photo credit: j wynia

When my grandparents on the Wynia side moved out of the farmhouse and into senior/assisted/nursing homes, a lot of their things were spread to various family members. We all went to the house and the question was posed whether we wanted any of their stuff (yes, those kinds of moments are weird).

Many members of the family had always wanted the china or the old baby buggy, etc. When I was asked, I thought back to Grandpa's slideshows, in the dark, those old images up on the screen. I asked if I could have the slides. There was a strange look and I remember someone asking if that was really all I wanted. I said "Yes" and have had those big boxes for several years.

I started scanning them a couple of different times, but life got in the way. However a month or 2 ago, I decided I needed to get back on it and committed to getting them all scanned. I've been slowly and steadily working my through the boxes in my evenings and weekends for the past couple of weeks as well as figuring out and improving the workflow for scanning them.

At first, I had hoped to use my Mac to do the scanning, in large part because I do like Applescript for chaining things like Photoshop together with other apps in a workflow as well as easily attaching actions to folders. Alas, my slide scanner (the one with 7200dpi optical resolution) does NOT work with anything but Windows.

So, I set things up on Windows, with a Photoshop macro to do the triggering of the TWAIN driver and capturing the image and an Autohotkey text snippet to uniquely name the output files with a timestamp. Autohotkey does a pretty good job of that sort of thing. You can either have a keystroke like CTRL+ALT+T that spits out a chunk of text or an abbreviation that always gets replaced when you type it, no matter where. If it wasn't obvious, you want to be careful you don't name your abbreviations into something that might get triggered by accident.

For this one, I just used this one line in an .ahk for CTRL+ALT+T inserting the current timestamp. I hit that key chord when Photoshop prompts for a name.

^!t::Send, %A_Now%

Makes the whole process a series of quick actions, punctuated by waiting for the scanner to do its thing. Click. Wait. Punch the naming chord and Enter. Wait. Repeat.

Now, I can't move on from the scanning without mentioning something that I find puzzling. From all appearances, scanning software and drivers appear to be written on The Island that Time Forgot.

I bought my first scanner in 1994 for something like $300. It was a little handheld gizmo that did all of 256 shades of gray. The software that came with it for Windows 3.1 looked like nearly everything else that year. It had that look of "multimedia CD-ROM" that was all the rage.

What's strange is that with 4 scanners in my office right now, all of the software that came with it looks almost exactly the same and has the same kind of crappy problems. These apps (it should be noted that this is on the Windows side of things. It's better on Mac and even Linux) do things like lock the mouse during the nearly 1 minute the scan actually takes, put progress windows on top of everything else and ensure that you can't minimize it, etc. All of this TWAIN stuff has the same big buttons with crude bevels and horrible usability.

It really seems like they keep TWAIN driver developers isolated from the rest of the world on some island. Every year, they ship a new batch of scanners and requirements to the island and get back a bunch of drivers on CD. They're somehow given copies of Windows stripped of all modern interfaces and keep using the same tools.

I'll grant you that Windows Image Acquisition (WIA) makes that much simpler. Unfortunately, a 3000 dpi scan of 35mm slide film isn't one of the handy presets and WIA doesn't provide a box to enter the DPI, even if the scanner supports more than the maximum in the drop down.

Digressions aside, scanning these images at nice, high resolution and staring into the past prompted further questions about family's history. After being tempted several times before, I finally registered for the 14 day trial at Ancestry.com.

The site has a couple of nice features, even if the workflow is a bit stilted. As you add people to your family tree, it marks people where they have information that might be attached to that person. You click, examine that information and decide to attach the info or ignore it.

The stilted workflow comes in that it always seems like the thing I'm trying to do next isn't on the screen anywhere or in the place I last used it.

However, the evidence from the few hours I've put into it over the past week or 2 speaks to its effectiveness in spite of those glitches. I've got 577 people added to my family tree and one chain of ancestors that goes back 13 generations to someone born in 1360 in "Warga, Boarnsterhim, Friesland, Netherlands". (Nearly 100% of my tree so far leads straight back to the Netherlands).

1. J Wynia
2. Louis Wynia Jr.
3. Louis S Wynia
4. Sam Wynia
5. Suster DeVries
6. Johanna Wynia
7. Eeltje S Wynia
8. S Jans or Wijnia
9. Foekes or Wijnia
10. Sijtses or Nijda
11. S Sijes or Nijdam
12. Willems or Nijda
13. Willem W Nijdam
14. Willem W Nijdam
15. Sijts Ids
16. S Van Idsinga
17. Ferckje G Aytta
18. Gerbeth Aytta - b1360

I can definitely see how sites like Ancestry.com have consumed all of the hobby time for a lot of folks. This is definitely some interesting stuff to dig through. If you've ever been curious yourself, it's worth checking out.

Photo: François Rejeté

I use Wink to create the occasional screencast. I frequently use them to illustrate the flow through a set of wireframes, etc. Often, a short video is the best way to explain how something works on a PC and Wink is a great, free way to do that.

Unfortunately, if you use Wink to do your screencaps, you can easily screw things up and lose all of your screenshots. So, I prefer to take the screenshots outside Wink and import them. I've also then got them for whatever purpose I want.

I've used a variety of tools to do this, but this weekend, ran across a useful little commandline tool that dumps screenshots to a directory and names uniquely according to pattern. MiniCap has quite a few features itself, and if you want a more robust GUI version, called Screenshot Captor that does a LOT more, including blurring all but the active window. Both are free, but with nag screens. Regardless, these tools are worth registration anyway. I actually found it via the same site's great collection of Autohotkey scripts that do all kinds of useful crap.

What I wanted was to just hit one key from anywhere in Windows and a JPG or PNG just shows up in the directory. I already have an Autohotkey script running all the time to do things like turn "*sig" into my email/forum signature or Win+J to launch an SSH tunnel and a browser (along with a bunch of other stuff as my "J" macro).
Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Marcel van Schooten

While I'm thinking about the grander ideas around attention, I'm also prototyping and experimenting with the little bits that will make up whatever I end up with. Part of that is wanting to track what windows are open and how often.

Aside from this generally supporting my idea that recording as much as possible is a necessary step to figuring a LOT of stuff out, this has direct applications. The most obvious that jumps to mind is sorting a Start menu by actual time of use instead of the arbitrary methods used by Windows.

This is a VERY simple Autohotkey script that I wrote during the "Ambient Findability" presentation at SXSW last week. (I actually got quite a bit of stuff done during several of the panels). At any rate, it checks for whatever window has primary focus every 5 seconds. The title of that window is dumped into a text file.


#Persistent
SetTimer, DescribeWindow, 5000
return
DescribeWindow:
WinGetActiveStats, Title, Width, Height, X, Y
FileAppend %Title% `n, window_log.txt
return


Obviously, a more robust implementation would be better, but it goes to show just how simple some of the recording can actually be.

Features that should really be present would include:

• Only logging when the new primary window is new and recording the time on the previous one.
• Detecting mouse/keyboard movement or screensaver kicking in. This would indicate that the window that's presently focused isn't actually in front of a person and the logging should pause until someone's back at the helm.
• Parsing out things like the app name (Firefox) from the document loaded (page title). While both are useful data points, they are seperate. If I juggle 300 Word docs in a day, the fact they're all in Word is important, but knowing which documents I use most often is also important. This script jams both together.
• File management to ensure that this thing doesn't grow unchecked. Having been on the problem side of more than one server outage caused by a 2GB logfile that someone "forgot" to manage with rotation, I know how quickly this can sneak up on you.

P.S. To keep the attention stuff from overflowing, here are a couple of other bits.

• I registered a domain and set up a placeholder site at Attenable.com (during the DIY panel at SXSW (Hey, I got inspired)) for whatever I polish up for this whole topic. Not sure what shape that will take.
• I'm talking with Garrick Van Buren this week to talk about attention as a podcast interview.