereader supports an always on, scan document on insert into feeder mode. Which means coming home I can drop a card/reciept in and it can go directly into the computer to be saved as searchable PDF, xls or whatever.