The folks over at Carnegie Mellon University have got a really good thing goin’ with reCaptcha.

I recently installed it as a plugin to this site to stop spam and hide email links, but when I found out what the “read books” part of the tag-line referred to, I had to share…

To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using “Optical Character Recognition” (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

But if a computer can’t read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here’s how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times.

Source: http://www.recaptcha.net/learnmore.html

So guys, what are we waiting for? Lets digitize the world while we de-spam our inboxes!

This is a great tip for all mac users who rely on the Hide/Unhide Application feature on the mac. This tip allows you enable a hidden feature of the dock which shows hidden applications as semi-transparent, allowing you to quickly identify which applications are hidden and which are shown with a simple glance at the dock. Here’s a couple of screenshots to show you what it looks like (click for a larger image).

As you can see, this can be very useful when you have a lot of applications open at the same time. To set your dock to appear this way, open Terminal (~/Applications/Utilities/Terminal) and paste these two lines:

defaults write com.apple.Dock showhidden -bool YES
killall Dock

If at any time you would like to revert to Apple’s default setting paste these two lines:

defaults write com.apple.Dock showhidden -bool NO
killall Dock

I saw this great tip on MacTips.org (by AppleGazette.com). For this and other great Mac Tips, visit their site.

Recently, my Dad wrote about the Lighthead Software application Caffeine. This app allows you to prevent your Mac from going to sleep at the click of a button. It’s a very useful app if you are running a process that shouldn’t be stopped.

If you want to take this one step further and allow closing of your Mac’s screen while allowing it to continue working. To do this, you simply need to download an application developed by semaja2 called InsomniaX. This program can also come in handy if you want to use an external monitor as your only display but don’t want to leave your laptop open.

Please feel free to leave your comments on this or other posts.

I’ve seen this clip several times but I think it means more to me now that I understand the concepts behind the Web 2.0 movement. Have a look, it’s under five minutes long and truly inspiring.

Earlier today I dropped my MacBook out of my backpack. I took it out of the incase sleeve (hoping it would be alright) and discovered that one of the corners was badly bent from the fall. Here are some pictures:

Pretty intense huh? The entire machine (as far as I’ve tested) works. The power-port even works! It doesn’t look very pretty though. I’m going to contact AppleCare as soon as I’m done with school and will post updates on twitter about how they handle the situation.

**UPDATE** Apple was very gracious and replaced the top (keyboard and all) after they bent the underlying metal back into place. Thanks Apple! **UPDATE**

Over the weekend I set up my new website (right now it only contains a blog) and imported all the current posts. Please visit it here.

Thanks and I hope you enjoy!

After installing Ubuntu using Wubi, everything worked fine for a few days. After a few days I booted up and was greeted with a terminal-like screen called a BusyBox. After scouring the ubuntu forums and finding several posts explaining how to read the error logs and what-not. All of these “solutions” did not help.

Do I have a solution?

Yes. Boot up into windows and shut down normally. DO NOT HARD RESET! (that’s what’s causing the problem) After windows shuts down, attempt to boot back into ubuntu, it should work this time.

The reason I think it wasn’t working was because when you hard reset your computer you cut all power, therefore disallowing linux to access it’s virtual disk when you start up. If i’m wrong on anything I’ve said, please comment and tell me. Also, if this works for anybody, I’d love to find out. Don’t be afraid to comment!