Ben's Bits

As regular readers will know I'm quite interested in the sharing of information. This includes support for projects such as the Internet Archive. One such example of their fantastic work is the sharing of public domain books which have been scanned, many by the ill-fated Microsoft book scanning project. Unfortunately, the Google Books project is (ironically perhaps) much more restrictive on licensing. My own feeling is that these books should be shared as much as possible and attaching new licensing restrictions to public domain books just because you have scanned them is ludicrous.

One potential solution to this is to scan books yourself but those that have done even more than a few pages of a book on a flatbed scanner know that this is a long a tedious process. The commercial scanners used by Microsoft, Google and the like are much more efficient but also much more expensive. Luckily the do-it-yourselfers have come along with their own book scanning solution. It's not as elegant as the commercial scanners but it's definitely inexpensive. Personally, I'm hoping someone comes along with something in the middle. A pre-built book scanning frame and platen which you can add cameras and accessories to and use with the open source software which has been developed.

You can watch the original Instructables video on building a DIY book scanner or visit the new DIY Book Scanning site with news and forums.

If you're brave and resourceful or just desperate enough it is often possible to bring back electronics from the dead after they have had liquid spilled on them. I've recently been working on a friend's laptop which had water spilled on it. I've gone from it doing nothing at all to being apparently fully operational with the exception of the LCD backlight which I'm still working on. Note this can be a long process which requires drying time and lots of patience. This could easily stretch to weeks and many hours of assembly and dis-assembly work which is why it's often a better bet to just replace the problematic component.

My own process involves dis-assembling everything and giving it a good scrubbing with a toothbrush and some very pure electronics grade alcohol followed by a scrubbing with contact cleaner. I then let everything dry out for a day or two and repeat. Re-assemble everything and test. Many times only certain things will not be working anymore which can give you some hints as to where to look for corrosion and areas of the printed circuit board which need further attention. It may take several iterations of this process before you arrive at something useful. One bit of good news about those small surface-mounted components which are difficult to replace in the field is that they are much easier to scrub down than their larger counterparts.

For more information and tips on bringing back liquid damaged electronics I suggest reading this article at GRYNX.

I love Google Apps, the sevice which hosts email, calendaring, online docs and chat for your own domain name free of charge at Google. Sure there are some disadvantages and I still don't like working in the Google Docs word processor too much but the email and calendaring are great. I also love the iGoogle service where you can customize a homepage with RSS feeds and include a Gmail and Google Docs module.

The problem is that internal communication at Google between these projects is pretty much non-existant, at least it appears that way. iGoogle integrates wonderfully with the consumer Gmail and Google Docs service but not at all with the hosted Google Apps service which is becoming even more popular as companies, particularly universities and colleges, around the world start to adopt it. One of my customers was particularly annoyed that documents created with their hosted app couldn't show up on their iGoogle page and asked me to find a solution. After much frustrations the best solution I could come up with is a series of hacked together iGoogle apps which replicate as much of the functionality as possible from the official Gmail, Calendar and Google Docs iGoogle apps.

1) Google Docs for hosted domains iGoogle gadget

2) Google Mail for hosted domains iGoogle gadget

3) Google Talk for hosted domains iGoogle gadget

4) Google Calendar for hosted domains iGoogle gadget

5) Google Tasks for hosted domains iGoogle gadget

Of course, this is really just a workaround and doesn't do as nice a job of integration as the regular apps do. In related news the Google account authorization is a mess because of this as well. For example, you can log into the iGoogle site (and other Google services) using a non-gmail address which is linked to a regular gmail account but this is confusing if you also have a hosted apps mail account on that domain. A mess all around. Google...if you're listening you really need to make some improvements to how your hosted apps service integrates with the rest of your services and sites!