Let me briefly sing the praises of the amazing bit open source of code that is Zebra Barcode Reader. Using the zebraimg application that’s included with the source code, I can take a JPEG image of a UPC code on the back of a and get the book’s ISBN returned to me as text.

I’ve managed to assemble the pieces of a puzzle that lets me take a photo of a book’s UPC code, email it to my server, and receive back, a few seconds later, the best Amazon.com prices for new and used copies of the book. It all seems, well, rather magical when it works. And the barcode decoding part of the process seems to work very, very well — 100% so far, in fact.

This was all induced by this 43 Folders blog post about iPhone applications that don’t exist — I reasoned that, as the Nokia N95 has an excellent macro mode for taking close-ups with its 5MP camera, it would also be very good at taking barcode photos with enough resolution to easily decode. And it does.

Here’s how the process works. First, I take a photo with the N95’s camera, using the macro mode and holding the camera about 6 inches above the UPC code:

Next, I email the photo, using the N95’s built in mail application and its wifi connection, to a special email address I’ve set up on my server. There’s a script on the server that intercepts the incoming email, pulls the JPEG image’s MIME attachment out of the message, runs the image through zebraimg to get the UPC code, and then uses the Amazon.com API ItemLookup operation to find the title, author and prices for the book. These are then simply emailed back to the sending address:

If you have a new Prince Edward Island driver license — the crazy all-digital ones with the tiny numbers beside each field — flip it over and you’ll see a barcode. Thanks to The SWIPE Toolkit it’s easy to find out what information is encoded in that barcode. For me, the “processed” version of the results came out like this:

Address=100 PRINCE ST
City=CHARLOTTETOWN
State=PE
Zipcode=C1A 4R4
Driver License Number=XXXXXX
License Expiration Date=MM/DD/YYYY
License Issued Date=MM/DD/YYYY
Date of Birth=MM/DD/YYYY
Sex=MALE
Address2=
Height=1'85"
Address Line 2=

There’s actually more information in there, which you only see if you look at the “raw bytes” tab in the Toolkit application; this Pennsylvania document can be of assistance in understanding what the fields mean. In there I see information like my name and eye colour that the Toolkit doesn’t parse.

The PDF417 format for the barcode used in Prince Edward Island is used many other places too, so if you live elsewhere you may be able to do this just as easily. It took me about 5 minutes from scan to decode, and worked on a Mac (it’s a Java application). Be sure to save your scanned image as a JPEG (I tried TIFF and it didn’t work).

Nokia Map Loader 2.0 came out of beta today. This is a big step, as the old Map Loader never worked for me — something to do with Parallels and USB and device drivers — and I was forced to resort to other means to load map data into my Nokia N95.

I’m happy to report that the new version supports “PC Suite” mode for data transfer, routing around my USB issues. And it’s a much slicker application too.

I happened upon this page on the PEI Department of Cultural Affairs website this afternoon and was hit with a sudden waft of time travel: the design of that page is one that I put together more than 7 years ago for the Province of PEI — here’s an Internet Archive of the www.gov.pe.ca front page from 2001 that uses the template.

I always loved that design — it’s my favourite of all the interations the site has gone through over the years. All that crazy green and blue and orange, and the jaunty swoosh, borrowed from the wordmark, that just peeks over the edge into the green.

Icelandair cuts winter flights, reports Nova Scotia Business Journal. What was supposed to be year-round flights from Halifax to Keflavik will now be suspended for the winter, with the last flight for this year on October 20, 2008.

This is really too bad: Icelandair is a much better alternative to Air Canada for getting to Europe, if only because Keflavik is so much better a hub than Heathrow or Frankfurt.

Fortunately for any Europeans coming to Zap Your PRAM, the October shutdown date comes the day after Zap closes.

There has never been a Rukavina in the Olympics (pointer from Jason Kottke — to the site, not the Rukavina absence, that is).

With the redesign that launched yesterday, the City Cinema page in Plazes becomes much more functional.

In older versions of Google Earth there was a “horizontal slider” on the map that allowed you to vary the angle at which you were viewing the map — the “tilt” for lack of a better word. In recent versions this control has disappeared; after some digging in the help for the application, I found that to achieve the same thing you now simply hold Shift on your keyboard and drag the map with the mouse.

Piece a Cake, the Charlottetown restaurant that I wrote about here 5 years ago is, alas, no longer: there’s a sign on the door announcing their closure as of June 28, 2008, and there’s a “For Lease” sign in the window. I was not, by any stretch, a Piece a Cake regular — somehow it always seemed to fall outside of my culinary peripheral vision. But I had many good meals there, and there’s no doubting that when they opened they pushed the Charlottetown restaurant envelope forward. Will be missed.

Regular readers will recall frequent mention in this space of my friend Harold Stephens, author, adventurer, boatbuilder, and kind host for our trip to Thailand several years ago. Steve has just posted a video to YouTube about some old and some new experiences in China.