i finally got crackin on a followup project that has languished for months. for the old magazines project i scanned and converted to text the editorial content and stories, but i skipped the music. each issue after 1900 had something like 20 pages of music, and i chose not to scan that stuff on account of the time consumption as well as the merits of the content. much of it just sucks, or is of limited general interest. but if i could devise a quick and dirty way to do it, then why not… so now i’m running a mini google books or archive.org setup, with the kitchen dedicated almost completely to a makeshift setup including a dslr atop a tripod, pointed at a white sheet of cardboard on which i place the pages. the tripod is locked in place, but to avoid possibly bumping the camera i use a remote control to snap the pictures. the captures are not always perfect, but i do not expect perfection. a reasonable representation of the pages will be suitable for conversion to PDF and browsing as a photo gallery.

i thought it might go quicker to throw them on the scanner, but that appears not to be the case. that really surprises me.

the text content had to be scanned at 600 dpi, on a flatbed, because the quality of the OCR was poor when the captures came from a camera. the text is just too small in those magazines for the dslr to catch it reliably. if i had a way to solidly flatten the pages, with a protracter type of gadget, then it might have worked, but i don’t have time for that, and scanning is good exercise. i will pay the local craft’s shop a visit tomorrow, though, to see if they have some kind of easel/canvas setup that might work. i think they might have something like that, but i doubt i’d have room for it, or energy to set it up.

my goal in this final phase of the scanning part of the project is to get these fucking magazines out of my apartment and into storage. i didn’t mind the clutter at first but it’s gotten to be too much, hundreds of tese fucking things. i am going to scan a few years ahead of public domain, so i can have content to share for the next few years. after that i’ll probably go get the magazines from storage if i am so inspired. and i will, of course, scan new copies as they come in. the ease of things now is that i only buy copies one or two at a time, and the bulk of the scanning is done. until now i was shoring up my collection by buying dozens upon dozens of copies all at once, sorting them and bagging them like a wannabe archivist, accumulating the content for gradual conversion to text and web content. now i am looking more at the web page portion of things, and less at the scanning. and i am also attempting to develop the site into a quality web product, not just a dump of public domain content. that comes gradually, i guess. i mean, the search engine is looking good, and other elements are of note… i had this crazy idea recently that i would try to get back into corporate, on a contract or parttime basis, as a product development type. either that or a web analyst. those are the only type of roles i’d want in the vastness of corporata. otherwise i’m no use, and of no value. i can’t do codejockey stuff any more, except for my own purposes. though i have to say, i was pretty impressed with myself last week, when i zipped through a programming task in a few minutes. i thought that particular goal would take all day for me to reach. once you go regex i guess you can’t go back. hah. anyway, my point being that this project is getting me to think like a product developer again.

blahblahblah.

a friend sent me something pretty cool last night. a recording of his commute through Portland, using a portable recorder. i love that shit. sounds of bus doors slamming, babies screaming, the dingdong sounds of public transportation. he inspired me to do more of it myself, though i’ve done my share of surreptitious recordings of strangers the past several months.

that sounded weird.

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i am thinking of moving, back to manhattan. i don’t really like manhattan, but i like brooklyn far less, and i don’t know the bronx well enough to have an opinion. manhattan seems like a place where i could mind my own business. that is why i moved to new york in the first place, for to take comfort in the anonymity of strangers.

i read something once about people who had been abducted by aliens. according to whitley streiber these folks all shared a common trait: they wanted to live in large cities. they felt safer from the aliens there. maybe that is what i need. safety from the aliens.

i never intended ot live in Astoria this long. so many years. i can’t ocmplain about anything to do with the area, except that lately there are too many bicyclists and it is no longer safe to cross the street without considerable preparation. i happen to live on a street which possesses one of the rare examples of a bike lane tha tpeople actually use. but they only use it at certain times of the day, on perfect weather days. i really hate the bike lanes around here. i would hate to grow old in this town. these fucking bike lanes are biased toward the young and the invincible.

if i had to take manhattan again i would probably go for murray hill, or midtown west. areas like that are not likely to be overrun by bike lanes. are they?

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