Bob Pritchett

Long ago I bought a box of old player piano rolls with the idea of building some harness to digitize them. (I dreamed of returning to my youth, when I knew what to do with a soldering iron.)

I had a lot of fun imagining different solutions to the problem, and did a bit of research on the mechanics, timing, etc. I just never get around to building anything. And now that I've seen this amazing photo album, I'm okay with that. It's already been done every possible way.

You can download MIDI versions of digitized rolls at the International Association of Mechanical Music Preservationists roll archive.

I leave you with "In the Good Old Summertime" circa 1902.

Posted by Bob Pritchett at 8:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This follow up to Microsoft's Photosynth is spectacular. This makes all the "Now enhance it, and let me look at it from another angle" nonsense in the movies seem not so far away.

Now all they need to do is integrate this technology with live video feeds, and we can be virtual tourists in real time. Or, the most perfectly surveilled police state ever!

Posted by Bob Pritchett at 6:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It was love at first site when I saw the nixie tubes on Hoefler & Frere-Jones' blog. I ordered a clock immediately.

I still need to find the perfect place in the office to show off its warm glow and cross-fading numerals to everyone; until then I'll just have to keep it here on my desk, hypnotizing me...

Posted by Bob Pritchett at 8:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

How many times have you been using an image that just didn't quite fit? Seam carving is the easiest way I've seen yet to give something that little tweak without losing key elements of the photograph. (And it's really cool!)

Sure, you could use Photoshop, but that's a complicated and expensive tool. Sometimes (especially when laying things out with stock images) I just need a little more background to lay some text in, or I need to shrink an image in one dimension without cropping. This looks like the perfect solution.

The easiest place to try it is at rsizr.com, where you can be resizing your own images (or deleting people!) in just moments.

Posted by Bob Pritchett at 11:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I stumbled across this 75 year-old floorplan of the directors' floor in a bank.

Life on the directors' floor looked pretty nice, with the fancy lobbies, meeting rooms, and private dining. But it also looks cut-off from what was happening in the bank, being so removed and isolated from the floors below. How did they stay in touch?

I imagined men ensconced in plush offices with private washrooms and 1930's office technology, sitting alone in deathly quiet rooms for hours on end. I imagined quiet conversations in the dining room and mail arriving once a day. No email. No instant messaging. No interruptions. It seems so slow, so dull, so wonderfully productive...

Posted by Bob Pritchett at 10:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There are some pretty long sentences in the Greek New Testament, and parsing them can lead to large syntax graphs.

Nothing like this, though...

Posted by Bob Pritchett at 11:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Inspired, no doubt, by the Logos Bible Study Bus, Adobe is hitting the road to promote their Adobe Integrated Runtime.

Posted by Bob Pritchett at 9:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I love sushi, and I love eating it at Blue C Sushi, where it rolls by endlessly on a conveyor belt in a cool, high-tech space.

I thought the bar coded serving rings were the height of sushi tech, but it looks like they're going RFID to optimize freshness (and profits!). If only they would open in Bellingham...

Posted by Bob Pritchett at 6:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was talking with a friend about our crazy real estate prices and what comparative bargains must be available in older cities. “Like in Detroit,” I said.

A quick web search shows that houses (a technical definition) in Detroit start at under $1,000. But there are derelict houses everywhere. What does real money buy in a place that’s lost a million people since its peak?

Well, less than a million buys a mansion. A real mansion, with nearly 12,000 square feet on half a city block, nine bedrooms and murals on the ceilings.

Those slightly larger spec homes with granite counters that go for a million around here don’t quite have the same feel…but they’re probably cheaper to heat.

What $975,000 buys:

Detroit, in-town:

Bellingham, in-town:

Posted by Bob Pritchett at 11:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)