#archiveteam-bs 2012-06-15,Fri

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Time Nickname Message
00:24 🔗 Coderjoe man.. why are there no large (like 20-30 inch) electronic paper (eInk) displays (for things like signage)?
00:26 🔗 Coderjoe for general purpose, at least
00:27 🔗 Coderjoe the eink.com website demo slideshow thing shows a 2.4 meter long display
01:00 🔗 S[h]O[r]T 5mins before i left my apartment today maintainence tells me they are going to replace my water heater since its leaking down to the next floor or being leaked on above
01:00 🔗 S[h]O[r]T i say ok and go to work
01:01 🔗 S[h]O[r]T i come home and rust stains all in my carpet and dirt and shit in my sinks and tub
01:01 🔗 S[h]O[r]T and rust all down the apartment stairs
01:01 🔗 S[h]O[r]T i sent them an angry service request
01:13 🔗 Coderjoe not terribly surprised
01:14 🔗 chronomex landlord doesn't give a shit
01:14 🔗 Coderjoe particularly the crap in the sinks and tub. they had to drain the tank
01:14 🔗 chronomex landlord hires flunkies who don't give a shit about the landlord
01:14 🔗 chronomex you're two degrees of giving a shit removed from actual caring
01:16 🔗 chronomex of COURSE you're going to get walked on
01:27 🔗 S[h]O[r]T this is the scene wont get funded either :\
04:20 🔗 Coderjoe By 1877, only about one hundred and ten inhabitantsremained. Rongorongo was one victim of these circumstances. The colonizers of Easter Island had decided that the strangelanguage was too closely tied to the inhabitants' pagan past, andforbade it as a form of communication. Missionaries forced theinhabitants to destroy the tablets with Rongorongo inscriptions.
04:20 🔗 Coderjoe hmm
04:20 🔗 Coderjoe copyfail
04:20 🔗 Coderjoe (each line wrap wound up missing a space)
04:31 🔗 shaqfu Christian missionaries: the anti-archivists
04:31 🔗 shaqfu Same nonsense happened in Central America
04:35 🔗 Coderjoe but they also sometimes help. they were at the forefront of cartography for a time, because mapping the world was important in getting to new lands to spread their mission.
04:37 🔗 shaqfu True, but a lot of other folk were doing the same thing
04:38 🔗 shaqfu Astronomy - and from it, math - has its roots in mercantile exploration
04:38 🔗 shaqfu And I lied; Mongols are the anti-archivists
04:39 🔗 DFJustin yep
04:40 🔗 DFJustin example: khitan literature http://babelstone.blogspot.ca/2011/10/khitan-miscellanea-1.html
04:41 🔗 shaqfu As a percentage of the world's knowledge, 1258 was likely the single greatest disaster that will ever happen
04:41 🔗 shaqfu (byte-for-byte, Yahoo is still more destructive)
04:51 🔗 Aranje (That's horribly sad)
04:54 🔗 chronomex 21:38:55 < shaqfu> And I lied; Mongols are the anti-archivists
04:54 🔗 chronomex disarchivists
04:56 🔗 Coderjoe also fire
04:56 🔗 shaqfu They used that too
04:57 🔗 Coderjoe fire destroyed so many things
04:58 🔗 Coderjoe (the rongorongo tablets were destroyed by fire, too)
04:58 🔗 shaqfu Alexandria, Baghdad, Los Angeles
05:00 🔗 Coderjoe germans with books, stalin...
05:01 🔗 shaqfu In Stalin's defense, the USSR protected a lot of its cultural materials
05:01 🔗 shaqfu PRC was leagues worse
05:01 🔗 Aranje "In Stalin's defense" Not words I figured I'd see, when I woke up today
05:01 🔗 shaqfu Russia still has many world-class archives/museums; China, they'll just shrug
05:02 🔗 chronomex fire destroyed my grandmother's adoption records
05:03 🔗 chronomex it sounds cliche, but it was in a warehouse full of paper and there was a fire
05:03 🔗 Aranje burn baby burn
05:03 🔗 shaqfu I once heard a horror story about Iron Mountain and fire that made me do a double-take
05:03 🔗 chronomex iron mountain is a shredding company ...
05:03 🔗 Aranje explosion?
05:04 🔗 shaqfu Warehouse fire
05:04 🔗 shaqfu Except, wait, the warehouse had sprinklers!
05:04 🔗 shaqfu ...except the sprinklers weren't actually connected to the water main
05:04 🔗 chronomex hahahaha
05:04 🔗 chronomex wat
05:04 🔗 Aranje If you blow shredded paper through a hose at a high pressure over a flame (blowtorch) it will make a flamethrower and vaporize any paper that comes out >_>
05:05 🔗 Coderjoe https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash3/556802_475858285776963_1079166928_n.jpg
05:05 🔗 chronomex neat
05:05 🔗 shaqfu Dunno if any of you are old enough, but if you took standardized tests pre-1980, there's a good chance the records were lost
05:05 🔗 chronomex is that magazine titled Fails?
05:05 🔗 shaqfu Because the warehouse they were stored in had non-functioning sprinkers; thanks, Iron Mountain
05:05 🔗 Aranje huh. Fire?
05:05 🔗 Aranje Haha, shit.
05:06 🔗 Coderjoe Tails
05:06 🔗 Aranje Iron isn't fire proof, after all >_>
05:06 🔗 shaqfu It's like cloud storage failure, except with paper
05:06 🔗 chronomex Aranje: right, viz.: thermite.
05:06 🔗 Aranje mmm
05:06 🔗 chronomex shaqfu: pretty much!
05:06 🔗 Aranje my favorite substance
05:06 🔗 chronomex perfect for welding train rails
05:06 🔗 Aranje Very suited to the task, yes
05:07 🔗 shaqfu Pity there was no proto-Archive Team running in and out of the building, grabbing burning records
05:08 🔗 shaqfu "ETS 1950-1980 Save, 5MB, available on microfilm"
05:14 🔗 chronomex fuck microfilm
05:15 🔗 chronomex it's better than magtape (in some respects), at least.
05:16 🔗 shaqfu I'm really glad things like the Memex or the World Brain never actually existed
05:16 🔗 chronomex why?
05:16 🔗 Coderjoe https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash3/598567_327573480652820_719589795_n.jpg
05:16 🔗 shaqfu It's bad enough that we have as much microfilm as we have - the last thing we need is *more* of it
05:16 🔗 chronomex what do you have against memex?
05:16 🔗 chronomex at least memex would have it machine-processable
05:16 🔗 shaqfu Maybe I'm mixing it up with something else
05:17 🔗 chronomex I'd much rather have a million aperture cards than a hundred thousand sheets of film
05:17 🔗 shaqfu I'm thinking of the desk that you loaded microfilm into
05:17 🔗 chronomex yes, that's a memex
05:17 🔗 chronomex mechanical/electrical hypertext too
05:17 🔗 chronomex I would expect it to use something closer to aperture cards anyway
05:17 🔗 shaqfu Ah, okay; I forgot the interdocumentary aspect
05:18 🔗 chronomex fiche is okay for archival, super shitty for browsing
05:18 🔗 shaqfu Doing research on it without any index is incredibly unfun
05:18 🔗 shaqfu "I'd like to know about some event that happened in 1945"
05:18 🔗 chronomex fiche is shitty to read even with an index
05:18 🔗 shaqfu Sigh; off to scroll through film for hours
05:19 🔗 chronomex heh
05:19 🔗 chronomex at least you can cruise through rolls fast
05:19 🔗 chronomex fiche is even worse, it's the 4x6 inch rectangle that you have to manually zigzag through
05:19 🔗 shaqfu That's closer to what I was on
05:19 🔗 shaqfu The machine I used only displayed about a quarter of the film at once
05:19 🔗 chronomex suck
05:19 🔗 shaqfu You're telling me
05:20 🔗 chronomex sir, I have on the order of a million aperture cards.
05:20 🔗 shaqfu From where?
05:20 🔗 shaqfu Auction?
05:23 🔗 chronomex museum I volunteer at
05:24 🔗 shaqfu Those were hot shit then - machine-readable images!
05:24 🔗 chronomex I'm digitizing all their flat resources
05:24 🔗 chronomex they're still pretty rad
05:24 🔗 chronomex you don't need to type in the metadata!
05:25 🔗 shaqfu Did they have the machinery to read them?
05:25 🔗 chronomex nope!
05:25 🔗 shaqfu Was that why you were writing OCR engines?
05:25 🔗 chronomex it should be possible to bodge together something with a camera and a light table and some mechanical bits, though
05:26 🔗 chronomex um, kinda, the ocr engine is for printed code listings
05:26 🔗 shaqfu You could probably repurpose it here, for reading the punched holes
05:26 🔗 chronomex exactly
05:26 🔗 shaqfu Since your engine respected spacing
05:27 🔗 chronomex it's a simple enough principle - drape a grid across the page, tweak it until the grid sits on as little ink as possible, read out of the rectangles
05:27 🔗 shaqfu And here you can be sloppy, since it's nice big white spaces vs. nice big black spaces
05:27 🔗 chronomex right
05:28 🔗 chronomex but as it turned out I got really solid results with the text also
05:28 🔗 shaqfu Ah, awesome
05:28 🔗 chronomex which was xerographically reproduced COM
05:28 🔗 chronomex er, Computer Output Microfiche, basically a phototypesetter direct to fiche
05:29 🔗 shaqfu Seems straightforward enough in principle, and saved untold hours of typing
05:30 🔗 chronomex COM or OCR?
05:30 🔗 shaqfu OCR
05:30 🔗 chronomex yeah
05:30 🔗 chronomex that's what OCR is for :P
05:30 🔗 Coderjoe oh, speaking of OCR, I just discovered I have a valid license to ABBYY Finereader sprint
05:30 🔗 shaqfu Except when it doesn't work :P Let's not discuss what it's like to type up thirty thousand handwritten cards...
05:30 🔗 chronomex that's good stuff, bro
05:31 🔗 Coderjoe (came with an epson scanner)
05:31 🔗 chronomex shaqfu: okay, let's not.
05:31 🔗 shaqfu Hm, are there any big improvements in OCR coming up?
05:32 🔗 chronomex captive cloud workers?
05:32 🔗 Coderjoe it would be nice to see some good Free OCR
05:32 🔗 shaqfu I saw a project that I considered MTurk'ing, until I realized it would require $80k
05:32 🔗 chronomex heh
05:32 🔗 chronomex Coderjoe: yes, unfortunately ocr is hard.
05:33 🔗 shaqfu That was at 20 cents per page, double typed, plus error-correction
05:33 🔗 chronomex what was it?
05:33 🔗 shaqfu chronomex: 400 hotel registers
05:33 🔗 chronomex ahh
05:33 🔗 shaqfu It's neat stuff - essentially 30 years of rich people - but it's closed due to rot
05:33 🔗 Coderjoe handwritten?
05:33 🔗 chronomex right
05:34 🔗 shaqfu Coderjoe: 1895-1929
05:35 🔗 Coderjoe ok, yeah. that would need the amazing pattern recognition software that only exists in the skull of homo sapiens
05:35 🔗 shaqfu I don't understand why "this is too fragile to touch more than once" doesn't put something at the top of the digitization list, but w/e
05:35 🔗 chronomex I need to get a loupe
05:36 🔗 shaqfu One of those badass ones you wear?
05:36 🔗 Coderjoe because academic/paid archivists like to talk about the right way to do things
05:36 🔗 chronomex shaqfu: yes, preferably
05:36 🔗 chronomex my other work at the museum involves making a computer happy
05:36 🔗 chronomex I have the source code, just most of it is on fiche
05:37 🔗 shaqfu No reader?
05:37 🔗 chronomex no convenient reader
05:37 🔗 Coderjoe my dentist has a pair of glasses with permanantly-affixed loupes
05:37 🔗 chronomex yeah, those are cool
05:37 🔗 chronomex a loupe and a light table, and we already have the light table in a decent place
05:38 🔗 Coderjoe not the swivel-in kind, but the kind glued to the normal glasses lenses
05:38 🔗 shaqfu I haven't done any fiche work; it's out of the question to project it?
05:38 🔗 chronomex I don't have a decent projector, but that's a good line of inquiry
05:38 🔗 chronomex I've also been considering making a scanning rig, from an X-Y table and a camera with macro lens
05:38 🔗 shaqfu I was about to ask about that - scanning and scraping
05:39 🔗 chronomex that's an ultimate goal
05:39 🔗 chronomex have about 200 sheets of fiche, so not too bad
05:39 🔗 shaqfu Big enough to be a pain, but not big enough to force you to automate
05:40 🔗 chronomex kinda
05:41 🔗 shaqfu Collections like that are the worst - no matter what you do, you always feel like you did it wrong
05:41 🔗 chronomex I don't
05:41 🔗 chronomex nope
05:41 🔗 chronomex ;]
05:42 🔗 shaqfu Hah; I'd second-guess myself
05:42 🔗 chronomex I'm scanning the paper at 300dpi duplex b/w, lossless tiff
05:42 🔗 chronomex it comes out well, I'm seeing halftone in my scans
05:42 🔗 chronomex so I'm not worried there
05:43 🔗 chronomex the sheetfeeder flies, too
07:12 🔗 SmileyG Coderjoe: good free ocr? -> gulttenberg project?
07:30 🔗 Coderjoe project gutenberg and the distributed proofreading project only really work for public domain works
07:41 🔗 SmileyG Ah, this isn't? Ok.
08:14 🔗 BlueMax Man, why is it so hard to extract a 7z file in Lubuntu
09:21 🔗 Coderjoe it is?
09:22 🔗 Coderjoe apt-get install 7zip; 7z x file.7z
09:26 🔗 BlueMax :|
09:31 🔗 SmileyG lol
09:31 🔗 SmileyG still is.
09:31 🔗 * SmileyG had a "uncompress" bash script which checked the compression type and uncompressed the file
09:32 🔗 BlueMax I mean, I installed 7zip from the Lubuntu software centre (I found the solution a few minutes back)
09:32 🔗 BlueMax But it wouldn't open in Archive Manager even after I did
09:32 🔗 BlueMax It was weird
09:32 🔗 BlueMax Then I followed this sudo apt-get command I found on the net which installed a lot of compression stuff and it worked after that
09:33 🔗 Coderjoe i'd say that's "archive manager" at fault
09:33 🔗 SmileyG yey for blindly following stuff online :<
09:33 🔗 SmileyG steps on gentoo
09:33 🔗 SmileyG 1. add 7zip useflag to make.conf
09:33 🔗 SmileyG 2. emerge archive-manager
09:33 🔗 SmileyG 3. PROFIT!
09:33 🔗 SmileyG And thats harder than ubuntu appently.
09:33 🔗 Coderjoe 4. get called names
09:34 🔗 BlueMax SmileyG, it wasn't dangerous, I recognised a fair few of the package names
09:35 🔗 SmileyG BlueMax: Oh I don't think its dangerous
09:35 🔗 SmileyG I just wonder how much of the knowledge is transferable and useful in other circumstances.
09:36 🔗 ersi Argh, I so hate TV broadcasting now
09:36 🔗 ersi fuck that shiiit
09:36 🔗 Coderjoe eardrums blasted out?
09:36 🔗 ersi Hm?
09:37 🔗 Coderjoe i kinda hate that the afternoon "kidvid" slots are laregely being filled with paid programming blocks
09:38 🔗 ersi I'm trying to setup a DVB-T head-end that'll fart out the video over on IP multicast
09:38 🔗 Coderjoe ersi: commercials with audio 2x the volume (or more) of the program they interrupt?
09:38 🔗 ersi yeah, I hate that as well - but not related to this perticular TV Broadcasting hate I got now
09:38 🔗 ersi it's more signal recieving hate
09:39 🔗 Coderjoe i hate all the encryption going on
09:39 🔗 ersi we got a MUX with public service/unencrypted feeds
09:39 🔗 Coderjoe not that i have cable anymore
09:39 🔗 Coderjoe comcast had a bunch as well
09:40 🔗 Coderjoe including unencrypted digital feeds of the analog basic cable channels
09:40 🔗 Coderjoe but then they started encrypting those basics
11:44 🔗 NotGLaDOS GLaDOS: oust, oust!
11:45 🔗 NotGLaDOS Or that.
16:28 🔗 DrainLbry My Time Capsule broke, let's sue Apple http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57453689-37/man-sues-apple-over-time-capsule-data-loss/?tag=rtcol;posts
18:05 🔗 shaqfu LibraryBox ordered; let's see if it fixes that nasty "can't share ebooks easily" problem
22:04 🔗 underscor http://inversephase.bandcamp.com/album/pretty-eight-machine
22:05 🔗 underscor Coderjoe: S[h]O[r]T SmileyG ops?
22:10 🔗 chronomex hmmmm
22:57 🔗 Coderjoe hmm. no sketchcow

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