Hey all,
I’ll be working for Hearthstone Arts this weekend at the Highland Games in Brookfield….come on out and say hi and see some cool Scottish games.
http://chicago.timeout.com/events/city-picks/60725/scottish-festival-and-highland-games
see you there,
Kilted
Karl is totally in love with this:
check out the video…it runs for 1hour 20 mins but is sooooo worth it.
ttfn
Wow…ok so its been awhile since I’ve posted, but I’m hoping to correct that now that some things have calmed down…er…sorta kinda. I wanted to take a second to post about a website I found called www.beepmystuff.com. This is a free online personal library database. It allows you to use your web-cam to scan the bar-codes on your DVDs, music, video games, books, etc and it compiles a library for you with all the pertinent information. The site searches Amazon using the 12 digit bar-code number (not the ISBN number) and pulls out all the info on your product and neatly organizes it for you. BeepMyStuff even has a lending function to help you keep track of who you lent items to. For awhile I had been considering an open source software called Koha suggested from John Wohlers. However, as John had pointed out to me this is an intensive system primarily designed for library technicians at facilities and educational institutions. The BeepMyStuff site is much simpler and gives the user multiple routes to add their items to their personal library. It not only allows you to scan the barcode, but you can search the net by Title or EAN/UPC (12 digit code) or if you have a very rare item not easily found on the net it has a manual description page that you can fill out.
The scan function is a bit tricky to use but that may be due to my crappy webcam which lacks autofocus and has a low frames per second rate. I was able to get a couple items by scan but I mostly gave up on my webcam and just used the search functions. Even abandoning the scan feature, I was able to load up 24 DVDs and books in under 5 minutes so things went very fast.
The webpage is nice and clean and easy to understand. If you use OpenID that is supported on this site for my more technical friends. BeepMyStuff also has an API in case anyone cares to do some developing. Another nice feature is the friends RSS feed which I think is a great way to let friends know what’s the new book, movie, CD etc that you are enjoying and giving them all the information they need to get that same item because it is in the RSS feed.
If anyone tries this let me know what you think…of course my library is under… kiltedbehemoth
ta — (not what you are thinking Gabi)