Viewzi.

we’re launched.

go there.

Viewzi is set to launch our Public Beta starting Monday. This week’s been full of last minute cleanup, bug fixes, and features squeezed in at the last minute. But we’re nearing the finish line and at 7:00PM Monday night, we launch. What this means is anyone will be able to search using Viewzi without having (or creating) an account. We call that “taking the wall down.”

Mind you, we’ll still be in “beta”. We’ve still got lots to do, bugs to squash, features to complete and roll out, etc. Lots of stuff to make Viewzi an even better, more fun way to search.

It’s been quite a ride at this point, and I only expect it to speed up. As a team, we’re really starting to get our legs under us and start hitting on all cylinders. And the feedback we’ve been receiving is quite flattering; very positive and constructive. We didn’t expect as many people to “get it” as apparently have over the past 5 or 6 weeks, and it’s really great to hear. We’re very excited about where the product is headed, and anxious to show the world what we’ve been working so hard on.

Well, 71 hours to go (really less, more about that later). Back to work.

Viewzi. Changing the way you look at Search.

If you’re curious about what I’ve been up to for about the past 6 months, today is the day. We’ve just come out from flying under the radar, and my company, Viewzi, has launched our private beta!

What is Viewzi? We’re building the next generation of visual search. It’s hard to explain in text, so go take a look at our site and see:
http://www.viewzi.com
There’s even a little movie to explain the whole thing.

What’s a private beta? Well, we’re not quite ready to accept the deluge of traffic from the world just yet; we’re still building great functionality and ironing out all the kinks. But we wanted to get a bunch of people trying out the system, so we’ve created an invite program. If you’d like to try out Viewzi for yourself, click on the “Try Viewzi” ticket on the main site, and enter the referral code “steve” (no quotes). The system will send you an email confirmation and then let you into the system so you can try out Viewzi for yourself.

I’d really like to know what you think, so post feedback (either from within the site itself or here).

So, it’s funny what can start with a simple, innocent comment. When I got my new car (Audi Q7, awesome!), I mentioned to Cynthia, “well, it’s a little bigger than the Beetle was, guess I’ll need somewhere else to put the lawn mower.”

This is what resulted from that little comment.

Today, I wrapped things almost completely up, building the shelves and installing the peg board in the shed. We then commenced the great “clean out the garage” task of 2007. Much went to the trash, but many things went to their new home in the “barn”, as we call it.

Apart from a little detail paint, it’s complete.

And the Q7 is now in the garage.

I made some more progress on the shed this week. I managed to get the roof decking on, first the easy side (the one facing the yard), then the hard one (the side next to the fence). On the “hard” side, I had to place the ladder on the outside of the fence and reach over to nail the decking in place. However, once I had it in place (but not nailed down yet), I noticed that things weren’t quite square…

I got my framer’s square and checked the door framing, and sure enough, I was a little crooked. But it seemed that I was off by the same amount in opposite corners, then the other way in the other two corners. This indicated to me that I was square when I framed the door, but that something had shifted. I took some measurements with my level and found out that the front left footing had settled a little, causing the entire building to slightly warp.

I got out my hydraulic car jack (rated to lift 4,000 lbs.) and raised the front left of the building up 2.25 inches. Checking my square again, this time the door was dead-on square. I took some scrap 2×6 and cut two lengths to 2.25 inches, cranked the jack up one more notch and placed them under on the footings and under the floor joist. Click here to see. After releasing pressure on the jack, the building settled right into place and was square as could be. I checked all the joints and everything was still solid. Phew. I went ahead and nailed the left roof decking into place.

The next step was to cut and mount the sheathing under the gables. This took some measuring but went up pretty easily. Next was the facia trim, a little finish-out work where the eaves met and installation of the drip edge.

The fun part was installing the sheathing on the back side of the shed, where the vines are completely out of control and the fence is in the way. After some serious hacking like I was in the amazon rain forest, I was able to get to the back side of the shed and mount the sheathing. Tomorrow I’ll trim the back out and finish off the drip edge, and hopefully move on to the felt and shingles. I’ll finish off the roof with a ridge vent so that the shed won’t be sweltering hot in the summer.

New pictures have been added to the shed page.

About the only downside of trading in the old vehicle for the new one, is that some things in the garage are going to have to go so that it will fit. While there’s plenty that will go to the trash, a few things we need to keep, like the lawn equipment. Where to put it? Here’s the project to build a “barn” to house it all…

Click here to see.

Back in June of 2006, I decided to take an old “pismo” class PowerBook (500Mhz G3) that I had laying around and make a Digital Picture Frame out of it. Pictures are here.

The idea is pretty simple. There are slowly becoming available from several companies digital picture frames, usually around 7″ in size that will display photos from digital cameras, but appear on your bookcase like a regular frame. While they do the job, they don’t do it particularly elegantly. Some of the problems I’ve seen are the fact that a) the screen is small, b) they require moving photos onto a memory card and changing that out on the frame, c) they either simply change the pictures out every few minutes or do some cheesy animation, and d) are very expensive for what they do. I wanted to do something more elegant.

It’s hard to say I achieved “D” completely (it was, after all a $3,000 notebook at one point), but seems to be worth around $200 on e-bay now, seeing as it’s about 7 years old. And it was, after all, just lying around not doing anything particularly productive. So we’ll call that one a wash.

Hardware-wise, I was in good shape. While not particularly powerful by today’s standards, it was a 500Mhz notebook with a very nice 14″ screen, a 12GB hard drive and built in wireless 802.11b networking. It runs OS X very nicely, and one of the built-in screen savers under OS X takes a folder of photos and does a slow cross-fade and zoom in/out animation that is visually very pleasing. So the mechanics from a software standpoint should be very straighforward… load up a folder with pictures, point the screen saver at it and let it rip.

I took a field trip to Aaron Brothers, and located a 15-inch shadowbox frame that is about 3 inches deep. Along with the shadowbox, I bought a sheet of black foam-core, and headed back to the house.

Before getting started, I did a fresh install of OS X on the notebook and made sure everything was working properly.

The first step was to disassemble the notebook and lose as much as I could and still have it remain functional. This meant losing the battery, the CD-ROM drive, the modem, and lots of plastic. I tried to pull the battery charging circuitry (the small circuit board jutting up from the main board that fits between the battery and CD-ROM bays), but it appears as though there was some elements of the power inverter there, since when I removed it the machine wouldn’t boot.

Removing the screen from the plastic bezel was challenging, but soon I had nothing but the glass itself and the cable that connects it to the main circuit board removed. Also removed from the screen bezel was the antenna assembly for the integrated 802.11 wireless.

The next step was to lay out all the remaining components on the foam backing of the shadowbox. This was a little tricky, since the main circuit board with the power inverter daughterboard was about 3/4″ too tall for the shadowbox. Had I been able to remove that daughterboard, it would’ve fit perfectly. As it was, I had to cant the circuit assembly about 15 degrees to make it all fit. I then proceeded to use small screws to affix everything to the foam backing of the box, carefully laying out the antenna assembly, the hard drive, the CMOS battery, etc. I also used a bit of gaffer’s tape to hold wires in place. I cut a small notch in the back of the foam to allow the power cord for the computer and a USB extension cable to come out of the box.

Next, I cut the foamcore to fit the opening in the front of the shadow box, and then cut a hole 1/4″ smaller than the size of the screen. Using an Xacto knife, I beveled the foamcore to create a mount for the screen, and then placed the screen in and used gaffers tape to hold it in place. The black foamcore acts as a matte for the screen, making it look like it goes perfectly with the frame.

Final assembly consisted of placing the foamcore mounted screen in the front of the box, and then placing the computer mounted back of the box on the rear, and using the frame screws to hold everything in place. At this point, the only thing exposed was the power and USB cables coming out of the back.

The moment of truth came when I applied power and it actually booted! It was a little strange seeing the OS X boot screen on this rather odd-looking Mac, but with a keyboard and mouse hooked up to the USB cable protruding from the back of the box, I had a working computer. I configured the wireless to attach it to the network and was ready to go.

I moved it into place on the bookshelf in our family room, and ran the power cable and USB cable down behind the bookcase, giving a very clean look. I enable remote desktop access in the system preferences and disconnected the keyboard and mouse.

Now I can remotely access the frame from my MacBook Pro or desktop mac, and load images onto the picture frame remotely. I’ve got it set to automatically wake itself up at 10:00 in the morning, and put itself to sleep at 9:00 at night. One minute after waking up the screen saver kicks in and the pictures start playing. I disabled the feature to put the screen to sleep, so it plays pictures all day long. It’s very quiet and quite intriguing from a conversation piece perspective.

I’ve actually experimented with having it automatically download pictures to display, since it’s always on the network. The way I’d like things to work is to have it monitor an RSS feed (i.e. photocast), download new images and throw them into the loop. Since photocasting on iPhoto is tied very tightly to .Mac, I haven’t been able to get that working satisfactorily, but now that I have a .Mac account, I’ll have to revisit that idea.

Extending the concept from here would be very easy… I can easily envision a further RSS enabled screen saver that not only plays pictures, but shows stories from news sites or blogs, occasionally shows the weather, etc. I’m not sure I really want to go there, however, since I really wanted a lean-back experience, passive in its presentation. I think that type of interaction is better suited for a device like an Apple TV hooked up to the big screen.

One thing that would be very cool, however, would be to put a frame like this at the grandparents house, having it subscribed to a photocast of pictures I publish, automatically updating remotely. It’s a great way to share photos with family and friends in a totally 21st century way. I really don’t see why this frame couldn’t be mass-produced for around the pricepoint of the 7″ frames that are on the market right now, and be much more elegant. What would you pay for such a device? I can see people easily paying $299 to put such a gadget in the grandparents home, especially if it was very easy to set up and well integrated with the other infrastructure (iPhoto, photocasts, etc.).

I’ve got an old titanium powerbook G4 lying around now; I’m thinking about making a portrait version as my next project. The trick there will be finding a frame… the titanium has a widescreen layout, not a standard aspect ratio.