The Deliverator – Wannabee

Every few years I find myself in the unenviable position of unavoidably needing to non-destructively scan a book. Every few years I pray that someone has come up with an affordable, reasonably quick way of doing this that produces good quality results. Every few years I burn an evening researching the state of the field. Every few years I come away disappointed. Here are my observations from this go around:

Hardware:

Sheet Feeders – If you can afford to destroy the book, you can cut off the binding with a fine toothed band-saw or other power tool of your choice and feed the pages through a sheet-feeder style scanner. Sheet feeders like the popular Fujitsu ScanSnap series can scan both sides of each pages at something like 20 pages per minute at 600ish DPI. This is mighty impressive as it cuts the actual scanning time for a book down to something like a half hour. Unfortunately, when I find myself in the position of needing to scan a book, it is usually some rare tome it took me 2 years and $300 to find on AbeBooks. For my purposes, solutions requiring a band-saw need not apply. Also, many of the better scanners cost $400+, which is pushing what I would consider affordable.

Commercial Copy Stands range from simple single overhead camera rigs to more complex dual camera rigs with adjustable cradles to support the book without damaging it, re-positionable lighting, non-reflective glass to hold the pages flat, automatic page flippers, etc. Commercial, off-the-shelf solutions from companies like Atiz can run $14k+ without even factoring in the cost of cameras (typically high end Canon DSLRs). Great, if you are a university library spending grant money, sucky if you are a book nerd on a budget.

DIY Copy Stands – A substantial percentage of the functionality, speed and quality of these rigs can be replicated for under $1000 by building your own dual camera copy stand following one of the several increasingly standardized designs from the DIY Book Scanner project. This is still more time and money than I want to spend and probably more space than I want to waste for a device I would only very seldom use. When a full, well documented/supported, single evening kit is available for under $300 plus the cost of cameras, I will probably be interested. The BookLiberator looked to commercially produce kits that would meet all my requirements, but efforts to produce the units fell apart after Ion Audio announced its similar sub-$200 BookSaver product at CES 2011. Ion has since VERY quietly pulled the plug on the BookSaver without ever selling any, but their initial product announcement was enough to send most small, independent efforts to produce a similar device scurrying for someplace small and dark.

Flatbed scanners are an inexpensive, mature, widely used technology which suck at scanning books in a wide variety of ways. First, most flatbeds tend to be optimized for high quality scans of things like photos, not for speed. Secondly, most scanners have a significant bezel around the scanning platen, meaning the only way to scan a book is to significantly bend/distort the spin in order to get the pages to lie flat against the glass. Even mashed against the glass, you usually get significant page distortion near the binding resulting in curving text and uneven illumination.

Several years ago I purchased a Plustek OpticBook 3600 plus, a flatbed scanner specially optimized for scanning books. The OpticBook has a very thin bezel along one edge of the platen which lets you open a book to a 90 degree angle and have one page flat against the glass while the other hangs freely over the side. This lets you produce an undistorted scan of a page without significantly bending the spine. The “DigiBook” software included with the scanner has an automatic page rotation feature, so that every other page gets rotated 180 degrees. This lets you scan a page, flip the book over to scan the opposite page and have everything automatically rotated the right way. There are giant over-sized buttons on the scanner that let you trigger a scan in B&W, greyscale or color. The actual scan takes 5-8 seconds, as the scanner is optimized for speed, rather than highest possible DPI.

The OpticBook concept is very nice in theory, but the implementation leaves something to be desired. Even with the scanner bezel as thin as it is, the scanning element doesn’t get close enough to the binding to scan most paperbacks. It works fine for hard covers like textbooks, where the content doesn’t start as close to the binding. The software is also very crash prone and the work-flow somewhat less than ideal, with the operator having to hit a “transfer” button in the software after each page to write the image out to disk, despite the over-sized buttons on the scanner itself. Anything that adds 5-10 extra seconds to the work-flow gets multiplied tremendously over a 500+ page book. These scanners are also very poorly sealed, with significant dust accumulating on the interior of the glass plate with no easy way to clean it short of disassembly. There doesn’t appear to be a way to adjust the lamp brightness, so you tend to get a bit of bleed through from text on the other side of pages you are scanning. Many users also complain of short bulb life, although my unit is still functional. From reviews I’ve read, I am not convinced that Plustek has learned much from their mistakes in successive models in this series.

Handheld Scanners – I’ve never been impressed with the quality of the results from hand-held “wand” scanners. I haven’t personally checked out any of these devices in years, as I’ve largely consigned the whole category into Sharper Image / SkyMall crap-gadget territory. If someone wants to tell me that X device can quickly and accurately scan a paperback, I may look into these in the future.

Software:

Post Processing – While hardware has seen little improvement since my last review, there have been some improvements on the software side of things. The DIY Book Scanner project has yielded a plethora of scripts, tools, etc. for packaging up scans into various digital book formats. Of these, I have found a tool called Scan Tailor to be the most polished, easy to install, and to use. Scan Tailor will take a directory filled with scanned images and will straighten, deskew, remove background and bleed through (to give you black text on a pure white background), set a constant page size/margin, etc. Scan Tailor will work almost completely auto-magically through each step of the process and if it does make a mistake, it is easy for the user to intervene and apply a manual correction. Scan Tailor cut my workflow from previous years of 6-8 programs and scripts (each with fussy dependencies on libraries and frameworks) down to 3. I still do some post processing of scans in irfanView and Scan Tailor doesn’t do the final bundling of images into PDFs, DJVU, etc. or do OCR, but other than that it is pretty much a one stop shop for post scan image processing.

Binding – Once you have a directory full of post processed images, what are you going to do with them? I am still using Presto Pagemanager 7.10 for assembling my post processed TIFF images into PDFs. It isn’t ideal in many ways, but has the virtue of not costing me anything more and working consistently, if in somewhat of a hurky-jerky liable to temporarily freeze Explorer kinda way. I played around with a half dozen PDF/DJVU binder scripts/programs recommended by the book scanning forums and basically concluded that the free options all royally sucked in one way or another, not the least of which is requiring me to install 5 different programming frameworks just to try them out. Scan Tailor is a lovely, consistent, unified application that is easy to install and use. The DIY Book Scanner community could really use something as well done for the binding stage of the process. As it is, one is left to fend with a gobbledygook of unmanageable python scripts, ruby scripts, feeding various Unix command line utilities and throwing an undocumented fit anytime it finds something not to its liking. The situation is marginally improved if you want to output DjVu files rather than PDFs, but only marginally.

OCR – So, you want to turn those post processed scans into a re-flowable format like .epub for easy reading on your ebook reader device? You are kidding me, right? OCR is one of those things that has been around since the dawn of scanning and despite a lot of protestations seems to have changed little. If you asked me about the state of OCR 5 or 10 years ago I would have told you there is Omnipage & Abbyy Fine Reader & everything else. Today, that still seems to be the state of the industry. I tried a half dozen of the everything else variety including OpenOCR (Cuneiform), VietOCR and TiffDjvuOCR. Most of the free solutions seem to use Tesseract, an open source OCR engine from Google. Across 3 books with straightforward, single column formatting and commonly used fonts, I found the free OCR packages basically good enough to create a rough keyword index for searching books, but nothing near the accuracy to create a readable, reflowable ebook without significant time spent correcting errors. I concluded I might actually be able to retype a book faster and more accurately than if I tried to correct all the strange and easily unspotted errors committed by OCR. I would be curious to try the commercial packages at some point, as a lot of book scanners seem to swear by recent versions of Abbyy Fine Reader, but I’m not really in the mood to spend $150+ to fart around with either of the commercial offerings.

I’ve had a couple hardware problems with my Ipad 2 (which I purchased on the first day of availability). The first was that the battery life was never as good as my Ipad 1. With my Ipad 1, I could go almost a week without charging, so long as I was only using it for ebooks and light web browsing. With my Ipad 2, I found myself putting it on the charger every couple days. The other issue I had was my Ipad 2 had a leaky back-light. When reading ebooks on a black background, this was really apparent and annoying. When used for anything else, pretty much unnoticeable. However, I read a lot of books. Still, not quite enough of an issue for me to get up and do something about it.

Last week however, the battery situation worsened considerably. While reading a book (with no apps backgrounded), my Ipad 2 went from 80 someodd percent to 10% warning level in like and hour and a half. I put it on the charger and went to bed. In the morning, I found my Ipad 2 not only hadn’t charged, but was dead as a rock. When put on the charger, I could get an apple logo to show up and a “hook up to itunes” restore message, but it would turn off and not power on under battery as soon as it was unplugged.

I ended up driving down to the Apple Store in Bellevue Square. The place was a complete zoo, but Apple seemed to have enough employees on hand to keep everything moving along. I proceeded to the back of the store where the very busy “Genius Bar” was located and I was intercepted before I could quite get to the counter by a guy asking me if I had an appointment. I said I didn’t and he pulled out his Ipad, asked me some basic questions about what was going on and created an appointment for me for 10 minutes later. In the meantime, I wandered the store looking at various accessories and doodads that I probably shouldn’t buy. A tech flagged me down, questioned me about what I was experiencing, plugged it into a testing device, verified the problem and hooked me up with a new, non-refurbished unit within another 15-20 minutes. I got home, plugged the replacement in, restored my most recent backup and had my replacement unit fully functional in hardly anytime at all. Granted, not everyone lives by an Apple Store, but I was very pleased by how quickly my problem was resolved. Oh, and the new unit did not have any back-light issues.

This Ipad 2 replacement process is a huge contrast to the long, uncertain chain of events that one must go through if a PC breaks down. Especially troubling is how manual (and thus difficult for a casual end user) the process is of migrating one’s programs, settings and data from one PC to another. The PC world has had decades to get this right and still gets it profoundly wrong. Quite simply, Apple with their Ipads and Iphones currently offers the easiest and most seamless old profile -> new device migration in the computing world.

Well, I wound up getting myself an Ipad 2. I was able to sell my Ipad 1 via Gazelle for a substantial percentage of a new one, so the cost of upgrading was minimal. I ended up visiting 5 stores on the first day of sales (March 11th) before I finally found an Apple store at University Village with any left. I ended up getting a 16 GB model with Verizon 3g. As with the first Ipad, I purchased a 3g model not for the 3g connectivity but for the GPS functionality. I’ve been using the new Ipad 2 pretty heavily the last few days and thought I would share my thoughts:

-The Ipad 2 feels very different when held due to the curved edges and flat back. The flat back is really nice, as the first generation Ipad had a curved back and wouldn’t lay flat on a table and tended to want to scoot around when used. The curved edges are frankly quite annoying, as it makes it extremely difficult to plug in the main dock connector and the 1/8th” headphone port doesn’t fully mechanically support the headphone plug on all sides, making it difficult to determine if headphones are properly seated. This may also prevent the use of certain headphone designs.

-The Ipad 2 includes only a single speaker like the Ipad 1. It would have been nice if they had gone with stereo speakers, but that said, the speaker on the Ipad 2 is a LOT better. The original’s speaker was overly quiet and wasn’t much good for watching movies and the like.

-Upgrading from the Ipad 1 to Ipad 2 was super-easy. I ran a full backup of my first generation Ipad and then synced my Ipad 2. Itunes transfered all my apps and data. I only needed to manually restore settings for a few program, such as my twitter client, online banking client, etc. which don’t allow their data to be backed up. This had to be the easiest old computer->new computer migration I’ve ever done.

-I purchased an official Apple leather “smart cover” to go with my unit. I really like Apple’s minimal approach to providing screen protection. The smart cover adds only minimal thickness, provides scratch protection when you have the Ipad in a bag and folds up into a stand giving you two useful viewing angles. It also engages/disengages sleep mode on the unit. I expect this cover to be a good solution for most users. I doubt it will be the final solution for me, however. The Ipad 2, like the Ipad 1, is very slick, literally. There is no texture to the back surface, making it difficult to grasp one handed. I bought a Street Skin for my first unit and will likely do the same when they introduce an Ipad 2 version.

-The cameras are really crappy, especially for still shots. Grainy, low resolution, motion blur, poor light sensitivity are all words I would use in connection with these cameras. I really wish Apple hadn’t gone so low end in this area. The two upsides to the inclusion of cameras is that Apple has come out with a good video editing program for the Ipad for the first time and the camera works with most iOS apps designed for the Iphone. This has enabled me to deposit checks into my bank account without needing to visit my bank, for instance.

All in all, I really like the Ipad 2 over the Ipad 1, but it definitely has its faults.

Five and a half years ago I started fooling around with “disposable” video cameras being sold through the CVS pharmacy chain. These video cameras were meant to be one time use equivalents of the cardboard box disposable still cameras still sold at many stores throughout the world. The idea was you would pay around $30 for the camera, go out and take some footage and then bring the camera back and they would give you a DVD with your video on it, but keep the camera. The pharmacy would then wipe your unit and sell it again to someone else. The CVS cameras were small, built robustly and powered by simple AA’s and inexpensive. Naturally, the hacker community went to work on the cameras and quickly figured out how to download the video without the pharmacy’s help, making them reusable. These were great cameras for use in places you wouldn’t want to risk a “real” camera. People attached them to model rockets, helicopters, planes, placed them next to hot things, explody things, etc. They were cheap enough that you wouldn’t think twice about risking the camera on the off chance of capturing some cool footage. Naturally, I bought half a dozen.

Over the years, I’ve attached them to robots, glued fisheye lenses on them, put them in zip-lock bags and used them underwater. I’ve captured some real fun footage because I was no longer risk adverse about risking the camera. In the process I’ve destroyed two cameras outright, permanently modified two for niche uses and one is good for only spare parts. Only two escaped my abuse entirely unscathed. Today, I threw them all away.

Why?

Quite simply, the magic economic equations surrounding gadgets + mass market demand + capitalism + time has rendered the old CVS cameras obsolete. For under $50 I can now buy a camera from Kodak that is quite a bit smaller, holds more video and at higher quality than the CVS cameras, and is mildly hardened for rugged and underwater use. If you shop around, you can get this camera for more like $40 at stores like Best Buy, but I just got mine at Amazon. There are similar form factor cameras from other makers, but most are significantly more expensive HD capable units that are designed more for people wanting a cheap, small, everyday camcorder or for technophobic people looking for a very easy to operate video camera. These units (Flip for example) tend to be more like $100.

Tomorrow, I am going to strap one onto a robot and watch things go crunch. If the camera survives, great! If it doesn’t, the camera’s Micro-SDHC card is small enough that I can find it intact in the twisted, shattered remains and I probably got some great footage for $50. Photography and videography is at its most interesting when people are willing to push boundaries and experiment. The technology has finally gotten cheap enough that “that would be really cool but I don’t want to break this expensive piece of equipment” is no longer part of the equation.

Some thoughts on the Kodak Mini Video Camera:

-Captures at 640×480 at 30 fps as an AVI file using an MJPEG video codec and 16 bit PCM audio at 11khz. At this setting you can fit about an hour’s video on the included 2 GB Micro-SDHC card. You can also do QVGA at 60hz and take stills as well. There doesn’t appear to be any image stabilization, but what can you (currently) expect from a camera that is under $50. Give it a few years though…

-The camera has a built in rechargeable battery. The unit has a pop out full sized type A USB connector that pops out of the side for charging. You will need to use a USB extension cable (not included) to plug it into a PC to charge. My unit did not show up as a USB mass storage device when I plugged it into a computer running the 64 bit version of Windows 7. Other users report it coming up as a drive letter and forcibly installing (without prompting) some piece of software called Arcsoft Mediaimpression SE which also seizes control of most video/photo file extensions. I was glad this was not the case with my unit.

-Because my unit doesn’t show up as a USB mass storage device, I had to pop the Micro-SDHC card out of the bottom of the unit. I had to use itty-bitty tweezers (thanks Tweezerman!) to grab onto the card as there is no ejection mechanism for the card. A 2 GB card was included with mine, but this camera is sometimes sold without a card.

-The camera is exceedingly easy to use, with just an on/off button, 4 way arrow buttons and center selector and a “settings menu” button. The simple control scheme should make this a good camera for micro-controller driven operation, if someone wants to strip it down to just the circuit board for use on a rocket, kite, balloon or something.

-The whole unit is smaller than a pack of cards.

-I am not sure if I would entirely trust the built in waterproofing on the camera. The only point of entry for water is through the base, which hinges open to reveal the USB connector and card slot and potentially around the membrane rubber buttons. The base does have some rubbery gasket material to seal against water, but it is pretty minimal. I would recommend coating the area with a thick grease/vaseline, etc. before submersion in water beyond a few feet.

I own an original model Ipad and use it daily. Today, Apple announced Ipad 2. Here are my thoughts on it and whether it is enough for me to upgrade:

Pluses:

-Ipad 2 is thinner and a little lighter than the original, while retaining the same general width x height and screen size of the original. The slight reduction in weight will be nice for those who use it as an book reader, as arm fatigue was a definite factor with the original.

-Ipad 2 has dual cameras. I’ve never seen video conferencing as much of a killer app, but I know some people that were really dieing for this with the Ipad 1.

-Ipad 2 has a new, faster dual core processor with what is being described as “9x” faster graphics. I am all for increased performance, but it is up in the air whether many app makers will write applications that make use of the faster subsystems for risk of alienating the large Ipad 1 user base.

-Magnetic screen cover system is a big plus in my view, as it lets you protect the Ipad’s screen when putting it in a bag or (in my case) large pocket, while adding little to the dimensions of the unit. Most cases for the Ipad 1 greatly increased the unit’s apparent bulk.

-3G models available for Verizon and not just AT&T.

-Has some extra motion sensing capability (3 axis gyro) compared to Ipad 1, which should be nice for gaming.

-One of the big pluses in my view is the new HDMI video output adapter, which works for ALL applications. This is a big change from Ipad 1 where applications had to be specially coded AND approved for TV output use. Think Hulu+, games, etc.

-Pricing is being kept competitive or slightly lower than similar Android devices

Negatives:

-No built in SD slot for downloading photos. This should have been do-able even with the thinner bezel of Ipad 2. The lack of a SD slot was a consistent minus cited by many Ipad 1 users/reviewers. I hate that Apple tries to make their devices aesthetically clutter free at the expense of needing to buy and carry a lot of easily lost adapters & dongles.

-No USB port. Nuff said. Wasn’t a big issue with me, but I know a lot of people wanted it.

-The Ipad 2 apparently still has only 256 MB of ram. I’ve bumped up against this consistently in my everyday use of the Ipad 1, which has the same amount, especially when doing tabbed browsing.

-Still requires an external power brick for charging versus being able to charge via USB on most computers, even if it takes significantly longer.

-Still no syncing over WiFi.

Externalities:

-Apple is beginning to enforce much harsher terms on 3rd parties wishing to supply content to Ipad users. They are essentially requiring any content being provided to users to also be available for purchase through their own content stores at the same price, so that they can get a (sizeable) cut of the pie. This will apparently apply even when the purchase is made “off site” and not as an in-app purchase. This will effectively make it impossible / not cost effective for competitors like Kindle, Nook and Sony to offer eBooks to Ipad users and will likely broadly apply to other types of content as well. I find this move to be incredibly anti-competitive and is a HUGE minus for me. One of the things which has made Ipad such a compelling part of my daily life is its ability to consume media from a variety of sources, whether that is news, books, music, podcasts or video. By constraining my choices to what Apple itself offers, they have greatly limited the appeal of the whole platform to me. If it wasn’t for this single thing, I would probably buy an Ipad 2. As is, if these changes take effect, I may sell my existing Ipad 1 in favor of an Android alternative.

I recently found myself spending so much time juggling how I was storing my data in order to get it to fit on a combination of a 2 TB and a 1.5 TB external hard drive, that I thought it might be worthwhile to revisit getting a 3 TB external drive for backup. I decided against getting a 3 TB drive when they first came out, in part due to AnandTech’s unfavorable review of the only 3 TB drive on the market at the time, Seagate’s GoFlex Desk 3TB. The big turn offs for me were the poorly designed enclosure resulting in very high temperatures, high $/GB ratio and a host of compatibility issues. Since that time, both Western Digital and Hitachi have gotten in on the game as well with 3 TB offerings of their own. I opted for the My Book Essential 3TB, since it seemed to have the best designed enclosure of the bunch, offered the cheapest $/GB ratio of any of the 3 TB drives on the market at $165 via Newegg and gave me a chance to try out my USB 3.0 port on my Asus P6X58D motherboard.

Installation of this drive was decidedly NOT a breeze. I ended up having to update my motherboard’s bios, USB 3.0 controller sub-firmware and USB 3.0 drivers  just to get the drive to be recognized and then had to install and then update Western Digital’s included Smartware software in order to update the drive’s firmware in order to get it working properly. I wouldn’t recommend this to clients as a “just plug it in to gain 3 TB of storage” device, but once I got it working it has behaved like any other external hard disk drive and has stayed comfortably cool via strictly passive ventilation and worked reliably through multi Terabyte initial data copying and subsequent daily backups.

Western Digital doesn’t exactly go out of their way to advertise it, but this drive spins at something below 6000 RPM (hence the assorted eco-branding). Even with the fast USB 3.0 interface, this drive performs considerably below any 1.5 or 2 TB drive I’ve owned, even with those drives being in USB 2.0 enclosures. This drive is decidedly for bulk data storage purposes only.

One other thing Western Digital doesn’t advertise is that the drive used in the enclosure is the same WD30EZRS series drive which they sell for ~$35 MORE as a bare OEM drive sans enclosure. Popping the drive out of its enclosure is relatively straightforward, although you are likely to pop a couple plastic clips in the process, voiding your warranty. Still, if you are looking for a 3TB internal drive on the cheap and don’t mind potentially voiding your warranty coverage, this is about as cheap as you can get one.

I ended up picking up a second unit to use as an internal drive. I kept it in its enclosure long enough to update it to the most recent drive firmware and then popped it open. I am keeping the enclosure in case I ever need to apply another firmware update. It has functioned like any other non-boot drive in my system, save for that the performance characteristics are such that if you have more than a few apps contending for I/O attention from the drive, throughput drops enough that HD video streams start breaking up. This can be problematic if you are trying to watch a movie and a backup job starts in the background, for instance. To reiterate, this drive whether used externally or internally should be used for bulk data storage only.

With this week’s refresh of Apple’s Macbook Pro line of computers, consumers are going to get their first sampling of Intel’s Light Peak technology under the moniker “Thunderbolt.” Apple is no stranger to introducing new external interfaces, having premiered and acted as the die-hard champion of Firewire and Displayport. Both of these technologies, though offering technical advantages over other interfaces at their time of introduction, haven’t really become very mainstream and have remained pricier than alternatives. With USB 3.0 having beaten Thunderbolt to market by almost a year, I know a lot of techies have taken a brief look at Thunderbolt and dismissed it as yet another connector to try and fit on a motherboard bezel. I’ve looked at Thunderbolt in some depth and the deeper I’ve dug, the more I am interested. If widely adopted, I think it may widely reshape the collection of peripherals and mess of wires that have come to represent a “Desktop” level computing environment.

The salient points:

-Thunderbolt offers significantly more bandwidth than USB 3.0 with dual fully bi-directional 10 Gbps. That is up to 20 Gbps in both directions. USB 3.0 after overhead offers around 3.2 Gbps This greatly influences the classes of peripherals that could be run over a link. Think externalizing GPU’s vs external hard drives.

-Thunderbolt provides significantly more power to external devices than USB 3.0. USB 3.0 gives you a little under 5 watts to play with, which, while an improvement over USB 2.0′s ~2.5 watt, is less than half of Thunderbolt’s 10 watts. 10 watts is enough to power most full size desktop 3.5″ hard drives in external enclosures. It is enough to drive a monitor reasonably bright 20″ LCD monitor. With a little bit of power conserving design, it may be possible to do away with the need for power adapters for most present, common, PC peripherals except laser printers.

-Thunderbolt lets your daisy chain up to 7 devices. All the devices chained together have to share the Thunderbolt port’s overall bandwidth and power allotments, but both are fairly ample. The daisy chaining ability, combined with more directly powered peripherals, means a lot fewer cable will be needed to connect all your peripherals to your CPU unit and a lot of those cable runs will be shorter. In brief, way less desktop mess / tangle of cables.

-Thunderbolt tunnels the PCI Express protocol as well as Display port. Since tons of interface chips are designed to plug into PCI Express buses already, this will make it relatively trivial for 3rd party device manufacturers to take existing designs for internal peripherals and create “external peripheral” versions of the same. This, combined with much friendly licensing to implement compatible implementations and support of the underlying technology via Intel could make Thunderbolt a rapid starter, whereas some of the “inside baseball” aspects of Firewire lead to its slow adoption and lack of mainstream support compared USB 2.0.

Am I going to jump in headfirst and order a Macbook Pro today? No, but if Apple doesn’t try to play this one too close to its chest (and smother the baby in the process), Thunderbolt has the potential to truly become the “universal” bus that USB has long claimed to be.

While I am normally in favor of tolls and other systems of taxation that generate revenues to pay for infrastructure where it is to be used and by those who use it, our state has a poor history of continuing to collect tolls after the cost of construction has been paid, even in cases where the original legislation authorizing the construction and tolls had specific sunset clauses. Government has a tendency to be very reluctant to give up a revenue stream once it has been established, even when such taxation is no longer (or never was) justifiable under any reasonable, expressible philosophy of taxation. With the recent, massive budget shortfall, we have seen seen increasingly desperate attempts by the government to stick their fingers in other people’s pies, with often little or no justification for why they are entitled to a slice in the first place.

It should be noted that the legislation establishing the toll does not have a sunset provision requiring the toll to be removed after the bridge is paid for, or be scaled back to maintenance levels after payment of the bonds are completed. It merely requires that “Revenue from tolling the bridge will only be used as authorized by the Legislature for bond payments, operations and maintenance within the SR 520 corridor.” This means that the toll revenue may be used to pay for anything in the 520 corridor, potentially freeing up funds to pay for budget shortfalls elsewhere. It also appears that tolls can be used to fund mass transit and not simply highway purposes, something some toll payers may disagree with strongly. Is there even a requirement to pay off the 30 YEAR bonds as quick as toll revenues allow? The original I-90 floating bridge’s tolls paid off its cost of construction in 9 years, decades ahead of projections. The current 520 bridge’s tolls were ended in 16 years. I have to wonder after all the accounting jiggery-pokery takes place, how much and for how long 520′s toll revenues will have been used to pay for highly controversial projects like Seattle’s Waterfront Tunnel?

I am also extremely opposed to electronic RFID or plate registration as the sole means of paying a toll. RFID systems have severe privacy implications that often go un-addressed or unacknowledged by implementers or are addressed dismissively. From WSDOT’s faq :

Will my privacy be protected?
Yes. Good To Go! electronic tolling Passes use radio frequency identity chips, which do not hold any personal information. For Pay By Mail, only photos of the vehicle are taken, not the driver or occupants. All personal data, including name, address and payment information, is kept confidential and privacy is protected by law. Under no circumstances is individual customer information disclosed for use by marketing firms.

This scant acknowledgment of the issues surrounding RFID systems answer falls into the dismissive category. There is essentially no anonymous way of paying this toll. You either have to register your plate and establish an account, or get an RFID badge/sticker and establish an account. Government entities have an even poorer reputation for keeping databases private (uh, Wikileaks anyone?) than commercial enterprise, who often at least have some financial/reputation impact rationale for keeping client data private and I am very loath to supply my billing information to a government agency. While they make assurances that the data stored in their databases will remain private, tolling data has been used in numerous criminal and civil cases.

Unless you deliberately shield the RFID tag in other areas, there is nothing to prevent the tag from being read at other locations by the state or by other individuals and most people are frankly not going to bother. There are countless examples of how tags can be abused (up to and including cloning of someone else’s card) by private individuals. For instance, an acquaintance of mine, Eric Butler, recently showed how a commonly available cell phone could be used to remotely read someone’s ORCA transit card and display their recent whereabouts.

WA state is one of only a few that has a law against skimming someone’s RFID data without their knowledge, but if the rewards of doing so are large enough and it can be done anonymously, with little chance of being caught, then I am doubtful that this law will have a deterrent effect.

Turning 520 into a toll bridge will undoubtedly shift a lot of traffic onto the region’s other, already crowded arterials. The particular implementation details of this toll system just give me one more reason not to use 520 and not to go into Seattle for non-essential needs.

Update: It does appear you can set up a quasi-anonymous “Unregistered Pass Account” account without deliberately disclosing identifying information by showing up in person at one of the customer service centers and paying for a pass in cash. Given that they already have equipment in place to take pictures of license plates for plate based billing, they have the technical ability to correlate a plate with an unregistered pass, effectively de-anonymizing it. This is a marginally better situation, as the government/company hired to run the system wouldn’t have your direct billing details, but you would still be carrying around an RFID tag that is chirping for all to hear/clone/whatever. They also warn that if the pass isn’t read correctly, one would be sent an inflated/surcharge bill by mail. In such a situation, you couldn’t really protest without revealing your identity.

A more desirable setup would be the ability to set up a cash only account for plate based billing. In such a situation, one wouldn’t have to carry around a chirping RFID tag and wouldn’t be disclosing more information than the state already has through a vehicle’s registration. This doesn’t appear to be possible, currently, and they are charging a $.25 extra surcharge per toll for plate based billing. How much is your privacy worth to you? One has to wonder at the rationale for this disincentive. This may be an indication that their plate image capture system functions poorly in some situations, such as gridlock traffic, when an overhead mounted camera may not have a clear shot of the plate. I wonder whether this will cause scofflaws to deliberately tailgate large trucks and the like?

My last set of upgrades to my HTPC managed to eek out one more year of life, but it finally succumbed under an avalanche of high bit-rate video, new surround sound encoding schemes and other tasks which proved too much for the aging Shuttle boxes’ older dual core AMD CPU and bandwidth challenged DDR400 memory to handle. I ended up being able to scrounge most of the parts for the new HTPC from my spare parts bins, so the only purchases I needed to make were the CPU and ram. The new system has the following specs:

-Core i7 950 cpu

-4GB of Kinston DDR3 ram

-MSI X58 Platinum motherboard

-750 GB Seagate HDD

-Blu-ray reader / DVD burner

-600 W OCZ power supply with modular cables

-Lian Li desktop style aluminum case

-Nvidia GT 240 graphics card

-Windows 7

Putting together the system was pretty straight-forward. The Lian Li case I had on hand doesn’t have the best cable pathing and won’t accommodate longer video cards, but it had the virtue of being free. Thanks to the modular cable system on the power supply, I was able to keep the internal rats nest down to a bare minimum. The noise level is higher than on my old system due to an increased number of fans and and fairly loud head seeking of the Seagate HDD. I’ve been using SSDs pretty exclusively for my boot drives for the last few years, but needed more storage for this system than is cheaply affordable in an SSD and I was trying to keep the cost of this upgrade to a bare minimum. I might clone the HDD drive to an SSD at some future point if the head seeking becomes too annoying, but for now the projector fan largely drowns it out.

Software setup was a bit more of a challenge, as some of the audio/video software I use still doesn’t play nicely with Windows 7. I was able to get my HDTV DVR software, Beyond TV, working with my tuners, eventually, but it took some doing.

I switched from coaxial digital audio to optical Toslink, due to my newer motherboard not supporting coaxial out. This went fairly smoothly; I was dreading having to deal by touch with the maze of barely accessible wires coming out of the back of my surround receiver.

The biggest sticking point of the whole project was that my Optoma HD20 projector did not want to display anything but gobbledygook when hooked up to the Nvidia GT 240 video card. I had used this same card, cables and everything with the previous system without issue. Updating to the latest beta 126.635 drivers finally got an image up on the screen, but at 1080p60 resolution, the computer would momentarily lose sync with the projector every 5-15 minutes and the projector would seek for 3-4 seconds before relocking. VERY annoying when watching a film. Setting the refresh to 30 hz or a lower resolution gets rid of the problem, making this appear on the surface to be a video bandwidth/cable length issue, but this same video card, projector and cables behaved perfectly well under XP, so I have to conclude that Nvidia’s Windows 7 drivers are pretty much made of fail.

It would really piss me off to have to buy a new video card or a video amplifier/HDMI repeater in order to solve this problem. The HDMI cables aren’t that long (35′ if I remember correctly) and were of the higher quality type designed for full 1080p spec use at longer lengths. They are plastered in the ceiling, so replacing them isn’t really an appealing option!

I’ve done SIFF for six years straight, if I am doing my math right. After tonight’s experience, though, this year may be my last. One of the things that has really been bothering me in recent years, particularly after getting my own home theater is how mediocre the presentation of films has become at SIFF. Tonight was a really, really bad experience on all levels.

I still go to a lot of movies in commercial theaters, especially for the opening nights of blockbusters. I love the soundtrack of a audience’s reactions that you don’t get watching a movie at home. I love the big screen and thumping bass that would annoy the neightbors. Theaters offer a whole host of intangibles that a home theater just can’t match. So to, do film festivals. I love sitting in a cafe after a film and discussing it with other festival attendees, picking up trivia and recommendations.

I don’t like running all over town trying to get from theater to theater. I don’t like standing in the rain for an hour before a film just to get a seat. I don’t like having to watch the same pre-film SIFF promotion for 20 straight movies and here the non-sensical, incoherent remarks of the programmers prior to the films. Mostly, I don’t like the disrespect that SIFF gives its audience.

Today, I showed up to watch Henry of Navarre at The Neptune. This is an epic scope and length film with lush presentation, big battle scenes, sweeping vistas, lots of detailed sets and costumes. In short, it is exactly the type of movie that I still like to see in a real theater. After driving into Seattle, paying for parking, buying overpriced hot dogs and drinks and sitting down, the programmer informed us that the distributor sent them a cut that wouldn’t work on the venue’s projection system, and that instead we would be watching a DVD version. They offered to provide a film voucher if in the first 20 minutes of the film you couldn’t stand the quality. What they ended up showing was a poorly cropped DVD screener with huge watermarks in both upper hand corners, muted colors and blocky compression artifacts and poorly translated subtitles. The video looked like something you might stream via Real Player circa 1995. Needless to say, I took the voucher. What pisses me off is they waited till everyone was seated and had already paid for food to even present this option. The offering of a voucher instead of a straight refund also pisses me off. I paid cash for my ticket, to say nothing of being out gas money, parking & concession costs. Offering a voucher doesn’t affect their bottom line at all.

I receive daily marketing emails from SIFF. This is exactly the kind of information that could be provided in advance via email, a twitter feed, etc. They do have the emails of a good percentage of people purchasing tickets and a simple database lookup would give them the emails of a lot of people who had purchased tickets. It would be nice if they had spent one iota of effort to save me some time and money.

For the last couple festivals, I’ve encountered inconsiderately handled issues such as this at two or more screenings. Last year, I was at a screening during which the audio kept breaking up every couple minutes for 10-20 seconds at time, during which you couldn’t hear the dialogue. I fought for and got a refund, as none was pro-actively offered. I later spoke to someone who went to a later screening of the same film and reported the same issue and lack of consideration.

I don’t know where they got the video, but I’ve already found superior copies of it available online. As everyone but those involved in the industry seem to have grasped, the real reason illegal downloads are flourishing isn’t the free vs cost issue, it is that piracy offers a superior experience than what can be had legally. I am earnestly considering just scrapping SIFF next year and spending more quality time with Netflix streaming, Hulu, the several independent film channels I have on my dish, etc. This little infographic from Making Light sums up the issue quite nicely: