I’ll be hosting a workshop on building DIY Book Scanners at BrainSilo on Sunday.

Paper Upgrade, my host, is a Portland non-profit dedicated to helping students digitize their study materials. They use DIY Book Scanners to do their work.

BrainSilo is Portland’s hackerspace. Can’t wait to meet ‘em… my goal is to get one of these scanners into every hackerspace worldwide.

Perhaps even more important, I finally get to meet Ahren and Peter of CNCRouterParts.com.

Ahren and Peter designed the router that enabled me to design this new scanner.

They’re donating precious time on their machines to cut the first four or five copies of the new hackerspace book scanner, one of which will be donated to the Disabled Resource Center to scan books for students. As far as DIY CNC goes, CNCRouterparts is the best thing out there. Can’t wait to go visit the mothership. See you soon!

Delacroix, on researchers at Cambridge, 1850:

“Since the light of the star which was daguerreotyped
took twenty years to traverse the space separating it
from the earth, the ray which was fixed on the plate
had consequently left the celestial sphere a long time
before Daguerre had discovered the process by
means of which we have just gained control of his light.”

Edit: Ha, I see James posted this ten years ago; I first read it in 2004 in Sontag’s “On Photography”.

What a year

this has been. The last of my twenties.

From the first

few

hacks

onward,

I knew it would be something special. I felt it in my bones. I was ready for it.

But I couldn’t know how well it would go.

Or what it would look like, when I tried it.

I wouldn’t have believed you, had you told me, there’d be midnight rides from Ocotal to Managua;

daylight runs in the Hilux, Nicaraguan electronics shops.

No one told me I’d be soldering on mountaintops,

or leaving such great people behind.

or how it would leave me. What it would teach me.

Or that I’d go down to the swamp right after

with a system we built

together

to record

the last

gasp

of a dream.

This was the year of shadows, dust and sun.

of darkness, pine, and starlight.

of music,

wire,

and welding

of argon, steel, and

sparks.

of acetone

ozone

and salt

This was a year of press

and pressure.

This was the year the flood came

and went

and took my

Droid with it.

This year, I left you. And so

This year, I missed you. Like I missed you every other year.

Thank gods I got to spend time with you, my personal heroes and your libraries

heroines

partners

comrades

friends

and inspirations.

Thanks for making things with me.

For soldering with me.

For keeping track.

For getting it.

For taking me underground – not pictured.

For taking things further

and further

Than I ever could, alone.

This year, I built

machines

to build

machines.

I moved across California twice.

I slept in my truck ten or twenty times.

I saw, for myself, disorder

canaries in coal mines,

sick systems. I did stupid things

Smart people were in on it, much of it was for the better.

I did crazy things –
like field stripping laser TVs in NYC

like making buildings

into cameras

like making new things

from old things

Always hacking something from nothing

Sometimes roasting pigs in the ground

I built crazy things –
laser folding mirrors

illumination systems

optical tricks and traps

massive arrays

faked communication protocols

hacked my own truck.

I felt

the value

of comraderie;

I learned the wisdom in getting out,

in ending early. Cutting losses.

and I left.

And in the strange days that followed, I found a home.

Gonna park my whirlwind there for a while.

One of the best things about my community is that it is just chock full of awesome people.

One of the bad things about being the “DIY BOOK SCANNER guy” is that people always ask “DOES IT TURN PAGES?”.

Well, my friends, it turns pages.

jck57/Monson’s Servo Auto Scanner.

DIY Page Turner from Berlin Hackerspace C-Base:

dtic was among the page-turning pioneers of our forum:
Revision 1:

Revision 2:

jck57/Monson is actually building a full-auto scanner, check out his other impressive engineering:

Cabinet Magazine, Issue 42 has images from one of my projects! They did a fantastic article on Soviet food and used images from here.

Thanks, Cabinet. Have always loved your work. Also a huge thanks to Dima Solyanoy for introducing me to the book, and for borrowing me his so that I might scan it. Miss ya, Dima!

Recently, Sara rekindled my interest in wear and tear, particularly how it manifests in consumer electronics. I have many great examples of wear, but none more profound than my Dell Precision M70.

Few people know that Dell made high quality laptops with an all-metal chassis – the Precision line. This machine had an ultra-high resolution display, Quadro workstation graphics, and near-mil-spec construction. It has survived dozens of things that killed lesser machines. It has outlived every other computer I own. In the process, I’ve worn hand-and-arm-marks into the palmrests, scratches into the screen, polished the capacitive surface from the touchpad, and caused the paint to peel from the bottom. In a way, I think the super-crufty filesystem and ever-crowded desktop are also wear and tear. I feel at home on this machine.

This machine changed my life. I bought it in 2005 with money I earned working on Slator’s projects. On this machine, I came into my own as a 3D modeler[QT]. I authored You Are Not Dead, the album. I processed thousands of photographs and countless hours of video. This machine has been to Fargo, Moscow, Toronto, New York, Vancouver, Los Angeles, Kennedy Space Center, and Kandalaksha. These days, it runs my radio rig, decoding all kinds of interesting things. I think we still have a few solid years of work to do together.

More travel, less distance.

More action, less acting.

More gifts, fewer demands.

Quitting awful, early.

Moving on.

Away from ulterior motives.

Away from the lovesick, the neurotic, the conditional

From attachments, abusers, and contracts.

Toward risk

Of my own choosing.

Toward reward

Of my own making.

Sorry for the radio silence, I’ve been swamped. Al Jigen Billings has an awesome post talking about my latest work:

Or, “The utter uselessness of car alarms”.

Sequence of events:
1. Key fob for my car alarm dies, I am about 1 mile from home, in Richmond, CA, in the Iron Triangle.
2. I walk to RadioShack (also 1-2 miles away) and buy battery replacement.
3. Replacement battery does not work. Can’t open door without setting off alarm.
4. I walk home and make 12V battery pack. Fob works, door opens, once. Stops working. Can’t start truck.
5. Determine key fob is borked. No spare, because my keys were stolen a week ago. RICHMOND!!!
6. Open door and set off car alarm.
7. Get angry. Convert anger to cool ruthlessness. Open hood and disconnect battery with Leatherman. Cut wires to obnoxious speaker.
8. Disassemble dash with Leatherman.
9. Cut wire ties supporting car alarm. Remove wires from car alarm.
10. Reconnect battery.
11. Pull off white and red/white striped wires (labeled “starter”&”starter motor”).
12. Connect wires with can opener.
13. Depress clutch (clutch has starter switch)
14. Truck starts.
15. Buy small “adapter” that connects two wires. Connect wires.
16. VICTORY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thanks, little can opener:

These can openers have quite a history of being used in interesting ways. My Dad gave me one when I was just a little kid – explained its usage and let me put it on my keychain (which mostly contained useless old keys). Over the next 20 years or so I found it useful all over the place. I’ve used it to remove screws, open cans, cut tape, start fires, and now, to hotwire my truck. Thanks, Dad! Too bad the one you gave me was stolen with all my other keys AND my spare fob. But lucky that I’d purchased a dozen more for gifts.

A few lessons here.
1. Car alarms are useless. Now that I’ve done this, I could disable most aftermarket car alarms and start many cars in a matter of minutes.
2. Having only one key fob is the same as having no key fob.
3. Having a multitool in your pocket at all times is not paranoia, it is good policy.
4. The P38 can opener is a profoundly useful thing.

EDIT: While driving to buy some bolt cutters, I realized that the connection I made with the can opener is the correct place to put a kill switch in for the starter. I might also put in a fuel pump kill switch somewhere.

Goodbye, Los Angeles.

It’s often tough to get in touch with me. For the coming weeks and months, it is going to be tougher, starting now. I’m going to be traveling constantly.

Please, if something is an emergency, or needs my input now, say so in the subject line. Otherwise, have patience, glacial, unerring patience.

It may sound dire but it is a good thing. Today, I’m off on a project to photograph the last Shuttle launch. See you in the future.

Hmm, interesting things going on here at KSC! Brush fire:

First Kathrine:

Then Daniel:

Article here:

http://newsstream.blogs.cnn.com/2011/04/14/saving-a-stranger-from-slavery/

I talked about what happened with Kseniya and Svetlana.

Thanks to Cory Charles for the opportunity.

Bethany is my niece. She’s been around for 643 days. About time that somebody got her some boltcutters.

You know, like everyone else got.

Almost a year ago, I helped some friends of mine out of a very bad situation. Today, Abigail Pesta’s article tells the story better than it has ever been told.

Two pictures I haven’t shared yet:

The car from which I conducted operations, parked in a campsite in Wyoming.

Someday soon I’ll write up my own thoughts on the story, but for now, all I can say is that I’m very pleased with what Abby wrote and grateful for all the help.

Steve Devore’s Book Scan Wizard is the most automated, complete DIY Book Scanning software ever written. If you’re doing any kind of bulk or batch scanning, you owe it to yourself to check it out.

And now, through a new partnership with the Internet Archive, Book Scan Wizard and DIYBookScanner offer an upload button – every DIY Book Scanner can share his or her work with the world, or get an OCR’d copy of their scans for free. I can’t over-write the significance of this upload button in Book Scan Wizard – it closes the loop. We now have a complete path from your bookshelf to your Kindle, free OCR for all scanners, conversion to DAISY for the blind, and a world-class web book interface, courtesy the Archive.

Unfortunately I’m traveling at the moment, so I’m really not giving the new upload button the post it deserves. And it’s important to say here that this service could go away at any moment – we are really just dipping our toes into the water here. So get Book Scan Wizard while it’s hot and fresh, and get scanning — and uploading.

I was recently in San Francisco for Personal Archiving 2011, which was held at the Internet Archive. I had the pleasure of seeing the scanning facility there, meeting with the amazing staff — including the designer of the Scribe scanning system, Tom — and setting up something of a collaboration with the Archive, which I’ll talk more about soon. This was the talk I gave there:

I also had the pleasure of visiting Ace Monster Toys. There I met Al and Myles and Robbie (and a host of other awesome people) who have built up a really great hackerspace in almost no time.

If you ever get a chance to visit this space, do. They’re doing great work. Myles had some innovative solutions for the New Standard, as well as a host of questions about camera control, glass, etc that most everyone encounters when building. It was a pleasure to be able to answer questions like that in person, instead of across the forum interface. He’s talking about virtualizing the software book scanning environment, which would be really cool to see. It was such a pleasure to actually see one of these DIY Book Scanner builds in real life.

Update: Here’s a sweet pic that Judith took while I was speaking, featuring DIYBookScanner member Tristin.

Southern California – infamous for entertainment, fake-faced hedonism, fast moving garbage. That fantastic apparition emerged from the carcass of the military-industrial complex. Near my workplace, a building had its facade ripped off – and inside was a king-hell war factory, a maker of computers and displays for missiles and submarines. Singer Librascope.

This company was, at some point, acquired by Lockheed Martin.

Looks a little sorry these days, sitting next to the place where straight-to-DVD movies are made.

A ramp on the side so you could drive a crane up top:

All that’s left now is paint.

Well, paint and a whole lot of memory – Librascope vets had the good sense to scan all their Librazettes and put pictures online. These things happened in that building.

Interesting.

This video makes me proud on a number of levels (though pride is an insufficient word, here).
1. Both my brothers are excellent storytellers.
2. Mike is an excellent mechanic.
3. My whole family – brothers, dad, mom, sister, nephews, and the dearly departed – share the dream of living a life of our own creation. From cars to quilts to crazy cameras.

How to build a ’48 Ford in One Month from Shane Reetz on Vimeo.

So, uhh, I/my project made it into the print edition of the New York Times today, February 10th. Page C1 – Arts:

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/10/arts/10innovative.html?src=twrhp

I am proud to be called part of the “dark matter of innovation”.

I must correct one crucial fact – more than 250 people have built DIY Book Scanners – and I’m also aware of a whole shadow world of scanner builders who never join the forum and share (they show up on Craigslist and in other forums and websites every other day or so). My estimate on the total number of builds, documented and undocumented, completed and left unfinished, is between 350 and 500. DIYBookScanner.org (the site where the action happens) has been around for ~600 days, so that’s quite a few builds.

Well, hell. Life is good. The book scanner project is going gangbusters. We have not one, but two of the best open source book
scanning applications out there (Scan Tailor and Book Scan Wizard, both GPL) which are being actively developed, improved, and community supported. Scan Tailor, in particular, has the best text-based dewarping ever implemented in free software. We have three community-developed open source ways to bind digital books (Bindery, DJVUBind, and PDFmaker), and we have a ton of hardware innovation going on. On the hardware front, we decided to try to see how little hardware we can use – so we’re co-developing hardware and software to use laser beams to “dewarp” (flatten) the images of book pages. Our first results came within hours of trying things out… and things look great. If this method reaches anything near the potential we’re seeing now, in the near future we could go from a $300 high speed book scanner made from trash to a $30 high speed book scanner made in the
USA – that fits in your handbag.

In the last year my community has helped out in Haiti, Africa, Canada, Indonesia, and all over the States. By “helped out” I mean offering advice, money, hardware, software, ongoing support, and even in-person meetups in Portland, OR (and elsewhere). We have substantial representation all over the world – particularly in Brazil (you should see these guys innovate), Germany (builders of auto page turners!), and Russia (a place where camera-based book scanning has been going on for over 40 years – the original DIY’ers). You can’t search for book scanning without finding us, because we’ve tried or seen almost everything out there, shared our experiences, and improved it as a collective effort. That said, sometimes finding what you want in our forums is a pain in the ass. I’m working on it.

As the founder and steward of this project, I often wonder how long book scanning will seem as important as it does now, in this pivotal moment of books gone bits. While once, I thought these thoughts cynically, I now think the same thoughts — differently. We are creating the future of personal document digitization, making it easy, free, and powerful — as it should be — and using things and skills that people already have. Someday, I hope, it will not be a big deal or seem so important, because it will be 1. freely available to anyone and 2. just a baseline expectation, like the free and simple use of printers and phone-cams is today.

Maybe I’m wrong. It’s hard to avoid such grandiose thoughts when you see a thousand people working together toward a common goal, each in their own way, on their own terms, in their own time, and according to their ever-rising ability. Maybe another technology will come along and disrupt our innovation, making things even easier, cheaper, faster, and more accessible.

I’d be glad to see that happen.

Thanks for your time.
Daniel