Keys Corner

Bookpedia – you can also, of course display the catalog as a list!
Until now I have for many years used Readerware to catalog our (1100+) books and (800 or so) CDs, and Delicious Library to catalog our much smaller collection of DVDs.

The rational behind that was that Readerware is cross-platform (Windows, Palm, Linux and Mac) and we could upload our catalogs to our Palm devices, and it can scan the barcodes from the books and CDs using a cheap barcode reader which they supply with the software and then look up the barcode in various internet databases (including Amazon) to create records which include cover art, reviews, authors, titles and other information about each one.

I chose to use Delicious Library because although it was only available for the Mac, it accessed a larger number of databases to find the DVDs, and I quickly discovered that depending on the combination of languages and sub-titles (which differ in the different countries), often DVDs available in Germany or Spain were not found in the Amazon stores in the UK or USA because they had different UPCs (universal product codes). So a wide range of databases increases the chance of finding a DVD via it’s barcode. Delicious Library can also scan the bar codes, but it uses the Mac’s iSight to do it, rather than needing a barcode reader.

This weekend, however, I have exported all three databases as excel files and imported them into Bruji’s excellent products: DVDpedia, Bookpedia and CDpedia. These are cheaper to license than the products that I have been using and recommending up until now, and offer more extensive import / export functions, which is good if you want to make lists of your collections available to others. The programs only run on Macs, but that is fine for me, and we can read Excel files on our phones, so the lack of support for Palm or other PDAs is no problem. They all allow barcodes to be scanned using an iSight. The main advantage, however, is the larger number of databases on the web which the software can read to retrieve the item descriptions – not only a large number of Amazon sites, but also more exotic sites, such as Casa del libro to retrieve the increasing number of Spanish books we are buying and which we need to catalog. If you have a Mac: recommended.

Good news (the music is financed by advertising on their website):

As of today, you can play full-length tracks and entire albums for free on the Last.fm website.

Something we’ve wanted for years—for people who visit Last.fm to be able to play any track for free—is now possible. With the support of the folks behind EMI, Sony BMG, Universal and Warner—and the artists they work with—plus thousands of independent artists and labels, we’ve made the biggest legal collection of music available to play online for free, the way we believe it should be.

Full-length tracks are now available in the US, UK, and Germany, and we’re hard at work broadening our coverage into other countries…

In the past, I’ve tried a number of times to get a reasonable conversion of a bitmap graphic to a vector graphic. I have never been satisfied with the results, and have ended up creating the vector graphic from scratch. Now there is a free online tool, developed by Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, which really does the trick: Vector Magic.

Just look at the samples on their website. if you’ve ever tried to use Corel Trace or Adobe Live Trace, you’ll appreciate how much better the results from Vector Magic are.

(via CreativeTechs)

...Researchers at the California Institute of Technology have shown that a person’s enjoyment of wine can be heightened if they are simply told that it is an expensive one…

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Logitech took over Slim Devices some time ago. They are introducing a new product at the end of January, which looks like it will give Sonos a run for their money in the area of wireless streamed music at home.

The Squeezebox Duet offers much of the functionality of the Sonos gear for a fraction of the price – $399 for the controller and one receiver (Extra receivers at $150), compared to $999 for the Sonos starter kit (which contains a controller and two receivers, one with a built-in amplifier. Extra receivers from $349). It supports Mac, Windows and Linux platforms and a large number of audio formats including AIFF, WAV, PCM, MP3, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, MP2, MusePack and WMA. We’re waiting to see the pricing in Europe.

Vaibhav Sharma highlights a useful feature of recent-model Nokia phones on The Symbian Blog. The phones come with an application called “Switch” which is intended to allow purchasers of a new phone to transfer (switch) the content of their existing phone to the new one. In fact it can do a lot more than that.

It also allows you to keep two Nokia phones synchronized without using a PC to drive the sync process. Syncing can be via infra-red, WLAN or Bluetooth. Depending on the phone model not all methods may be available. Pretty well any data on the phones can be synced – not just contacts or calendars, but also images, call lists, MMS/SMS messages, and music. I had noticed the Switch application on our new E51 phones, but hadn’t realized how powerful it is.

I don’t think we’ll use it much as we sync our contacts and calendars, some excel sheets, as well as encrypted password files with our Macs too, and need to keep everything everywhere in sync, but if you are only concerned about keeping several phones in sync, it would be much simpler to use Switch.

The Economist thinks that although last year was terrible for the music industry, things will soon be even worse:

IN 2006 EMI, the world’s fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free. “That was the moment we realised the game was completely up,” says a person who was there…

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Jeremy Clarkson, the BBC Top Gear presenter, is regretting mocking the fuss made about the British government losing CDs with millions of sets of personal data on them. He published an article in the Sunday Times which included his bank account details, claiming that concerns about identity theft were exaggerated. Someone promptly transferred £500 from his account to British Diabetic Association. Because of the Data Protection Act, Clarkson has no idea who was responsible for the transfer.

Clarkson’s revised opinion about the lost CDs:

“Contrary to what I said at the time, we must go after the idiots who lost the discs and stick cocktail sticks in their eyes until they beg for mercy.”

How some software manages to get on to the market is a puzzle to me.

For the last 3-4 days I have been struggling to download the Nokia Maps which, if I could download them, would allow me to use Nokia’s navigation software with our new mobile phones without having to buy a data contract for the phone to allow it to download the maps in real time. The main focus of the struggle may not be Nokia’s fault. I had to update my Windows 2000 installation (which runs under Parallels on my Mac) to Windows XP, because the Nokia software requires Microsoft’s .Net 3.0 framework to run. The problem is, that after the Nokia software has downloaded about 300 MB it reports a write error to the memory card on the phone and crashes. Then I have to re-download the whole chunk of maps again, because there is no way to restart from where it had got to. This might well be a problem in Parallels’ USB port handling. Why Nokia are incapable of writing software which runs on a variety of platforms, is something only they know; and given that they can’t, it would be nice if they would at least allow you to restart it from the point where it crashes.

However, their apparent attitude to quality assurance in another area makes me very concerned as to whether one can rely on their navigation software at all, if one is able to install it eventually. Maths does not seem to be their strong point – take a look at the screen shot below:

Spain is listed as being 164.8 MB in size. The sum of the Spanish regions shown on the screen shot (which is an incomplete subset of the country) is 213.7 MB. If I set my navigation goal as Madrid, what are my chances of arriving in Barcelona by mistake?

Update:
See the comment to this entry – in fairness to Nokia, it seems the difference is caused by having each map “chunk” overlap with the neighbours, to allow for better ease of use. (It would still be nice if Nokia could support more than only the current Windows platforms (XP, Vista), and allow restarts of failed downloads, however).

Downside 1:

When the cheapest source in Germany for two CDs by Gianmaria Testa (an Italian singer) ships the CDs from New Zealand (with a packing slip printed with an address in New Jersey, USA).

Downside 2:
The demand for cheap meat results in keeping chickens in overcrowded, insanitary conditions. Free-range birds cost about three times the price of battery-raised chickens, but the conditions they are kept in are considerably better. I remember as a child, we didn’t eat as much meat as families do these days – it was too expensive. But we probably were healthier as a result.

As a society, we need to look more critically at the logistics of producing and shipping consumer goods – it shouldn’t be cheaper to literally ship goods half way round the globe, rather than delivering from local suppliers. And the cheapest food is not necessarily the best, either for the consumer’s health or for the factory-farmed animals.