[00:20] <karora> snail: I saw a simple book digitisation device last year that was using relatively cheap digital cameras, much smaller than the bookdrive but a similar concept.
[00:39] <snail> karora: there are a number of very, very cheap designs out there. five years ago when we bought ours it was considered very, very cheap too, but things have moved on.
[00:40] <karora> Certainly seems like the right general approach to the job.
[00:42] <snail> the main trick is that if you can about colour reproducibility you need eliminate secondary sources of light and let your bulbs warm up before you start
[00:42] <karora> The enhancements in the 'pro' version would seem well worthwhile for a professional environment, but I'd find it hard to see why you would not do the basic job with DSLRs.
[00:43] <snail> karora: most of the 'pro' versions use DSLRs too. they're just so cheap, reliable and interchangeable.
[19:41] <snail> morning all
[19:41] <ibeardslee> morning
[19:44] <snail> sometimes i really wish nautilus didn't copy USB drives by first building an in-memory list of every file on the drive...
[19:44] <snail> my copy is still going from last night
[19:45] <snail> and taking up so much memory that my PC is almost unusable for anything but IRC
[20:00] <ojwb> morning
[20:31] <ajmitch> morning
[21:22] <snail> does someone know of a nice scriptable commandline tool for putting metadata into PDFs?
[21:26] <Aginor> isn't there a really good pdf library for python?
[21:26] <Aginor> it isn't exactly command line, but it is very scriptable
[21:27] <ajmitch> reportlab?
[21:29] <Atamira> rmorning
[21:33] <ojwb> snail: pdftk?
[21:34] <snail> ojwb: thanks, looking into pdftk now
[21:35] <ojwb> don't think i've used it to set metadata but I have for other stuff
[21:36] <ojwb> says it can do it anyway
[22:03] <snail> looks like perl's Image::ExifTool is the perfect storm for editing PDF (and other image formats) metadata
[23:15] <hads> Anyone think I should sell these; http://www.fit-pc.com/web/
[23:17] <ajmitch> hads: they look like they could be good, what sort of price though?
[23:19] <chilts> hads: I got one a few years ago, they're nice ... but I had nice problems getting the video card working with my old monitor
[23:19] <chilts> it was weird
[23:19] <chilts> but they are nice machines
[23:23] <hads> They would be around $600 for the base model I think, so not super cheap.
[23:23] <hads> chilts: Weird, what type of problems?
[23:23] <hads> Got offered the NZ distribution but wondering whether it's worth commiting $10k to it.
[23:24] <ajmitch> that's quite a cost
[23:26] <chilts> it just took a while and someone else poking it to work ... I wasn't sure what they did in the end
[23:26] <chilts> I'm happy to send you it for evaluation, remembering that this is an older model
[23:27] <hads> Thanks, I think they are going to send an eval model anyway
[23:28] <hads> ajmitch: The $600 or the $10k
[23:28] <ojwb> looks a neat box
[23:28] <ajmitch> hads: $10k :)
[23:28] <hads> Yeah, that bit is :)
[23:28] <ajmitch> you'd need to sell a few to get that back
[23:29] <ojwb> $600 doesn't seem too bad by NZ prices
[23:29] <hads> Just from the minimum distributor order
[23:29] <ojwb> to that's $10K of stock rather than buy the rights?
[23:29] <hads> Yeah
[23:29] <ajmitch> ok, not so bad
[23:29] <ajmitch> $10K up front just to buy the distribution rights would be too steep
[23:30] <hads> Indeed, I don't buy rights.
[23:30] <hads> Yeah, just a gamble on how these type of things sell.
[23:30] <ojwb> so it's a case of can you sell a few dozen in a reasonable time I guess
[23:30] <hads> Yup
[23:32] <hads> The thing that attracted me was that they come OS-less or with Linux Mint which is nice.
[23:34] <ojwb> i'm not in the market for something like that (currently anyway), but if I was, it looks a good option
[23:37] <hads> Thanks, it's helpful to get feedback
[23:41] <ibeardslee> hmmm I could think of a number of uses for things like that .. although the budget disagrees
[23:41] <hads> heh
[23:42] <ibeardslee> more CPU and RAM than my existing home server
[23:44] <hads> A big draw for me is the <10W power usage.
[23:44] <ajmitch> yeah, that & being fanless is what I like
[23:45] <ajmitch> I was looking at the pc engines kit as an option for an AP & router, something like this could probably do a similar job & have power to do other stuff
[23:46] <hads> Yeah, the atom CPU has plenty of power for lots of things.
[23:46] <ajmitch> not really a gaming box though :)
[23:47] <hads> Not enough power for plenty of things too :)