Wyszdom

I’ve been having a lot of fun with Google Goggles, an image search app for Android phones.

In my previous post, I included a few videos to quickly show off what it can do, but tonight I found a very practical use for the application. I’ve traveled to Europe a couple of times and taken plenty of pictures of famous landmarks, but I never got around to actually captioning them. I may have been able to recall where everything was immediately after the trip, but years later I don’t even know which country some of the photos (which aren’t geotagged) were taken in. Fortunately, one of the things Google Goggles is pretty good at recognizing is landmarks. Knowing this, I’ve been able to figure out where many of my pictures were taken simply by taking pictures of my pictures!

I recorded a video to show how this works. The landmark recognition bit begins about 4.5 minutes into the video.

Google Goggles

This is straight out of a science fiction movie. Search the Android Market for Google Goggles and install it. It’s free. Once you have it installed, you can search just by taking a picture. Don’t know what that famous landmark is? Take a picture of it. Want to look up online deals on a product? Take a picture of it. Learn more about its current capabilities on the official site.

New version of Google Maps for mobile

This is also available in the Android Market. If you’ve already downloaded a previous version of Google Maps from the Market, you should see “Update available” if you click on the Downloads tab in the Market app. One new feature is called “What’s nearby?” which, as you’d expect, tells you what businesses are near a specific location. This version also introduces Google Maps for mobile Labs, which allows you to test new features. I’m currently trying out “Compass arrow.” You can learn more about this new version on the Google Lat Long Blog. And don’t forget that on Android you get free turn-by-turn navigation!

For those of you who want to see a quick demo of Goggles, I just took a few pictures of things from my desk. There’s no audio in the videos since I took them at work.

Update: I’ve written a new post about a use of Google Goggles.

In August, I shipped off a box of negatives from our family photo collection to ScanCafe, a photo scanning service. I was a little nervous shipping irreplaceable memories to people I didn’t know, but a couple of my colleagues had successfully used the service and I really wanted to get the photos digitized.

For those of you unfamiliar with the service, here’s the basic process:

1. Place an order with ScanCafe.
2. Ship box of photos to ScanCafe.
3. ScanCafe scans your photos and ships the originals and files back to you.

There are plenty of reviews of the service already (mostly positive), and here I’ll talk about my experience.

Ordering and Packing

Estimating the number of negatives is tough. We had many envelopes stuffed with negatives from many rolls, so I couldn’t just multiply a number by 24 or other standard number of exposures. Fortunately, you don’t really need an exact count at all; you’re just supposed to enter in some number so that ScanCafe can provide an estimated cost, which you pay 50% of before shipping. I estimated about 3,000 photos and ScanCafe ended up scanning 4,400.

Because I was nervous about putting everything in one box which was eventually going to be shipped internationally, I randomly divided our photos in half and only sent one half in with the first order. With everything packed, I printed off the shipping label. The label had a weight mentioned on it (I guess determined by the number of photos), so I hoped that the package wasn’t too heavy, and fortunately UPS didn’t complain.

Scanning/Timeline

ScanCafe does a pretty good job of giving updates on the status of the order, which I expect and appreciate. You don’t get to see the scans come in live or anything, but you know when your package has arrived in at the facility, when scanning has started, etc.

Based on the status updates collected in my email archives, here’s the timeline of events for scanning 4,400 photos:

August 10th – ScanCafe received package in Burlingame, CA.
August 24th – Originals received at imaging center. Images expected to be available for review by September 19th.
August 31st – Scanning commences.
September 22nd – Scans available for review.
September 27th – Order completed.
October 13th – Received tracking number.
October 20th – Originals and DVDs delivered.

Image Review and Checkout

Until this point, everything with ScanCafe was as good as I expected it to be based on the reviews, except for it taking a little longer than I thought it would. To be fair, though, they did scan thousands of photos, and I’d much rather wait longer than see a compromise in quality.

One of the nice things about ScanCafe is that you can actually choose to not buy up to half of your scans (you’ll still get the originals back), so they let you preview them all online before placing your order. I wonder if anyone takes advantage of this feature, because the site is excruciatingly slow when loading images. Even loading thumbnails and album lists felt like being on dialup. I’m guessing that the servers are located in India, so it would be nice if they moved to U.S. hosting. The “express checkout” option looked very tempting from the start.

The lack of speed wasn’t what bothered me the most. The site is confusing at this point. There is an option to organize the photos, but I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to do. I’m also not sure about the free restoration that’s offered. I didn’t see it as an option, and wondered if it would be something that I chose after selecting which photos I wanted. I had no idea if this process was applied to my photos, as some images definitely looked unrestored in the gallery. Maybe it happens automatically after you choose your photos?

Even though it’s not required to organize your photos before you send them in, they will name the folders based on an labels or containers, which is helpful. I had a few labeled APS cartridges, but everything else was loose, so most of my folder names are things like “Bag 10.” They do label the physical bags/boxes if you didn’t. One funny thing I noticed is that whoever wrote my folder names wasn’t very familiar with the English language. For example, Christmas was written as Charstmas, Chartmas, Charestmas, and Chnstmer.

Delivery

After checkout, things didn’t move as quickly as I thought they would. It took two weeks before I received a tracking number for the return package. I guess they batch up the shipments between India and the U.S., which could explain the delay. The photos arrived in good condition along with the DVDs in full-size DVD cases. The 4,400 photos came in the form of over 50 GB of JPEGs spread across 13 DVDs. I’m in the process of uploading them all to Picasa Web Albums, which fortunately just lowered its storage costs! It would be great if there was a way to directly transfer them from ScanCafe to PWA, though. That’s my feature request.

Unresolved confusion

In the final receipt, there was a line for the optional “pro resolution” service that I selected during the initial order. However, I’m not sure how to interpret this:

Actual  Deleted  Selected
4419    0        2962

I was charged for the “Selected” amount. Does this mean that some of my scans weren’t delivered at pro resolution? I sent an email to ScanCafe asking about this on November 27th, which was forwarded to the imaging center on December 1st, when I was promised an answer within 48 hours. I have not heard back.

Update on December 6th: ScanCafe wrote back and said that this is a glitch in the displayed image count. All of my photos were scanned a pro resolution. Phew.

Update on December 7th: They emailed me again to inform me that the bug has been fixed.

Overall impression

I obviously had some issues with the website, but overall I’m happy with the convenience of the service and the quality of the scans. A second order is on its way.

One more thing

It snowed today in Pennsylvania. I wasn’t there to experience it, but thanks to ScanCafe, I can still show you what I look like in a snowsuit:

The problem

I see a lot of confusion about the use of microphones at live events. A common scenario:

A speaker begins talking, but his or her voice is clearly not playing through the speakers. The speaker immediately looks down at the mic and starts flicking switches. He or she looks at the tech, who gives a thumbs-up that the mic should be on. Still no audio, because by now the speaker has turned off the mic completely. The tech, who knows that everyone thinks it’s his fault, ends up having to join the speaker on stage to fix the equipment.

What has usually happened is that for whatever reason, the tech was unable to enable the speaker’s mic in time to catch their first words. The mic’s audio was probably muted before because the speaker was talking offstage or rubbing the microphone against their clothing. Neither the tech nor the speaker are at fault. Not every speaker should be expected to be proficient in audio equipment, and the tech can only operate the equipment so quickly.

The solution

If I were designing a microphone (let’s imagine we’re dealing with a wireless handheld), there are two main features I would implement. They both address the fact that many reasonable people, when handed a microphone, do not account for the presence of a mixing board. In their minds, if the microphone has power, the sound comes through the speakers. If there is no sound coming through the speakers, the microphone is off. Here’s what I’d do:

1: Concealed switches
If users can’t find a switch, they can’t turn off the mic. Hide any switches in the battery (or separate) compartment. This eliminates the need for the tech to put unsightly (and easily bypassed) tape over the switch.

2: Power light
If the microphone is powered on, it should have a steady green light. Someone who has read the manual can understand that the light comes on for a second when powered on, then turns off, and only comes on again if the battery is low. A regular user thinks that light on = microphone on.

How you can help

If you’re ever handed a microphone, here are a few tips to help out the audio tech:

• If you’re about to speak for the first time in the session, bring the mic into position to signal that you’re ready, and then pause for a second or two to give the tech a chance to turn on the mic.
• Hold the microphone close to, but not directly in front of, your mouth. If you hold it too far away, or even hold it in your lap (I have seen people do this), the tech will have no choice but to turn up your gain risk feedback. If you hold it “in the line of fire,” you’ll pop your P’s.
• Keep the microphone at a consistent distance from your mouth. This avoids unexpected changes in volume. One trick you can use is to lock the elbow of your microphone-holding arm to your side. With your upper-arm firmly planted, you’re less likely to move that arm around as you speak.
• Project, but don’t yell. If you speak just loud enough that you can hear your voice come back to you through the speakers, but so that if you spoke just a little quieter you wouldn’t, you’re good.
• If the microphone doesn’t work, don’t tap it or blow into it. None of the cool people do this. Test it by speaking or snapping, and look to the tech for instructions before flicking any switches.
• Turn off your cellphone completely or put it in airplane mode. Not all systems will be sufficiently shielded.

And finally, if you’re ever at one of those music award ceremonies, and as you stand at the podium and the microphone is not at the level of your chin, you do not need to lean down and speak into the mic. Technicians who work on live national broadcasts are smart enough to prepare for tall people.

Recently, Google announced a couple of new features related to captions and subtitles on YouTube: automatic captions and automatic timing. A couple of days ago, they released a video of the announcement which was made in Washington, D.C. Of course, since I’m a geek, I watched the entire hour-long video, even though as Googler who manages a YouTube channel with over 100 captioned videos, I totally already knew about anything they would announce.

Or so I thought.

At 20:32 in the video, Ken mentions a search feature that I’ll admit I was unaware of. Since captions have timing data, it’s possible to not only find the video that contains a specific caption, but to also point the user directly to the part of the video they were looking for, which is especially useful for longer videos. Here’s how to do it:

Google Video

1. Search for the text of the quote you’re looking for.
2. Enable the “Closed captioned” filter in the left sidebar. (You can also start out your search with this filter on the Advanced Video Search page.)
3. Make sure you’re in “List view,” and then click on “Start playing at search term” in the result you want to view.

YouTube

1. Search for the text of the quote you’re looking for.
2. Use the “Closed captions” option from the “Type” drop-down.
3. Click on “Start playing at search term” in the result you want to view.

And once you’ve found that specific point in the video that you want to share with everyone, you can link directly to it by adding this to the end of the URL, using 20 minutes and 32 seconds as an example: #t=20m32s

Note that a similar feature exists in the Google Voice app for Android, which allows you to jump to a specific part of a voicemail just by tapping on a word in the transcript.

Finally, I wanted to highlight one more announcement that was made recently about captions and subtitles. Google Translator Toolkit, a free service that assists with translation tasks, now supports editing subtitles in the .srt or .sub format. Just upload your subtitle or caption file with the correct extension (don’t save it as .txt), and you’re on your way to faster translations and a wider audience.

Disclaimer

Do you have an Android phone? Then stop what you’re doing, install the new Google Maps application which features Navigation (available in the Android Market), and head to your car.

You can read more about it on the official blog post, but here are my favorite attributes of the product, which runs just fine on my G1.

• Since it’s on your phone, it’s always with you.
• Map data is always up-to-date, and updates are free.
• You can search using your voice.

That last bit is pretty important, and I hope you try it out. As you may have already seen, our voice search quality  is getting amazingly good. In the car especially, you often don’t want to spend a lot of time typing. Before I started using Google Maps Navigation, I would often first look up a business using GOOG-411, have it text me the address, and then enter that into my Garmin GPS. Now, I can skip a few steps and say the destination directly to my phone, with no typing necessary. And remember that you don’t just have to search for a business name. If you’re entering a street address, just go ahead and say it. I’ve found that if you speak [number] + [street] + [city] + [state], it can work pretty well in many cases.

I haven’t dumped my standalone GPS yet since I still travel to places like Colorado where I drive in areas without a data connection, but for my day-to-day navigation, Google Maps Navigation has proven to be extremely useful.

Keep your eyes on the road, and have fun!

We are temporarily unable to process your purchase, so we’d like to offer you access to Gogo free of charge for the duration of your flight. Lucky You. Enjoy!

This made my day, and is an excellent lesson in customer service. Something was wrong with Gogo’s service, and they had the choice between frustrating me or making me happy. One of the easiest ways to annoy me is to mess with my Internet access, so it’s quite possible that if I wasn’t able to get online I’d refuse to pay for Gogo in the future. (Remember I’m the guy who refuses to sign up for Netflix because they buy popup ads.) But since Gogo decided to throw me an hour of free Wi-Fi instead (short flight), I’m now using my time to blog about how great they are.

If Randall Munroe released an XKCD image without title attribute, the ensuing confusion would result in the equivalent of a single nerd mousing over an image and checking source code for an entire week.

I wanted to try out the new screen recording feature in Snow Leopard, so I recorded a video about how to sync Google Contacts and Google Calendar with Address Book and iCal. It’s an easy way to get up and running on a new Mac.

This post bored me as I wrote it, but I’m publishing anyway in case it is useful to someone.

As I mentioned in my video archiving post, finding a good online backup solution was pretty difficult when dealing with files of the size required for my project. Mozy didn’t like my flaky connection and had poor support (they did give me a full refund), and Carbonite capped my bandwidth. I even emailed a popular hosting company asking them to consider offering a private storage solution that wasn’t against their terms of service. (The CEO politely sent a personal response, but told me not to count on it anytime soon.) I rejected CrashPlan at the time because I thought it was only a piece of software that let you back up to a friend’s computer, but after reading a recent review of it I’ve discovered that they’ll host your backups as well, inside a former bank vault. I’ll have to look into it in about a year when my current solution expires, which is LiveDrive.

LiveDrive is a bit more expensive than the other backup solutions I looked into, but it comes with some extra features. First off, it’s not just a backup solution. It’s hosted storage, which means they’re cool with you using it as extra space, and not just for backups. They even have a web interface where you can access your files or even choose to share them with others.

The Mac solution

They don’t have a Mac version yet, but they do have an FTP option, which I’ve decided is even better than a piece of backup software. Of course “better” doesn’t mean “flawless.” First off, it is FTP, and though I won’t pretend to be an expert in network security, I’ve not heard great things about FTP and security. They say SFTP is on the way, so for now I’m willing to accept the risk that someone may view or delete my backups. I’m just uploading video files and just backups, so it’s not like a hacker could mess with anything super confidential or essential. The other issue is that their FTP support is still in beta, which means that it is sometimes unavailable. A little bit of downtime is usually not a big deal, but when dealing with such long transfers, it can be frustrating if it’s being flaky at the time I’m uploading something, which right now is all the time.

Why did I decide FTP is “better?” First of all, it means that LiveDrive will always be compatible with my system. I can upgrade to Snow Leopard the day it comes out and not have to worry about it breaking my backup software. The other advantage of FTP is that I can decide to move my files around (to different folders or even different drives), without worrying about a piece of backup software freaking out and thinking that everything is different and re-uploading files that I’ve already backed up.

FTP Client

Update: I emailed LiveDrive about my FTP issues and they recommended FileZilla, which is free. It has an ugly definitely-not-born-on-a-Mac UI, but so far it seems to be working out well with the following preferences:

Connection -> Reconnection Settings -> Maximum number of retries: 99
Transfers -> File exists action -> Uploads: Resume

It looks like my connection gets reset by the server every hour, but the transfer is completed eventually. I’ll send my log to LiveDrive and see what they have to say.

The FTP client I’m currently using for these large uploads is an old friend to anyone who has done web development on a Mac. That’s right, I’m using Fetch. I first used it when I was in middle school, allowing me to access my school’s mirror web server from home. An FTP account was one of the benefits of being in [nerd alert!] the Internet Club. I usually use Cyberduck, which is free, for managing my website, but Fetch is the only client I’ve tried which has been able to successfully upload my large video files. I don’t know if it’s just a coincidence (the uploads have failed with Fetch too), but at this point I’m willing to accept superstitious features if they get the job done. The good news is that if you’re using a Mac and you’re looking for a nice FTP client, there are plenty available. I tried a bunch and liked all of them. In fact, I think Fetch is the only one I would have passed on if it wasn’t the only application to complete the transfer. Its UI just feels a little clunky compared to the other solutions. The custom cursor was cute back in the ’90s, but I’ve moved on.

Service experience

The service has been tolerable. Things got off to a pretty good start before I even signed up. I sent them an email saying something like “I want to upload files that are over 20GB each, I want to upload a bunch of them, and I don’t want my bandwidth to be capped. Is this something you can offer?” A few days later, I received a non-canned reply addressing all of my concerns. And they seem to be telling the truth. As far as I can tell, my bandwidth is not being capped on their end; I’m getting about what I get on other services with my same Comcast connection. Each two-hour video takes about 30 hours to upload when it works.

I have a pretty stable Internet connection now (my old modem was one of the reasons things didn’t work out well with the other services, but I was so disappointed in Mozy’s customer service that I’m not going back), but many of my uploads to LiveDrive do fail. Based on what I’ve read from others, and from my own stress testing (yanking the Ethernet cord out of my router) of the FTP clients, I think I can assume this is due to LiveDrive’s FTP service having problems. I hope this situation will improve in the near future.

Why this project is still worth the trouble

Oldest video I found: Christmas 1986. It looks like my parents recorded it over a tape they had been using to record TV shows. After the home video was over, I was treated to commercials for both the Magnavox VideoWriter and the Sega Master System.