In LA

Lunch at the Backwater Café in Lowell, MI

Lest I seem too dour about the food I’ve encountered during my stay here in Michigan, I’d like to point out that there have been some highlights.

Lowell township does have one reasonably fancy joint, “The Flat River Grill”, which serves tasty and colorful food, wine, &c.

The more commonplace local cuisine, can be good enough to make its characteristic beige color seem like a benefit. I enjoyed the hot turkey sandwich that can be seen at the top of this post. The Backwater Café also bakes their own bread. Fresh bread is never a bad thing, right?

Fresh bread at the Backwater Café

I would like to do less eating-out and more cooking at home, but given the hours we work on location that can be difficult. Luckily, this coming Monday, I won’t have to cook or eat at all.

I like writing, sketching, and I like to play with the odd electronic gadget, so I thought this IOGear “Mobile Digital Scribe” (AKA the GPEN200N) seemed an intriguing device. This weirdly technologized pen can be had for $44.95 at Amazon.com, at least until the end of September.¹

I bought and received mine, taking funds from my geeky-and-probably-unnecessary-device budget. A close look reveals that there are two parts to this gadget; The pen and the base station. The base station clips to a piece or pad of paper, and is used to record the movement of the pen, it features a single button that can be held-down to turn the base station on and off², and can be pressed quickly in order to indicate that the user is sketching a new page (up to 50 pages worth of scribblings can be recorded at a stretch). The base connects to the computer via USB cable, and the included software will instantly transfer any recorded notes to a specified location on the computer as TIFF images. The USB connection also charges the base station’s internal battery. The pen uses a couple of those tiny watch or hearing aid batteries, and shuts itself off whenever its not moving, so apparently they don’t need to be replaced often.³

I connected the base to my computer, updated its firmware to 1.76 so that it’d work with Mac OS X, rebooted my computer, unplugged the base, clipped it to some paper, wrote a bit, then plugged the base back into the computer. Everything I wrote transferred over to the computer automatically as a tiff file (deposited into a folder I’d pre-designated), and looked very very good. I’d guess that the base unit stores pen movements in a vector-based format, which is then rendered to a tiff file after it’s transferred to the computer.

I tried the bundled OCR⁴ software, “MyScript Notes Light” on Windows XP inside VMware Fusion. On my first test, it worked surprisingly well. Subsequent tests were not so successful. I think it gets confused when it tries to emulate the layout of text written in lines that are not completely horizontal. I also scribbled a couple of Chinese characters (ni hao) and it recognized those and converted them to text (in a separate pass with the OCR software set to simplified Chinese). There’s no reason that the high-resolution TIFF images created by the pen couldn’t be opened in more capable OCR software, perhaps resulting in more usable transcriptions.

Mouse mode does work, the pen can be used to draw and drag on the computer. A click can be executed by pressing the point of the pen down or by clicking the pen’s side button. There’s a bit of lag, which would suck for gaming, but mouse mode could potentially be of use with photoshop (note: the pen is not pressure sensitive).

I half-busted one of the base unit’s clips trying to clip it to a stack of paper larger than it can accept. So my recommendation would be “don’t do what I did”. Other than that hiccup, my thoughts on the IOGear Mobile Digital Scribe (or GPEN200N) are positive so far.

1. It’s currently marked down from $129 (WTFLOL) to $64.95, and then there’s a $20 mail-in rebate. [↩]
2. It took me a day to figure this out –the little guide it ships with says nothing about this, and holding the button produces some bizarre twiddlings of items on the base station’s LCD display, animations that don’t appear to portend an imminent shutdown, before it indeed shuts down. [↩]
3. Whether or not those batteries will ever need to replaced will depend on whether or not I tire quickly of this new toy or actually find it useful and take notes with it daily. [↩]
4. Optical Character Recognition – it converts one’s writing into text. [↩]

A closeup, in case you’re too lazy to click on the previous photo and then wait for the large version to load, or in case you still couldn’t read the text once it loaded. Now that you’ve read this far, it’s of paramount importance that you know what was printed on the bottom of the plate by a factory worker in a faraway land. Otherwise all that time you spent reading this post? Wasted.

The photo was taken (and stitched) within a few feet of this location:

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1. Stitched from a few photos on iPhone with the very fun ‘AutoStitch’ app. [↩]

I’d have titled this “L’shana Tova Y’all”, but it appears that actor Levar Burton beat me to the punch.

After a few weeks of living in a hotel room in Grand Rapids, I’ve packed up my things and moved into a shared apartment with the film editor here in Lowell, MI, just a couple of blocks from the editing room. It’s nice to no longer have to drive 25 miles to and from work every day. Tonight I used that extra time to prepare my own dinner rather than eat out. Hooray for homey food that isn’t beige.

Seen on main street today while walking over to the Flat River Grill to pick up lunch for editorial.

Ernest Borgnine, the vivacious 92-year-old actor who stars in the film on which I’m working ( The Genesis Code), dropped some impressive words of wisdom on a Fox News reporter a while back when asked for his anti-aging secret.

What he said.

I guess Michigan must have a serious “motor vehicle fuel theft” problem. That and the most serious-looking police officer/models in the country.

I saw this wine bottle on the clearance rack at Meijers and, though this alcoholic beverage likely has nothing to do with any two-wheeled self-balancing electric scooter, I couldn’t help but remember all the Segway hype from 2001.

The quote in this post’s Title is from Segway creator Dean Kamen, who has invented many extremely-cool devices, but his predictions for a future built around that scooter have yet to be realized. This Slate article does a good job recapping the more outlandish bits of Segway hype and expectations.

I remember rumors circulating before the Segway launch that Kamen was going to release some kind of antigravity flying machine based on the Stirling engine. I have no idea what that means, but the diagram of a Stirling engine over at Wikipedia is the most unintentionally suggestive engineering-related image I’ve ever seen. I’ve put a tiny thumbnail of it at right, but for greater impact view it at full resolution over at Wikipedia.

Hints of chocolate, blackcurrant, and outsized expectations.