As regular readers will know I’m quite interested in the sharing of information. This includes support for projects such as the Internet Archive. One such example of their fantastic work is the sharing of public domain books which have been scanned, many by the ill-fated Microsoft book scanning project. Unfortunately, the Google Books project is (ironically perhaps) much more restrictive on licensing. My own feeling is that these books should be shared as much as possible and attaching new licensing restrictions to public domain books just because you have scanned them is ludicrous.

One potential solution to this is to scan books yourself but those that have done even more than a few pages of a book on a flatbed scanner know that this is a long a tedious process. The commercial scanners used by Microsoft, Google and the like are much more efficient but also much more expensive. Luckily the do-it-yourselfers have come along with their own book scanning solution. It’s not as elegant as the commercial scanners but it’s definitely inexpensive. Personally, I’m hoping someone comes along with something in the middle. A pre-built book scanning frame and platen which you can add cameras and accessories to and use with the open source software which has been developed.

You can watch the original Instructables video on building a DIY book scanner or visit the new DIY Book Scanning site with news and forums.

I’ve written before about the various interesting applications for the Dallas 1-wire network such as HVAC control, access control, weather stations, etc. A few weeks ago I finally got around to ordering some 1-wire sensors to play with myself. I must say that I’ve had nothing but a good time with them. I’m currently running outdoor temperature and rainfall logging which you can see for yourself as the data is uploaded to a number of servers including Weather Underground and the National Weather Service (through the Citizen Weather Observer Program). In future postings I hope to discuss a bit more about how simple this was to get going and show off my own weather homepage (still in development).

For now I wanted to share the design for a 1-wire surge suppressor. As it turns out some people have had a problem, specifically with 1-wire weather equipment, with lightning inducting large currents into their 1-wire network and damaging the sensors and/or serial adapter. To combat this problem Philip Gladstone has posted some easy to build protection circuits for both 1-wire devices and the serial port adapter. While I haven’t built them myself yet I hope to have some time to do so before storm season gets into full swing.

One of the changes in my recent server upgrade was moving from using Samba on Linux as a workgroup server to making it a primary domain controller and implementing a small domain. I’m still waiting for O’Reilly to publish their updated Samba book which comes out this month so in the meantime I turned to the internet for answers.

What I found was a jumble of things using a variety of different methods of configuration to accomplish this. Needless to say I spent quite a bit of time untangling all this different (and sometimes conflicting) information. Although my server runs Debian the singlemost useful resource was this howto from the Gentoo wiki. The domain is up and running but the jury is still out on whether this is actually useful enough to justify the extra setup time and headache for such a small (six client PCs) installation.

If you’re like me you generate a lot of paper that is printed on one side. Of course, you could put the paper in the recycling when you’re finished with it but assuming it doesn’t have any confidential information you could give it a new life as a scratch pad first.

My personal preference is to cut 8.5×11 sheets into quarters, but some may prefer halfs. The real trick is knowing what you need to glue the sheets together into notepads. While some people use multiple coats of rubber cement my preference is to do it the real way and use what the priniting/binding industry calls “padding adhesive” or padding glue. The trick is to get the edge you’re going to glue lined up straight and either weight down the edge or put it in a clamp such as this which are easily built or bought. You’ll need to apply several coats of padding adhesive with a brush, letting things dry between coats. Once the final coat is dry you can slice apart the large pad into several smaller ones using a common table knife or a “pad knife”. If you want a more professional stiff backed pad be sure to insert thick cardstock in the stack before gluing where you’ll split the pads. You could even go a step futher and use something like cut up macaroni and cheese boxes for the cardstock backing.

You can usually find padding adhesive where printing supplies are sold. Online it is available from a number of vendors for around $10 a quart.