Going Digital... Painfully digital.

There's nothing quite like spending countless hours of your life slaving over a flatbed scanner, and trudging through the ascii fields of neverendor in the digitaurus rexus hades galaxy. Uncool, to the n double factorial degree.

There is some hope, however, for us mere mortals who foolishly embark down the rabbit hole into the realm of pseudo-reality -the nether space which sits so seemingly innocuously between our world and the land of dreams, the space in which reality becomes coarse, and vaguely familiar. All who dare enter, beware. The hope, of which I previously spake, is that you are NOT ALONE! Alas! Thine misery is spread! :)

My personal experience with the daunting task of digitizing all records, papers, books, music, videos, etc... began very recently (July / August 2011). Armed with my flatbed scanner, and many over-priced textbooks, I set forth this simple goal: to digitize all of my school books by the end of the summer (the end of September). I soon realized that a flatbed scanner is a sub-prime tool when current human life-spans are factored into the efficiency calculations.

Slow to be discouraged (i.e. stupid, or maybe naive at best), I began researching the methods employed by intelligencia web-wide. Ahhhh.... the sticky inter-web catches much. My initial (very short) research session turned up little usable information. Ahhhh.... the power of keywords unknown. Ironically, the knowledge I was seeking popped up randomly on the front page of a web-site (that I had just come across) known as: http://www.hackaday.com/ . I love serendipity. And hackaday.com.

Hack-A-Day had featured the following website and book scanner design: http://www.diybookscanner.org/

Somehow, I never managed to search something as simple as "book scanner"... hmm..... although, my initial search was literally one google query regarding digitizing books... not scanning them... because that was what I was failing at, scanning them.

My next blog will delve into the devilish details of applying ScanTailor modifications to a scanned set of pages (using a camera, somewhat like the design that is referenced above) and using the ImageMagick (TM) "convert.exe" program to apply Retinex image processing to the scanned pages (like NASA does to its images).

Stay tuned! :)