Using a Linea Pro as a keyboard wedge

The first barcode scanner I owned was a CueCat, modified not to require the proprietary software they shipped with. You plugged it into your computer, it presented as a keyboard, and whatever you scanned with it would be typed into whatever application had focus at the time. I don’t know why that mode of operation is called a keyboard “wedge”, but that’s what I know it as.

So we’ve got these expensive iPod barcode sleds, and it seems we ought to be able to use them in the same way you could use that CueCat. Here’s how to do it.
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Long scale Nest time lapse videos (part 2)

In Part One I showed you how to get the snapshot URL for your Nest camera, so you could get a full resolution still image from the camera. In this part, I’ll describe what I’m doing with those to make time lapse videos.
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Long scale Nest time lapse videos (part 1)

We have a few Nest (formerly Dropcam) cameras that we’ve had pointed at the construction site of our new building. We’re paying for the lowest of the subscription services, the one that gets you 10 days of video storage but not the full “Nest Aware” package. The time lapse videos we were getting from the service were ok, but the cameras are capable of higher resolution than the videos we were getting. (1080 vs 720, I believe.) And there were some pretty unpleasant compression artefacts showing up, mainly in the sky and clouds, which make up a large portion of the frame with some of the cameras. Also, we want to be able to make time lapse videos covering months, maybe a year. I think you can do some of that with the higher priced subscriptions, but you definitely can’t with the cheap one, at least not easily. (The previous idea was to have someone download a daily time lapse every day and then assemble them in Final Cut as needed. That’s a lot of manual work for something which ought to be eminently automatable.)

Here’s what I did to get us the ability to make full resolution time lapse videos of arbitrary duration, over any period of time the cameras were running. I’m using an iMac running OS X, but this should work from a linux system or a Windows system with the right tools installed.
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Barcode Project Introduction

With the New Burke opening in 2019, we’ll be moving everything from the current building into the new one in the next couple of years. Every object in the building will be touched. This is a great opportunity to add barcodes to labels for ease of tracking. If nothing else, hopefully we’ll be able to make the job of moving everything between buildings easier, even if there’s no long term benefit to processes.

Our collections are cataloged in at least five separate database products. There is no way we’re going to find an off the shelf solution which integrates with all of them. For one thing, one of the databases is no longer sold or supported. It has an ODBC connection, so maybe something could integrate with it, but I’m willing to bet that nothing does out of the box. For another, each collection has its own catalog number scheme, and there’s no guarantee that their database has a field for a separate barcode identifier. I need to be able to use freeform text as barcode labels, so that what gets scanned is the object’s native identifier in its home database.

With that in mind, we’re buying some hardware first and will figure out what software to use with it second. Here’s what we’re getting (prices may vary; this is what we paid in March 2017):
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Introduction

Inspired by the University of Alberta Museums Blog, this will be a blog for talking about and documenting projects the Burke IT department (all two of us) works on for the Burke Museum which could be useful for other similar institutions. The Burke is in the middle of construction of a new building, and will be moving in the next few years. At least one of the projects here will be related to that: an initiative to provide barcoding and asset tracking support to the collections managers who would like to take this opportunity to barcode their collections.

I also built an inexpensive Raspberry Pi-based firewall for PCI compliance in the gift shop recently. I couldn’t find a good set of instructions which had all the steps I needed, so I’ll be writing that up as well. There may be some inexpensive digital signage projects in the future, and who knows what else.

Possibly we’ll also use this to talk about some things that didn’t work, or don’t work how we’d like them to. Sometimes the most valuable page I find is the one which tells me the thing I was about to try will never work.

In any case, that’s what this is about. If you’re reading, welcome.