Digital Camera Clubs

PamelaMcLean is organizing digital camera clubs in Nigeria and Ricardo is helping with a photo editing course. See also SteveThompson's class's photo exchange with a Nigerian school

Camera for Blogging with MarginalInternetAccess

GregWolff, August 16, 2007: Hi Andrius - TiddlyWiki on a flash drive works great as an editor. I've supported a few experiments in Venezuala favella's with this approach (generally use PC's in telecenters). One addition for "editing" away from a PC is to use paper, pencil, and digital camera (use an SD card / USB combo that works in a camera). A little plugin in the tiddlywiki finds the images and displays them in the editor -- kind of like a visual blog. Easy to augment with audio/video as well. Best part is no need for special hardware -- total cost of system is just cheap camera/cellphone + SD card.

AndriusKulikauskas, August 16, 2007: But the camera costs 150 USD+, yes? although perhaps we can find used ones on eBay for 50+? This sounds good for uploading pictures. But how could this be used for reading emails?

GregWolff, August 16, 2007: Camera costs fall extremely quickly ... and yes, secondary markets make them even cheaper. For reading the wiki (and email embedded in tiddlywiki) you could 1) print it out and/or 2) turn each tiddler/email into an image which can be viewed on the camera. Same code that does sync could generate the .png versions of the text items.

AndriusKulikauskas, August 16, 2007: I think printing it out is possible only in exceptional cases due to cost. I don't know if reading text on a camera is realistic...

GregWolff, August 17, 2007: However, I do believe the cell phone is the more likely success path for you. The advantages of having audio input/output is large for populations that do not speak English. May be the thing to do is to couple the purchase of very cheap cell phones with a village "hub" or "librarian" -- the local person who is literate enough to type. The librarian could lease tablet PC's the same way that phone ladies in Bangladesh lease cell phones and resell typing/web services. This makes a lot of sense, especially for the newer wifi handsets. The design for that Librarian kiosk -- essentially the software package-- is definitely something that UnaMesa could support and hold in the public trust.

From Ricardo - I like the idea of photographing pencil-and-paper text. It means the number of people who benefit from a Flash Drive Editor or computer isn't limited to one user. Anyone can send messages by attaching a JPEG photo or flatbed-scan to an email. It would be good to look at other ways to get text from paper into the electronic world, especially if we can use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to convert it to ASCII text for editing, and to reduce the charges for sending data via the internet, using GPRS Mobile Phones which charge by the kilobyte

(see http://www.worknets.org/wiki.cgi?InternetAccessByMobilePhone).

Some initial ideas are :-

• Letters written with a manual typewriter should be good enough for OCR programs to recognise, maybe after a little photo-enhancement, such as thickening or sharpening the image.
• Maybe we can get people to write characters as block-capitals in boxes or on cheap pads of squared paper, like the forms commercial companies use when they want to OCR your details. The written-text could include an email header, the To-address, From-address, CC, BCC and Subject line. This would mean someone could OCR and send a stack of paper 'emails' each day using one computer. The email replies could be printed on paper.

Viewing text files on a Camera LCD Display or TV Output

For people without a computer, the page describes a way to format and convert any type of text file to a set of JPEG photos for all the pages, for viewing on a digital camera display.

The JPEGs can be loaded by USB Cable onto a camera and viewed on the LCD Display. I've tried it with my Canon camera and it works fine. The text was formatted in a word processor into 40 or 50 column lines, to suit a small display. The camera also has a TV Output, so I connected that to a TV and you can view pages on a TV Screen. You step through the pages using the camera left-right image-selection controls. This means you've turned a cheap camera into an eBook/text/web-page/Wiki viewer. The document can contain pictures on pages, not just text.

Pages can also be transferred to a mobile phone handset for viewing (untested), loaded into a Digital Photo Frame or burnt to DVD for display using a $30 DVD Player + TV (tested). Some Digital Photo Frames can display ASCII TXT files now, so they could display the unformatted text from Wiki pages. Some adverts say they are eBook/TXT viewers, with no more detail. This could mean they display an eBook file format or just display eBooks in TXT format.

Ricardo (England) - [email protected]

DigitalCameras

We're shopping for a digital camera in Lithuania. AndriusKulikauskas August 13, 2007 19:01 CET

We chose the Fuji A900 for 599 LTL.

Suggested cameras:

• SONY DSCW85 999 LTL at Elektromarkt, Akropolis, Vilnius plus a memory stick for 123 LTL

2-Dimensional Barcode File Transfer

It's an article I wrote for the One laptop Per Child WIKI site, about storing up to 2K Bytes of data in little square 2D Barcodes (see picture in article).

I've experimented and managed to store and recover a text file in one, and a very short MP3 sound file. You can store any kind of file in them, such as a small web-page or Wiki page. It's a bit of a novelty, a solution looking for a problem. I've got a ZIP file with all the programs I used.

I think some commercial firms use them in Japan. 2D Barcode Stickers on notice-boards or printed in magazines have adverts for pop-bands, products, etc, hidden in the barcode. You take a picture on a camera-phone or scan it, then software on the camera decodes it. There are websites mentioned in my article that can encode a text file into a 2D Barcode and extract one. There are also lumps of open-source software that can do it.

If anyone can think of a worthwhile use for 2D Barcodes, please add it here or email me. I've only mentioned it because it seems like a fun thing to play around with.

Ricardo - [email protected]

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Fri, 07 Nov 08 11:30:07 +0000 vijay: I want to make a magic eye for door with small camera and LCD display! pl help