Huge HP printer
November 26th, 2007
I found this at kottke.org
The cool thing is they designed the industry grade giant printer so it looks like a desktop printer…
I really want to see that printer IRL :-)
Blue River or?
November 23rd, 2007
Henk Hofstra’s blue road in Drachten (Holland) stretches 1000 meters long:
peertopatent.org
November 17th, 2007
@ peertopatent.org you will find a great example of wisdom of crowds.
This basically says it all:
recaptcha for wordpress – I am never reading another SPAM message HA!
November 17th, 2007
I have had it with SPAM, just running this little blog I get loads.
Aksimet helps a lot:
Akismet has caught 42,892 spam for you since you first installed it.
…but I still get some messages that somehow makes it past some spam-algorithm.
AnnnSensua: HI there…My nick is ChicaSensual20…I’m naughty and playful…….wanna see me on my page? …my page!
Naughty and playful – no way, you are selling low quality stolen porn or “whatever”. So I have to get a mail about “whatever” and once again I wonder why the CIA doesn’t hunt down and kill spammers (even if just for practice).
Anyway, before I get a stroke, I think I finally found someone that have come up with a nice solution @ recaptcha.net they have come to the conclusion that so far the spammers have the advantage.
No matter how you twist and turn, your end-user will have to endure some additional cognitive strain typing in words that the blasted SPAM bots cannot read.
The additional cognitive strain would be unnecessary if we killed all people that produce SPAM, but since that is not possible (why is this not possible?) the additional unnecessary cognitive strain is used to helps us determine that you are human and not just a dammed SPAM bot.
recaptcha takes a different approach. The user has to type in two words. One that a computer can read and a computer can’t.
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.
via: recaptcha.net
Basically with recaptcha at least the end-users cognitive strain is used to help digitize books that could not be digitized using OCR scanning alone:
Installing it on wordpress the only bad thing was that it was a bit hard to actually skin/theme the recaptcha (as seen below in my comment section). the original is RED I had to set the theme to WHITE.
I could only do it by opening the actual plugin file: recaptcha.php and change it manually:
/**
* Embeds the reCAPTCHA widget into the comment form.
*
*/
function recaptcha_comment_form() {
//modify the comment form for the reCAPTCHA widget
$recaptcha_js_opts = <<
OPTS;
$comment_string = <<
var RecaptchaOptions = { theme : 'white', tabindex : 5 };
More information can be found at the recaptcha wiki. Anyway, they are making a whole client API so that will probably/hopefully result in some people making clean designs.
Also, a registration is required. You get two keys (I did not bother to figure out why), and you put them in the wordpress admin under the recaptcha plugin.
I recommend this anti-SPAM plugin - stop SPAM, while you help digitizing books =)
