Amazon Mechanical Turk: Solve Easy Problems and Earn Dough

Amazon has begun a service called the Mechanical Turk. What is a mechanical turk you may ask? See an answer here.

Many problems that seem easy for humans to solve are sometimes extremely costly in terms of computing time or even worse difficult or impossible to solve, such as transcription of audio or translation of text. Sure, those tasks can be done automatically at the moment but usually with a high error rate, especially if the software hasn't been “trained” first. Amazon is taking a different approach by paying you to solve these problems that are easy to solve. For example, Amazon offers you 2 cents for identifying the artist or band name from an album cover image. It's easy, mostly. You can convert the earnings into a deposit or Amazon.com store credit.

Link. Thanks, Russ!

MAME Cocktail Cabinet #2 Begins

After the successful building of our first MAME cocktail cabinet, we've decided to build another one. The first cabinet was built to look as close as possible to a Ms. Pac-Man cocktail table. The next one will be the same style, but we're loosening up on the graphics, creating a custom underlay and control panels and artwork to allow other games to be played. I have reserved a PowerMac 7100/120 mobo for the task.


The underlay has been designed and needs to be printed and laminated. It's a combination of Ms. Pac-Man, Pac-Man, Galaga and Q*Bert. The control panels will have a set of three fire buttons on both sides of the stick (since I'm opposite handed).
Some useful links for you if you're interested in building one yourself.


Arcade Depot, precut real wood cabinets and control panel hardware.
Two Bit Score, good source for cocktail table glass and other authentic replacement parts.
Kyle Lindstrom, source for really good do-it-yourself cabinet plans.
Happ Controls, good source for SVGA 19″ shelf mount monitors, coin mechs, doors, joysticks and buttons.

Library of Congress Collection of Images

The Library of Congress has an extensive site they call American Memory. In it are some fascinating images, most with high quality versions in TIFF format. I've printed a few of these as 11 x 17 images and framed them. Someone, please, help them with their user interface. It's very klunky and is hard to navigate. It would be killer if someone spidered their site and created a faux user interface for it… hmm..

Link.

Quiz: Guess the Movie from this Still Frame


Ok, I'm going to start a new category. Try to guess what the name of the movie this still frame belongs to. (Click it for a larger version.) Post your answers in the comments. I have no prizes to give other than fame and notoriety.

UPDATE: It might have been mean of me to choose a rather obscure, missable movie, but it IS my blog. Anyway, the movie is Eraserhead by David Lynch. Read up on the movie before renting it– you may be setting yourself up for a huge disappointment.

Link.

Ford Ruins Childhood Memories with Advertisement

The choice of music accompanying the new rash of Ford advertisements was in poor taste. For those that don't know, the music used was “Linus and Lucy” by the Vince Guaraldi Trio; this is better known as the theme music to all of the Charlie Brown TV specials. Now, whenever I hear this song on the TV I'm going to associate it with this advertisement. Bah!

BTW, the real holiday favorite Charlie Brown Christmas will be on this Tuesday, Dec 6 at 8pm.