trassare.com

No reading! Just take me to the reCAPTCHA Challenge.

CAPTCHAs have always annoyed me. They are hard to read and not as effective as using math problems to prevent spam. Then along came reCAPTCHA. The premise behind preventing spam and digitizing books at the same time impressed me. Now these little anti-spam tools are doing something useful!

From recaptcha.net:

About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.

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reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

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Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times.

I immediately began wondering what it would take to turn reCAPTCHAs into a stand-alone application. Digitizing books is worth it right? So I threw together a little game where folks can play against each other for the highest score - kind of like an old-fashioned puzzle/arcade game without the poor quality beeps and bops.

I hope you enjoy it!

reCAPTCHA Challenge

New Golden Gray is now hosted at Wordpress! Download NGG from Wordpress.

New Golden Gray is based on William Pramana’s Golden Grey theme. Golden Gray was originally written for Alex King’s 2005 Wordpress theme competition. In the last few years Wordpress has undergone many changes and the coding requirements for themes has also changed. New Golden Gray is a rewrite of Golden Grey to meet those requirements and to exploit the new functionality of today’s Wordpress, version 2.6, while preserving the aesthetic quality of the original theme.

Features
New Golden Gray has been written to include:

• Support for widgets!
• Accessibility features: access keys and friendly text browser support.
• A 404 page.
• An archive page.
• Support for GaMerZ’ WP-Print plugin.
• Gravatars.

Screen shot

Download
Download New Golden Gray 1.8 (81K).
Download William Pramana’s original Golden Grey (29K).

Support
Use the comments section for all requests for support or to recommend improvements to NGG.

What’s Next

• Improved navigation bar.
• Improved support for mobile devices.

Known Issues

• If your blog contains more than about eight page links, they will not all fit in the navigation bar and they page layout will distort.
• Some CSS3 code is used in the style sheet which won’t validate against W3C’s current CSS validation.

Trassare.com is now using the Winksite plugin to support the Wii and the DS Lite.  I do not have either of these neat toys so if someone out there does, please visit this site with your device and upload a screenshot for me.

I’ve been on an accessibility kick with my websites lately.  I’ve long supported the PSP with the Winksite plugin but today I decided to add activate the plugins for the other two game systems as well.  In the coming days, months I’ll be updating this site with accessibility controls to improve navigation and appearance on multiple browsers.

George Carlin, one of my favorite performers, has died.  Read the AP obituary.

Toying around with my PSP tonight I selected the Network Update option from the XMB. Lo and behold there is a new firmware update available even though Sony has not yet updated the PSP website with the new version. Version 4.00 has the following updates:

• [Internet Search] has been added as a feature under [Network].
• You can now change viewing speed during video playback. Use this feature if you want to watch a video quickly, or if you want to slow down playback and listen to the dialogue carefully.

So that’s it! Or at least that is what is reported during the firmware update process. Earlier other features were rumored to be added such as Adobe Flash 8. An early check by me reveals that this is not the case.  So we’re all still stuck using an old version of Flash on the PSP.