Debian developer and Internet Mail Archive founder Jeff Breidenbach of PARC has made GlyphChess, a chess-playing scanner using Python, Gnuchess, SANE, and DataGlyphs attached to the bottom of the pieces.

DataGlyphs are cool 2D barcodes made out of / and \ marks for 1s and zeros that use the Reed-Solomon coding from CDs for error coding.

Members Only Barber Shop sign, Santa Barbara, California.

I thought it was part Pekingese but the bookstore owner told me frostily that it was a Thibetan Spaniel. Santa Barbara.

More Ventura pictures.

We drove down to Ventura on our trip to Santa Barbara. We enjoyed Zooey's Café Upstairs, and played Scrabble until they had to close because of a plumbing disaster. Hope they re-open soon.

We bought a Ben Franklin action figure, with kite and key. It's made by Accoutrements.

I got this Adddometer for $12 at an antique shop in Santa Barbara.

This Hovercraft is $80 at the Discovery Store.

I took a picture here a few years ago with my Speed Graphic and won a prize in the Palo Alto Weekly photo contest. We just passed by it again and I took it with my Hiptop camera.

Electromic Scoot Air Car Rides like "Magic" on a cushion of air http://www.stanzelflyingmodels.com/ I've been looking for this for years. I bought one for $3.00 from Edmund Scientific, but it suffered under the shoes of a 3-year-old visiting cousin. I had not been able to find them, until we went to Diddam's Toys in San Carlos and I recognized the battery case from a flying airplane with a similar technology. It said "made in USA" so I knew it was unchanged from the one I bought. A little digging (more than you might expect) turned up the company's web site -- their package is unpolluted by URLs -- and voila, only $13.99 each. I ordered a three-pack @$13.33 each.

We saw this chair when we were out on a walk. BTW, you can now rotate images left or right by making the name start with "<" or ">" in blogrouter.