Finding the chase and cutting to it

As mentioned before, I like using computers to do the jobs that are boring and fiddly (if T3 ever comes to pass, I’m toast, but there, I’ve said it).  I hate to say this, but I want interesting and challenging tasks not boring and repetitive ones.

For me, a computer (and some software) are happy to do the tasks I need to do but don’t want to spend all my time doing.  As such, I have spent the past 24 years working out how to get the most out of them.

So what?  Well, we have a large number of books; mostly paper backed fiction but music books, atlases, language books, a variety.  It has to be said I only had around 100 when I met my husband - he came with a “library”.  As such, it was with keen interest I saw delicious being demoed by a colleague.

I took notes, bought a web cam and hurried home to buy a copy.  Only I don’t have a mac in the house.  Several versions of linux, several versions of Windows but no mac.  Delicious will not install on anything but a mac.

Fine.

I wait a little and sure enough, Amazon web services became public and various pieces of code started appearing allowing consumption of Amazon’s extensive catalogue of books.  Most were from the point of view of being an Amazon partner but ItemSearch works publicly.

Long story short, I wrote some code that would take the barcode number and enter the details held in Amazon against that book into a private database.  It checks for duplicates (we actually managed to lose a few books that’s to that feature) and even stores the location in the house.

QuickMark

I have also mentioned before now my Nokia 5800 - cool device very cheap and expendable memory.  I could rave about it all day.  For $7 I bought QuickMark which uses my phone’s camera much like delicious uses the mac’s web cam to decode a barcode on the back of an item, say a book.

Using this and the wi-fi, I could consume my library web service from anywhere in the house for free.

Cool.

I worked really hard to catalogue 623 books before Amazon demanded the signature (8th Aug 2009 we did the run, 3 people 1.5 hours, plenty of tea and biscuits).

The signature requirement came in and I couldn’t get the encryption working but I waited a little and now everything is working again.

I have put the service in a protected area on my server and I really should do a proper search handler on it.  But it wows my man that we have a catalogued library (he really likes the fact Amazon tend to have pictures of the covers, so we can link to them).  Did I mention it was platform independant…

Is this for you?

Is this something you’d like to use?  Would it be useful to you?  Please use the comments to let me know what you think.