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Check Out My Mobile Sketch Blog

May 6 2007 - 8:30pm
Another napkin sketch from Sketchyd.com

A couple weeks ago I realized I wasn't sketching as much as I used to and decided to do something about it. I decided to build myself a "moblog," a blog which you update by sending text messages from your cell phone.

Getting my hands dirty with Perl for the first time in years was a lot of fun and it was rewarding to write an app that works with my phone. After taking a picture of a sketch using my cell phone I embed it in a message, append caption text, and send it to a secret email address along with a secret password. Mail sent to that address gets forwarded to my Perl script (thanks Keenan). The script extracts the photo, saves it as a file, extracts the caption, and adds it to the database. (If you're interested in the script give me a shout.)

I've limited myself to posting my sketches but since I can post anywhere, anytime there is a lot of room for creativity. So, go check out my sketch blog and be sure to leave me a comment!

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Comments

Liza says, "Very cool idea -- you're"
May 26 2007 - 4:00pm
Liza's picture
Very cool idea -- you're missing a RSS-feed though! You say the script 'extracts the caption' -- does that mean a caption can be saved with photos??
danielgm says, "It doesn't use computer"
May 26 2007 - 6:21pm
danielgm's picture
It doesn't use computer vision to extract a hand-written caption from within the photo. (But that would be ridiculously cool!) Instead I type up the caption in a text message which gets sent with the photo. There're all kinds of features one might add, too. I was thinking it'd be neat to send a "one of four" "two of four" message to the server so it can compile a series of images into an animation.
Chris says, "I'm gonna clone your script."
Jun 14 2007 - 4:40am
Chris's picture
I'm gonna clone your script. Or rather, write one myself. In PHP. It will be multipurpose. And open source. I'm thinking of a way to add OCR recognition to it. There's gotta be a way with GIMP or even through SANE somehow? That will allow you to write a caption in say the left hand corner of the picture which then gets translated to plaintext. The grammar nazi inside of me is gassing me for mangling that last sentence up.

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