On Friday Sarah and I went to the
Mariners vs Rangers game at Safeco Field with Eric and Jane. The Mariners lost but then before the game the announcement made outside the stadium guaranteed the best service and a good time, not a
winning game -- and they were right about the good time.
The night before, we saw The Hangover which was very funny and included Zach Galifianakis who was great. Incidentally, take a look at some of Zach's Between Two Ferns.
Last weekend Sarah and I mounted the TV to the wall which was exciting and we saw a mouse in the house!
I've hooked up the printer/scanner to the Media Center PC since I leave that on all the time anyway so we can have a networked printer. I wanted to hook up the scanner in a somewhat similar fashion but I didn't want to install HP's software (other than the drivers of course). So I've written my own script for scanning in PowerShell that does the following:
Here's the actual code from my scan.ps1 file:
param([Switch] $ShowProgress, [switch] $OpenCompletedResult)
$filePathTemplate = "C:\users\public\pictures\scanned\scan {0} {1}.{2}";
$time = get-date -uformat "%Y-%m-%d";
[void]([reflection.assembly]::loadfile( "C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\System.Drawing.dll"))
$deviceManager = new-object -ComObject WIA.DeviceManager
$device = $deviceManager.DeviceInfos.Item(1).Connect();
foreach ($item in $device.Items) {
$fileIdx = 0;
while (test-path ($filePathTemplate -f $time,$fileIdx,"*")) {
[void](++$fileIdx);
}
if ($ShowProgress) { "Scanning..." }
$image = $item.Transfer();
$fileName = ($filePathTemplate -f $time,$fileIdx,$image.FileExtension);
$image.SaveFile($fileName);
clear-variable image
if ($ShowProgress) { "Running OCR..." }
$modiDocument = new-object -comobject modi.document;
$modiDocument.Create($fileName);
$modiDocument.OCR();
if ($modiDocument.Images.Count -gt 0) {
$ocrText = $modiDocument.Images.Item(0).Layout.Text.ToString().Trim();
$modiDocument.Close();
clear-variable modiDocument
if (!($ocrText.Equals(""))) {
$fileAsImage = New-Object -TypeName system.drawing.bitmap -ArgumentList $fileName
if (!($fileName.EndsWith(".jpg") -or $fileName.EndsWith(".jpeg"))) {
if ($ShowProgress) { "Converting to JPEG..." }
$newFileName = ($filePathTemplate -f $time,$fileIdx,"jpg");
$fileAsImage.Save($newFileName, [System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageFormat]::Jpeg);
$fileAsImage.Dispose();
del $fileName;
$fileAsImage = New-Object -TypeName system.drawing.bitmap -ArgumentList $newFileName
$fileName = $newFileName
}
if ($ShowProgress) { "Saving OCR Text..." }
$property = $fileAsImage.PropertyItems[0];
$property.Id = 40092;
$property.Type = 1;
$property.Value = [system.text.encoding]::Unicode.GetBytes($ocrText);
$property.Len = $property.Value.Count;
$fileAsImage.SetPropertyItem($property);
$fileAsImage.Save(($fileName + ".new"));
$fileAsImage.Dispose();
del $fileName;
ren ($fileName + ".new") $fileName
}
}
else {
$modiDocument.Close();
clear-variable modiDocument
}
if ($ShowProgress) { "Done." }
if ($OpenCompletedResult) {
. $fileName;
}
else {
$result = dir $fileName;
$result | add-member -membertype noteproperty -name OCRText -value $ocrText
$result
}
}I ran into a few issues:
I'm excited by HTML5's video tag as are plenty of other people. Once that comes about and once media fragments are adopted, linking to or embedding a portion of a video will be as easy as using the correct fragment on your URL thanks to the Media Fragments WG who has been hard at work since the last time I looked at fragments.
However, until that work is embraced by browsers, embedding portions of videos will continue to require work specific to the site from which you are embedding the video. On the YouTube blog they wrote about how to "link to the best parts in your videos", using a fragment syntax like '#t=1m15s' to start playback of the associated video at 1 minute and 15 seconds. Of course if you want to embed part of a Hulu video it will be different. Although I haven't found an authoritative source describing the URL syntax to use, you can follow Hulu's video guide on linking to part of a video and note how the URL changes as you adjust the slider on the time-line. It looks like their syntax for linking to a Hulu page is to add '?c=[start time in seconds](:[end time in seconds])' with the colon and end time optional in order to link to a portion of a video. And the syntax for embedding appears to be "http://www.hulu.com/embed/.../[start time in seconds](/[end time in seconds])" again with the end time optional.
For more sites, check out the Media Fragments WG's list of existing applications' proprietary fragmenting schemes.
The weekend before the previous, Sarah and I moved our belongings into the
new house and spent a lot of time packing and unpacking, and now we're officially living there (interested Facebook friends can find my
new address or just ask me). The Saturday of the previous weekend Sarah's family came over for a half house warming and half Sarah's birthday celebration which was fun and served to force us to do
more unpacking and forced me to take trips to Home Depot, Bed Bath and Beyond, etc. On Sunday, Sarah and I went out to her favorite restaurant and she opened her gifts that I had to hide to keep
her from opening before her birthday. Happy Birthday Sarah!
While at Home Depot I had trouble finding what I was actually looking for, but I did find everything I needed to terminate the Cat5e cables that are wired in the house. Each room has a wall plate with two RJ45 sockets, both sockets wired to Cat5e cable. One of the cables per plate was already hooked up to a standard phone service punchdown board and the other cables per plate were all hanging unterminated next to the punchdown board. So now I've terminated them all with RJ45 connectors and hooked them up to my hub, wireless router, cable modem, etc. I had the same sort of fun setting all that up as I did playing with model train sets as a child. Hopefully no therapy will be required to figure out why that is.
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