Shark vs. Octopus: coolest fight ever

Having finished my last project, I needed some new task to keep myself out of trouble. So I decided to pick back up something I had started work on before we moved. See, tucked away in storage, we have somewhere north of two thousand books or so. Mostly because I am physically unable of getting rid of books. Even books I will never read again. (There was one notable exception to this rule, which I read and threw away, as an insult to the written word). With so many books, it was impossible for my bride and I to ever buy each other books as gifts, as there was a good chance we already had it. Even worse, I found I was buying myself books I already had. The library database was supposed to fix all of that. the only problem was, getting the data in the database was a time consuming task that we quickly wearied of. So in the spirit of supporting child-labor, I put it off until the Critter was old enough to do the drudge work. Fast forward a couple of years. We left nearly all our books behind us, but have managed to fill 3 new bookshelves overflowing in the past 12 months. And meanwhile, there are some unused barcode readers lying outside my office at work for a project that's on hold for a little bit. 'Hey,' my brain says to me one day, as I trip over the barcode reader box for the hundredth time, 'aren't there barcodes on the back of books?' Once upon a time in the distant past, I worked for a library systems company. In that time, I managed to pick up a thing or two about book catalogs. Mostly I know that no one older than 12 actually uses the Dewey Decimal system I was forced to learn as a kid, and that librarians can, on average, hold their liquor better than you'd think. But I figured this should be a reasonable head-start on building a personal library catalog. I started to do some research on that barcode on the back of your books (called an 'ISBN' code, if you weren't aware), and how it translates into usable text. I'm not the first guy out there with the idea of cataloging his home library this way. This guy is. (at least, he seems to be the standard link from a Google search.) Here's what I know so far:

The standard barcode, isn't.

Some publishers use UPC codes instead of the 'International Standard' ISBN codes. Apparently the justification for this difference is 'we wanted to screw with you'

Even when they put the barcode on, it doesn't necessarily match the ISBN, because of a decently complicated checksum game which is supposed to 'help' you know you've scanned the right thing

Almost every book reseller in the world puts their own price stickers (with yet another, propietary barcode on it) right on top of the ISBN code. Meaning you have to peel the damned things off of each and every book before you can scan anything.

Even once you have the ISBN, there is no single online source of all the book data I'd like to reference that you don't have to pay for (Library of Congress? Surprisingly sparse information). The best source seems to be Amazon, which means 'scraping' the information from their standard search function, book by book).

The standard is changing Any Minute Now, with some publishers 'helpfully' getting an early start. I began to sense that all of this meant that I was doomed to start writing & troubleshooting some overly-complicated scripts to translate the barcodes and get the information (or at least, I'd have to port what that guy wrote onto my server), which I looked forward to with the same enthusiasm I muster for having my prostate checked. Finally, I ran across some shareware that eliminates some of the above problems. (at least, it deals with the barcode and pings Amazon, Barnes & Nobles and a number of other sources for you to get the information in usable form. This is then put into an access database, which I can import into my online version. Figuring all of this out took me most of one evening. The next day, I tried scanning in a list of books to test it out. With the afore-mentioned hassle of having to peel stickers off of about half the books (fortunately, books bought online don't have them, and I also tend to peel them off as I'm reading the book sometimes). It takes me about 20-25 minutes per shelf to scan them all in and put them back at the moment. I haven't run the 'go out and fetch the info' part of the program for more than a test sample yet, but that seems to take about 1-3 minutes per book. At this rate, I'll be done just in time to move back to California and fetch the others out of storage. There has just got to be an easier way.

A couple of months ago, I read about this guy's project to mount a touchscreen monitor into his wall to serve as his home's media control center. As it happened, the previous evening we had hosted a bunch of folks for dinner, and I spent the evening going in and out of my office to fiddle with iTunes on my computer and play the right music. Flash back a month or so to when I had read about a couple of guys different takes on DIY digital photo frames, which seemed like a good idea. Besides the 3 people that read the 'Groove on a regular basis (from the statistics of them seem to be in Iowa. Which is interesting, as I don't think know anyone in Iowa), the mass of digital photos we've accumulated over the past few years don't even have the dignity of collecting dust in an album in our house. They languish in electronic archives, unseen. Since I've had to leave all my lovely powertools behind in the US, I had a mass of creative energy built up. I told my bride she'd just have to humor me for a while, and one quick trip to ebay later, and I had a 7" Lilluput Touch Screen Monitor, just like the ones used for the dashboards of the extremely overpriced luxury cars. Because I didn't want to pay the extortionist prices charged for anything electronic in Europe, I ended up buying it in the US and having it shipped to one of my buddies there (a.k.a.The Soul Cowboy and I picked it up on my last trip over. I already have a PC that does nothing more than serve as the webcam and iTunes MP3 server for the house. So that part was done. Without the tools to put the frame together myself, I took the monitor into a local shop and spent a couple of hours talking through the options with the proprietor. We ended up having to build the frame up out of stock to give enough depth for the monitor and some circulation. One of the fiddly bits we had to sort out was how to support the screen in the frame, but make the buttons accessible (without looking silly) and make the whole thing easy to disassemble as needed. The frame-guy suggested using the same metal clips he uses to mount antique oil paintings. This is why I'm glad I ended up using a professional! And you can see that even with the power and serial cables plugged in, the cabling requirements are pretty minimal (optimized for the limited space available in car dashboards). We chose the same dark mahogany finish that's prevalent on the furniture in our house. We were aiming to mount this frame in the dining room, as a central point of the open floor plan of our house, and the center point of any hosting we do. This was convenient from a wiring perspective (always important to consider, and more so when retro-fitting a 400 year old stone building like we live in), as it's directly opposite the wall of my office. We ended up choosing a small space directly opposite some built in shelves - which gave me a convenient spot for the server as well. It was just a matter of drilling a 1/2" hole in the wall for the wires and popping them through. The total length of the serial cable was under 8 feet, so it was up and running with suprisingly little fuss. The total screen resolution is 640x480, so it took a little getting used to operating, but wasn't really a problem. I have the server's monitor feed split ($15 splitter) and running into a kvm switch so that I can swap over and control and/or update anything from using my main monitor, keyboard and mouse as well for straightforward maintenance. Probably the nicest touch was my bride's idea; we had the frame guy (who really rocks. Seriously, if you live anywhere close to the northwest of England and need some killer frames for a reasonable price, drop me a line) make up two identical frames prepared for photos. So now the whole thing blends in as a part of the decor, rather than leaping out as a modern gizmo mounted on the wall. And when not actively used for to play music, the monitor is set to a screensaver that cycles through digital photos every 6 seconds. The speakers are hidden underneath a sideboard in the dining room, and nearly invisible. I went with the Creature speaker set from JBL. They're stylish enough to blend in and give a pretty decent sound quality through the space. The wires were run under the carpet and baseboard into the speaker and are nearly invisible. The total cost for this project broke was right at $575. $200 for the monitor, £45 for each of the three frames, and £65 for the speakers, plus a few bucks for various twiddly bits (svga splitter, etc). The power for the monitor is US based, and run through a simple adaptor, so I can take the whole thing back to the US with me. Although by that time, monitor prices will have continued to drop, so I may upgrade to a larger size. It should be noted that during this whole exercise, my bride patiently let me proceed and was only occasionally was seen to sigh and roll her eyes. But as soon as the whole thing was in, she was jumping up and down with excitement over using it. And it's had a surprising extra bonus: the critter has always loved looking at pictures of herself on the computer. The first time she walked by the frame while it was rotating through digital photos, she ended up riveted to the display for half an hour. And half an hour of peace from a not-quite-three-year-old is worth a hell of a lot. Overall Rating: Totally worth it.