Monday, November 21, 2005

POS POS

I've been trying unsuccessfully to bid on several used POS PC on eBay. Eva's passion for trying out new recipes printed off from the internet inspired me. Why not bring the internet to the kitchen, and along with it, access to email and our video and music collection? Unnecessary? Most assuredly, especially considering the size of our kitchen. But I have a rather expensive dream (both in terms of time I spend dreaming, and it's likely cost), that I will build a wired home someday. And this seems like a good place to start, because of its inspired utility. If this works, I may just try the bathroom next.

It has been harder than first thought, mostly because I'm cheap. POS systems start out cheap, but even old ones are sought after. I started out thinking I could get an old laptop, but even old laptops are still quite pricey. Also eBay laptops are really hard to find near complete at the basement price. Plus, who wants to use a mouse in the kitchen, whether it's a touchpad or not? No, it would make more sense to use a touchscreen, maybe even with a touchscreen keyboard. It would be nearly impossible to wire a touchscreen monitor any distance past 6 feet so I've settled on a sort of thin client. The POS systems inspired me because of their all-in-one designs, usually including a rugged touchscreen. Ideally this machine could boot off the network, wirelessly, or using a vnc client. Sound would be harder, but not impossible.

Would a 200mhz client do this. I'm guessing it would be close. But no matter, as long as it's somewhat affordable, it's a place to start living and building my dream.

Tuesday, November 8, 2005

Mechanical Turk

Last week I read a piece on slashdot about amazon's Mechanical Turk. Since humans still can do even some trivial tasks, like photo recognition, better than computers, they pay you to do said trivial tasks. Of course it was slashdotted within minutes, so I've only recently been able to try it myself.

The easiest way to get started is to find a group of hits, typically from large city, and try to find a given business address in a series of photos. The photos appear to be captures from a DV video taken from a moving vehicle. In a couple of the photos you can actually see the vehicle used to record in the reflection of windows. Chicago has a white Chevy Blazer.

You either match or discard all of the photos. You can return the series or "hit" as well. You get 3 cents per photo "approved". Approved doesn't necessarily seem to mean that there was a good match, as you can discard all of them if they suck.

3 cents seems like easy money. You can look at photos pretty quick, right? Unfortunately, it takes alot longer than i first figured. The photos are quite large, and since they're captures from video, they're grainy as well. Not to mention every one is street level. Sometimes, and in some cities, it's easy to match the address number with the a street address in the photo. Other times, you get pictures of parking lots.

It's still quite a slow interface, regardless of the size of photos being displayed.
I've switched to Opera, which seems to display and cache better. But before you can work on a series, you have to accept it. Then, if no one else has worked on it, you wait for it to load, sometimes again, and select an option. So for about a 20 seconds, you possibly get 3 cents. woot. Your answer is either approved or rejected, or abandoned. Since each group of pictures in the city your working in has an expiration date, it seems that if you work on hundreds of photos and their not approved in time, nobody gets the money. good to know.

So at this point, i've stopped dreaming this is a quick way to get easy money. It has proved fun though. I've been working in Chicago mostly, and since I've been there several times, it's fun to find recognizable landmarks, like my friends backyard!

Lots of room for improvement though. Several times you can follow the logic of addresses. you're looking for 123 damen ave. and you're only shown 119, 121, and the side of a truck. You know it's that corner in the last photo, but there's a ups truck parked otu front. Also, sometimes the capture is only of half of the store front. It might work if they gave you crop tools, but there's no way to specify.
Many businesses appear vacant, so you can infer their address, but who's to say the admin will notice? There should be a highlight feature, or a reasoning field.
Also, there's some common sense reasons not to pick the best photo. Sure that showcases the beautiful script sign out front, but the next photo doesn't show the adult bookstore next door.

So it's fun for now. hope I get my money. My scrolling finger is worn out.