Aku Aku

handwritten moblogging

I gave Mie a present today, The Nokia Digital Pen which is a bluetooth enabled pen that will allow her to handwrite her blog entries rather than typing them out on her phone's keypad (well as soon as I make the necessary changes to the blog posting code I have running for her website). Here's an example:

I don't know what that "dino" stuff is about, I guess she thinks I'm old. You can see Mie's blogpost which shows how she wrote out the message here.

There's some problems with this. It works great for people who go to Mie's blog and can see the images, but if you're subscribed to her XML feed then an image of handwritten text isn't going to do you a lot of good. And of course her prose won't be picked up by google. I've told her to just consider this a convenience to avoid typing the initial short messages on the phone keypad, and she should still plan on adding a lengthier commentary when she gets to a workstation with a keyboard.

I'm also going to look into handwriting recognition software that could maybe analyze the gifs generated by the pen and do at least a rough translation at posting time. I realize that an acceptable quality could be difficult to find though. But that's life at the cutting edge of moblogging, ha.

Maybe another alternative is to allow people to translate the text for her, as they do with the audio blogging at livejournal where other livejournalists can make a translation of a new phoned-in audio post. Tangentially, if you want to hear an interesting audio blog post, try this one where the blogger got mugged while making the posting, and the muggers took the cellphone and it continued recording...

Um, but back to Mie, who hopefully will never get mugged while scribbling a blog posting. Anyone know any good handwriting recognitcion software that will run automated on a linux server?

Update 21/Dec: I hacked up a system to allow people to transcribe her posts. Works like this: when the blogpost.pl script receives the email with the Jot*.gif note attachment, it inserts some special tags into the HTML and the text "No transcription yet, would you like to transcribe?" which links do a new cgi I wrote and stuck in the moveable type cgi directory. This cgi displays any handwritten note gifs in the entry and provides a form where anyone can enter a transcription and their name. When they submit their transcription it is inserted into the blog entry text. There is also place to type in an optional password on the form, if it is entered correctly then the transcription is locked (can't be updated anymore). Mie can give this password out to people she trusts. I strip all HTML out of the user-input fields just to guard against hi-jinx, and limit the size of the input to something reasonable. Seems like a decent system for now, but we'll see how it goes.

Designed By a Tree

I love this concept of creating a font which is carved into a tree and then updated yearly by capturing how the tree has modified it by growing.

 

 

 

Food Delivery 2021

Ran across an interesting project which at initial glance is about food delivery called Free Food. As I explain below, that's free as in speech not beer.

The creator of it, Noah Levenson, has a pretty good intro video:

Given the project name, at first I thought it was about getting food that would be thrown out distributed to hungry folks, but watching the video, it became clear that this is more about being able to order food directly from verified local restaurants on a decentralized trust network and avoiding the (almost criminally) inefficient middle man services like DoorDash, GrubHub, UberEats, etc. The README for the project explains the goals well and has a quick run down on why the middle man food "delivery" apps/services are so bad.

Using a decentralized network (think BitTorrent more than BitCoin) it allows for restaurants owners to verify their ownership of a particular local restaurant and publish their menus. This protects against the type of unauthorized listings and other fakery that the middle man services engage in, so you know you're dealing with the real restaurant. Hungry people can find the menus of nearby restaurants and place orders. Reference implementations of the diner and restaurant clients are shown, although I didn't see the source for them available. Presumably the restaurant uses its existing delivery staff for the delivery, or you can pick up.

This is an interesting project, particularly because it's potential goes well beyond just restaurant delivery. Really any resource that can benefit from decentralized (no valueless middle man required) localized (relevant to you, where you are now) discovery can benefit from this type of system. In theory a delivery drivers could advertise themselves as resources and the system could do the matchmaking. Since the network is decentralized this would mean they wouldn't have to share their fee with a middle man network provider.

I'd definitely give this a shot if it started up in my area. In the meantime there is a better sort of food delivery service that I've been using lately and have been quite happy with. It is called Club Feast (use my referral code dav1 if you try it out!). While it still is a middle man service, they have a twist on it that should benefit both the restaurants and the delivery drivers. It requires you to order your meals hours in advance (it used to be the previous day but in the past month they have been able to move it up to same day). This allows the restaurant and delivery network time to optimize the food preparation and the routes. It is a subscription service, which means you sign up for a certain number of meals a week and pre-pay for them as credits. It lets unused credits stack up and you can pause, so it is fair to the subscriber. The meal credits themselves are $7 each, so the meals are inexpensive although limited to what the restaurant decides to make available for $7. There are tons of options though so that has not been a problem for me in San Francisco. It seems like a great win-win-win compromise for the restaurants, drivers and customers, although I would love for a journalist to investigate and report on the actual outcomes.

Would a robust Free Food network be better than Club Feast? Perhaps? CF optimizes a somewhat different problem, but perhaps that could be layered into FF as well? Is there additional value CF could bring that benefits from its centralization? Not really sure. Some things I am sure about are that both of these are better than the dominant centralized apps, and that Free Food really needs to change its name, and the paltry amount of tests in `libfood` is scary 😂.

 

An Ode to Roblox as a Gathering Place

I haven't spent a lot of time in Roblox, even though both of my kids have spent significant amounts of their time and my money there, but this essay about how it compares to those places where teenagers hang out and create their own space away from the rest of the world really resonates. It makes me want to give it a try again.

Some choice excerpts:

On his first experience in Roblox:

In one of the very first games we played together (a work-in-progress safari game, the link to which I have since lost), V became a zebra, and I was a lioness. We ran around a broad plain populated by other animals, trees in the distance, low clouds overhead, and the buzzing of insects on a 2-minute loop. The chat was full of messages from prey to prey, predator to predator. V was almost immediately killed by a cheetah who then got in the chat to say, “Overyone come to pr,” “theres meat.” Summoned, I did so, and as I ate the still-living digital body of my friend in the company of a stranger in the shape of a wild dog, I thought, “Oh. This is special.”

On the game creation tools:

But perhaps the most interesting thing about Roblox Studio is the Toolbox. Other game engines have assets stores, but none of them feel like this: a rollicking, copyright-fucked, messy, virus-filled, unsortable pile of labor and of love.

On the long tail of forgotten worlds (games) waiting to be stumbled upon:

But the things I am making in Roblox are not what are unique or compelling about Roblox, and the same could be said for most of the big games that populate the platform’s front page. Instead, what is so special here are the millions of bizarre little worlds, all networked together and waiting (mostly empty, sometimes for over a decade) to be dropped into and explored with friends.

On the "brutal" monetization situation:

As a developer, you can monetize your own games in a variety of ways, from the above-board (tip jars! cosmetics!) to the scammy. Developers earn 70% of Robux spent in their games, which is a pretty standard cut for an app store/developer split. However, getting USD back out of Robux is a different story. The payout exchange rate drops to $0.0035 USD per 1 Robux, meaning the takeaway in real world currency is roughly 24.5% of any in-game commerce—a brutally extractive exchange rate.

Fighting Date Rape With Nail Polish

Now that Bill Cosby got an early release from prison, my friend Paul brought my attention to the company Undercover Colors that developed a clear nail polish that allows you to check a drink for drugs by dipping a fingernail into the drink. The nail polish changes colors if drugs are encountered.

Brilliant! And love that it was founded by NC State students (didn't to school there, but did participate in their rugby club as a townie).

 

It looks like the product has evolved slightly to a more typical strip test kit though. I supposed the manufacturing costs proved too high? Hopefully they are still working on the more subtle version.

Post Pandemic Predictions

I started compiling this list before George Floyd was murdered, and its triteness bothers me now so I'm just going to post it and move on.

In no particular order:

• Masks largely stay culturally accepted in flu and allergy seasons from now on in the USA, but will always carry a political connotation so some groups will never wear them and mock those that do, but like punk rockers have always mocked people in suits.
• 15 years from now, a common trope will be determining how old some young adult is by what basic K-12 subject they seemed to have completely missed. "How old is Alexandra? Well she can never remember what a gerund is, she must be 27-28."
• It'll be seen as the inflection point for polyamory going mainstream when the released masses just can't get enough of each other 😂.
• 2021: long hair on dudes is back in fashion.
• The artist live stream phenomenon is too beloved to simply disappear, but outdoor live music venues are going to see a boom. There might even be a combination of the two.

Comments

[mie]

You're not old!! Dino is in reference to that big furry dino costume/outfit that I got for you. You know, the one with the big tail that waggles back and forth and makes me want to yank it...I like it when you wear that : ) So there you have it, Dino.

[Laura]

ooh, you have me intriqued. I want to hear the audio blog from the blogger that got mugged!! But I don't think the url is right, it just goes back to your homepage... by the way, i love that pen you got for mie!

[Dav]

Oops, fixed the link. Thanks Laura!

[Samy Rengasamy]

Thanks for your blogpost.pl.
I did get to use it. Inspite of default text formatting set as 'convert-line-breaks', the
posted mail text does not retain the line breaks.
How can I fix this.

I am new to Blogging and I did not know how to contact you.

[phi]

dude, that rocks. i'm thoroughly impressed.

[Dav]

Thanks 1.1814 (phi) :)

[Martin]

Nice use of the Anoto pen, if you are looking in to recognition try to look at Decuma.com which is a company based just hundreds of meters from Anoto main office, works real well.

[Ele]

I was thinking dino = dynamo = dynomite!

[Shaun]

You are the coolest guy on the internet. Seriously.