Pi Slide scanner.

 Sorry to get your hopes up, but is this actually feasible*. Can we actually Frankenstein this out of parts such as  a light box and camera. I say this as I have an actual slide scanner that I use from time to time in windows. It does slides and some negatives along with some proprietary software to drive it and take stuff.

I've not taken it apart to see how it works, but I'm guessing its a small scanner with a light box at the base to highlight the slide and a button on top to capture. And I'm wondering, could this all be done with a Raspberry pi. 

Looking on line it seems I'm not the only one to have had this idea. See here, here and here, but the way I was looking at doing it was integrating a light box and a Raspberry pi with a camera module to capture stuff.  The caveat for this is, I've barely thought this through and most of the stuff uses an external camera for capture rather than the Pi camera module and board. 

I'm well aware that this probably won't work and would need some sort of external program such as S.A.N.E in Linux for it to run. But it just struck me whilst scanning in stuff. Couldn't they use the camera and mount to take shots of the slide and sent it to a pc for processing. 

Broken

A brief diversion before the main post.

The Clue of the Broken Blade is going to take a while as both books will need to be typed out. I have a password protected PDF of the original text, that I cannot edit into some semblance of order, so I will have to type both out. Your patience is of course requested as it'll be about 2 months to do this right.

Edit Done in the week, my estimate was right for once. Original, UK Edition.

Incidentally from this lot of 3 I got from Ebay, Broken Sword, Shortwave Mystery and Lost tunnel.

Broken Sword required the most editing, due to aforementioned password protection.

Shortwave Mystery needed the end of a chapter added to the PDF I had so it was complete.

The Secret of The Lost tunnel only required a few words to be added and extensive reformatting and proof reading. For added LOLS, it seems to call Chet, Diet, which is funny. This is along with Prank (Frank) and Poe (Joe) as the most common misprints, due to the OCR reading the text wrong.

Old Mill Done.

Finally finished up transcribing The Secret of The Old Mill. Will have to say that all in all that I enjoyed getting back into typing stuff up again.  Took all in all, about 8 weeks to do (in spare time after work and sometimes before work, I'm not the fastest typist.) Now going through some downloaded files to see what is the originals and what is the books we got here, in all to do it again. 

I'm only going to be looking at those stories that got an extensive rewrite in the 60's, so its basically the first 24 books and probably less if the pdf.s I downloaded are what they say they are.  The downside is that the originals aren't cheap, $25 (£18)per copy and the same again to ship to the UK on Ebay and around £10 for  the Applewood reprints which cover the first 15 or so books.

Any way, here is the original Secret Of The Old Mill, all proof read and typeset correctly.

On  a side note when did we drop the hyphen from to-night and to-day. It seems weird seeing this in period texts as its entirely absent from "today's" written language.

Oh and I may have touched on this before, but if you'd like some Cliff Notes to go with this explaining stuff then I will only be too happy to oblige.  As some of the terms used are quite obscure, especially the old underworld slang Mr Hardy uses from time to time. Chet Morton for that matter has some pretty obscure slang too for the interested.

Secret of the old mill post script.

This is sort of a follow up to last weeks post and yesterdays subsequent re edit of said post, about the original editions of the Hardy Boys detective series. 

I've decided to have a look and see if there are any pdfs or ebooks for download, and it seems that there are, sort of.  There are places where you can get the whole series or so as PDF files these are the late 50's reprints and are a good place to start.  I will warn you though that they seem  to have been formatted by an actual ape, such is the poor job they've done with it.  Chapter headings occurring throughout the story and some weird formatting makes it a chore to read. 

Worse some of the original stories are missing, this includes the original Secret of the Old mill, so it looks like I'm forced to type out a version from my own copy, and that's not getting me stated on tracking down the original version either via Amazon or EBay.

Looking at copyright here it seems to be a cluster fuck of differing lengths depending entirely on locale.  It covers ghost written works too so these books are totally covered.  Its 70 years here and 90 in the US, meaning nothing ever goes out of copyright, ever.  Which means depending on what version you have it maybe out of copyright or within the next 20 - 200 or so years.

In other words the:

*Short version if you're US based an would like a massive touch typing exercise and have access to a lot of Hardy Boys book including the original versions, then you could take on this exercise in futility and put a good quality copy out there for us.

*Long version is the Byuu option.  I track down and buy any of the original versions I can get, or at least will ship to us here in the UK.  Clean up the formatting of the PDF. files of what I have and then transcribe them out word for word in Libreoffice and host them somewhere for people  to download.  I have all the European releases and a few of the American releases too. 

*The other, other option is to grab the ebook files which is also going to be expensive, and is at the whims of the originals being deleted at any time. That is of course the worst ever option as I hate digital only, propriety media.

Comment below if you think this is a worthwile endeavour, or even a fools errand. 

Free Video Editors a top something or other

Been on the look out for some free video editors and stuff and thought I would give you a heads up on some things I've found. Everything is fucking shit and I'll explain.

I use quite a bit of free software to replace useless or inadequate stuff Windows does.   We use Recuva to snaffle pictures from old SD cards and Audacity and GIMP (not an actual gimp) for audio work and picture editing as well as a bought life subscription to Goldwave (they're Canadian, its cheap).  So would like to think they would have a nice free video botherer for YTP and the like something to rival Vegas for ease of use and integration.  What I've found is far, far worse.

Lightworks  

This could easily be from some cartoon tie in on the GBA

This is probably the best of the bunch as its remotely accessible to any newbies but still does things weirdly.  Overall it looks like it should be an old XP program from 2005 such is its design, you import stuff from a folder and arrange things in bins and then click on a bank of panels at the side to create you own timeline.  Even installing you'll need to register even for a free version, and the upshot is this unless you have a Vimeo or Youtube account you can't export it to popular formats such as WMV or AVI. Its a bastard headache to use and the shark logo kept reminding me of an old GBA game. 

It does have a great video tutorial that is narrated by a Brooklyn gangster.  Also if you are running linux, then versions are available for that as well, they'll still be opaque and obtuse though.

Blender.

Strictly speaking not a video editor as its a 3D renderer with some video editing added in, its on a par with Lightworks for complexity though, relying on drop down menus for everything.  You'll see when you start it up, you'll need to use a drop down menu to even reach the editor and then faff around with a few more menus to add a video clip, which needs a few unexplained keyboard short cuts to cut.  If you put in the hours you'll be able to do some great things with this, I am sure of this, its just like hitting a brick wall at 400mph and expecting to survive.

One really good thing is that it has the best tutorial videos ever with it, a seminar going through main functions and stuff split into a variety of videos.   On the strength of these vids, I've not uninstalled Blender yet, that's how good they are. If they simplified the video interface or split it off into a standalone product it would be genius.

Tencoder.

This isn't really an editor as such but a video converter and a decentish Youtube downloader. 
Its junk free unlike Freemake and you can update it painlessly in App to the current version.  Its not that hard to do just choose your output files from the drop down menu and it'll convert it.  A few caveats though some stuff will not get downloaded from Youtube, I've used this for a while now and it won't grab everything especially vevo stuff. 

You can use Keepvid or another site to download them for keeps, or if you want a program to do it then AVC Ultimate is pretty good, just keep ignoring the register nag box and it should download with no worries.

Honourable mentions go to WinFF which I've used in the past and Handbrake which I've never gotten on with.

Adobe Premiere CS2.

I haven't even tested this yet on PC, and its really old now so not sure if it'll work on Win 10 but this part of the discontinued Adobe creative suite.  Reading up on the comments, I see there are some formats it doesn't load but you can use Tencoder to switch them into something it recognises.

I've used and disliked Audition and a Legit version of Photoshop which I had to crack on an old PC to make it work.  I may actually download this if all else fails and use it on my old desktop (CS188 poops were done in Premiere and after effects) so I know its a good pedigree.

Shotcut.

I haven't talked about Windows Movie Maker here which isn't available for Windows 10, it doesn't matter as this is the nearest equivalent out there.  It didn't run in Vista when I tried but when I opened it in Win 10 bingo it loaded.  It feels like movie maker although its a bit of  a bastard about cutting stuff saying I should install Virtual Dub to do this which only imports AVI files. 

I like WMV as a video format and this was a deal breaker for me, if they add a way to cut and past in shotcut then I'm sold as Movie maker is a terrible program. I may give it a second chance if its rectified in the future but so far then its a no from me.

Conclusion.  They are either complex or missing features and stuff if you can live with this then good luck, blender seems the most capable but I would say learn 3D stuff rather then video editing.

Also Blackmagic Davinci, looks great but needs more HD space and RAM than God to get working, so its an automatic no from me.

The Crossley Cruiser

I'm currently without a record player, I don't know how you feel about this but I'm kinda lost without something to play records with.  My old deck is part of a really old Sharp separate system that comprises of a base receiver and radio, a tape deck and a record player.  We picked it up at a bootsale for the princely sum of £5 a good ten years back and everything still works (except the record deck).

Most of what you see here has gone to the great graveyard in the sky, including Man Ginger.

So its with a heavy heart that I'm looking around for a replacement deck that fits in with what I have via the AUX port and isn't some cheapo Crossley derivative in a suitcase.

The thing is, records mean a lot to me, I grew up with the first wave of dance music where nothing came on CD and you either bought records or a compilation on tape for the car or walkman, latter stuff would come on CD and over the years I've come to enjoy the mix CD (now supplanted by Soundcloud) and Pirate radio which is more legit now thanks to streaming digital stations.  I am not one of those people who are amazed that "Vinyl exists" and re buy all their Beatles albums on 180gram vinyl, I am an techno head and its either records or go without (or option B Youtube).

Which brings me to the split between the two extremes the Crossley Cruiser in a suitcase and the £1000 audiophile set up.  My dad has the former of the two, and offered for me to borrow it to try it out.  I took it up and instantly regretted it, the play back was tinny and cheap and the MP3's I did get from it weren't very good.  Worse is that everywhere I look in shops (HMV and "Chas" Ohlson especially) have these modern spam tin atrocities.  I am actually considering looking in Crash Converters for discontinued Stantons or Technics that's how bad it is.

The other end is Hi-Fi magazines which blind you with science and favour the grossly overpriced "audiophile" decks that are available nowhere and cost upwards of a grand.  I know you get what you pay for but something around the £200 mark should be the limit and get you something decent. I know there are good decks out there, that will fit my set up, but its finding them and the confidence to buy them, something I lack and that.

Bodge Job.

Not a great week to be honest and I'll tell you why in just a minute, but for now I'll link a to a nice little cross platform music player.  Clementine is something I'd heard of before mainly in a whats a decent alternative to I Tunes kinda way, but never really gave it much thought as I happily use Foobar 2000 for music needs.  Until that is I required it to do one specific job, to stream radio.  I suspect you can do it via Foobar 2000 but to be honest I used VLC to play that particular need, except it will not accept the feed from Intergalactic FM.

Clementine happily will play stuff like that as well as import a whole folder full of gear and play that too (which if I'm honest I don't really like, I play stuff from real media most of the time as well as well as the odd file format).  To do that you need to click on playlist and add stream and copy and paste your URL of stuff, it works and handles it very well.  If I only use that bit and import stuff from my Blackbastard   I'll consider it well made.  You can get Clementine Here oh and if you do install it please click on the extras to add kittens and the almighty hypnotoad to your player.

What a day.

We have added a new keyboard to my old PC.  Its an nice wireless model which replaces a Pakard Bell activeboard that came from a PC I had for over 10 years and is now toast.  Its nice and all but what I really wanted was something I found thrown out at work.  Its a QSenn Keyboard that is both Chinese and "Enlish" and was sadly knackered.  We had the idea to take my perfectly working keyboard apart and transfer the keys across making a sort of hybrid engrish / Chinese keyboard.

It'll be easy just pry off all the keys and put them on the active board...

Problem one, both keyboards are different sizes and certain keys do not fit.  Well I'll just add certain keys, no problemo...  It looked the part, all black with splashes of grey sort of like an old soviet computer, but the keys were wobbly and didn't stay together well.

Problem two, putting it back together. Happy with my hybrid monster, I decided to put it back together and add the various bits of circuit back together, oh dear we really should have taken photos, first of all we ignored all the special keys and circuit and when it was put it back, it didn't work.  Going back and adding the special bits was a right bastard and in the end it wasn't worth it as it got stopped at the bios screen moaning that you should add a keyboard to proceed.  In conclusion I say it was a total bust even, if it looked nice with its gloriously wobbly keys.