You may recall how Data the android read books in Star Trek: The Next Generation, or the robot Johnny Five in Short Circuit—by riffling through the pages and absorbing the information in the time it took to go from the front to back cover. Now researchers in Tokyo have come up with a system that can scan paper books into electronic form just as fast. The video (embedded below the jump) shows University of Tokyo assistant professor Yoshihiro Watanabe literally holding a book under the camera and riffling through the pages. The monitor captures the images...

I have been walking around with this idea for quite some time, but simply lack the technical skills to make it happen---a high-speed book scanner made from stuff you've probably got lying around the house. Now Daniel Reetz has gone and done it, and his instructions can be found at instructables.com: I've built two of these things now, and this instructable covers the best parts of both of them. You can build a book scanner using only hand tools plus a drill. I realized that not everyone is comfortable with using all the different hand tools you might need to...

When is a CAPTCHA not annoying? When it is used to help digitize old public domain texts. CAPTCHAs (an overly-cutesy acronym standing for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart") are those tests that are supposed to verify you are a real human by making you type some distorted letters or numbers. This is meant to keep spambots from being able to register for accounts, make spam posts on forums, sniff out email addresses, or do other things that might be considered harmful. Two Problems That Solve Each Other The problem is that spambot software has gotten to the...

Help wanted from some fellow sleuths-archeologists: Recent reports suggest that a Russian OCR tool called Cuneiform has been released as Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). The unfortunate part, for me, is that all the news seems to sit on the Russian side of the web, and I don't speak Russian. The matter becomes extra confusing when you notice that there is an American site that presents itself as the manufacturer of Cuneiform OCR (called Cognitive Enterprises), that still sells the package (albeit a much earlier version), and that keeps remarkably mum about the whole open sourcing...