Getting Evernote to OCR for you

Evernote is a great app that lets you make notes, take photos and screenshots, bookmark webpage and syncs everything so that you can access it from any computer, iphone or ipad. What I love about it, is that when you take a screen shot, it uploads the image to its server and tries to OCR the text, even hand-written text. Although technically speaking, Evernote doesn't actually do OCR:
"Evernote's image processing technology is a bit different. We analyze the image to generate a set of possibilities for each word that we see in an image. Each possible interpretation is given a score.
For example, we may look at a word and decide that this word may either be "clue" or "due", and we can assign a score to each possibility. This set of scored possibilities is stored in our database for searching.

As a result, there isn't a simple text representation that you can use. Instead, you can search our database to find the image based on the different sets of possible interpretations for each word."

Well, there is a way to get to that OCRed text (or data interpretation). You can find it in the files in Metadata/com.evernote.Evernote. Just in case anybody was wondering.

Wordle of keywords

I have been monitoring my blog with google analytics for a couple of weeks and wanted to see what the main keywords were that had resulted in a hit on the blog.

It seems like a number of people have been looking for a iphone app that identifies bird songs. I wrote a while back a blog suggesting that a version of Shazam that had bird songs included would be really useful but as it turns out Shazaam doesn't really work that well when you have a lot of background noise which is likely to be the case when trying to identify birds from their songs in the wild. I will keep my eyes open for such an app as it seems a lot of you are interested. Likewise, if you here about anything, please leave a comment here.

Automating label print out from google lousebase

I have been messing around trying to improve lousebase so that I can have tube labels automatically print out. The idea is that from within the lab, I could use an iPhone or any phone with a browser to add information to lousebase and then the tube identifier and information on which box,row,column I should put the tube in would be automatically generated by google spreadsheet.

So here is the form that you would point your mobile device (wireless laptop, iPhone, web enabled mobile)which should look something like this:



This form is set-up so that when you add a new entry, a label is created on one of the sheets. If changes are made to the label sheet, I receive an email. I was hoping that the email would contain the changes so that I could automatically print out that email with an applescript called Pergamail, I found here.

Unfortunately it only says that changes have occurred on the page so I need to go back to the drawing board. I thought that maybe using the Google Data APIs would be useful but as I am behind a firewall, I think I might be entering a whole world of pain.

iPhone App to identify a bird song in the field

Image by nixam via FlickrWouldn't it be cool if you could use something like Shazam to identify bird songs out in the wild. Doing a quick Google search, I found a few websites with mp3s of bird songs, for example xeno-canto. Shazam might already work with bird songs but I wouldn't know because I don't have an iPhone. I would get one though if I could use as a bird song identification tool.

UPDATE 30/07/2010.
I've found a few interesting posts and comments on this topic:
http://originalprojects.com/projects/shazam-for-birds
The comment by the user 'nature' is interesting http://www.tuaw.com/2009/02/09/this-iphone-app-is-truly-for-the-birds/
An education app http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/chirp-bird-songs-usa-lite-v3/id352826689?mt=8

UPDATE 05/05/2011

This blog posts explains in a neat way how Shazam works:

http://www.soyoucode.com/2011/how-does-shazam-recognize-song