Jonathan Blocksom's Weblog

I've added a thing called reCAPTCHA to the comments on this weblog. I've generally left the comments closed because spammers tend to post a lot of junk which is a pain to sort through. reCAPTCHA is one of those systems where you have to type in a distorted word, something that's hard for computers to do.

But the really neat thing about reCAPTCHA is that half the words it presents is from a scanned book. It uses the correct answers people enter to put together the full text of books that the Internet Archive is trying to digitize. So every time you leave a comment now you're helping archive a book.

You can read more about reCAPTCHA and how it works. I was inspired to do this after reading the O'Reilly Radar post about reCAPTCHA. They mention that reCAPTCHA is used by over 20,000 web sites and is "the equivalent of over 2,000 people working 8 hours per day, 5 days per week."

Posted by Jonathan Blocksom at 12:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

When planning to repair a toilet, purchase a complete repair kit, and not just the part you think is broken. Otherwise you will just break the part you didn't buy.

So two trips to Home Depot later, the main level toilet works and even fills up quickly again. I believe the slow filling problem was caused by a rubber washer in the supply line; the directions explicitly state not to use a rubber washer if it's a plastic line, which it was. I guess the plumber we paid to fix it a few years ago didn't read the directions.

All this home improvement I've been doing must be going to my head, because today I bought a table saw.

Posted by Jonathan Blocksom at 11:43 PM | Permalink

I'll be participating in the panel "Opportunities & Challenges of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Project" coming up on Tuesday, January 16 at the Center for Global Development in Washington DC.

The page lists me as one of "four OLPC experts"; I'm a little uncomfortable with that label. I have had an XO to develop with since last Spring but I haven't been working with it full time or anything. So although I do think I have a valuable perspective as an educational software developer, I don't want anybody to get the idea that I'm walking around telling people that I'm an expert on the XO.

That being said, if anybody needs some XO software development I'd be happy to submit a bid!

Posted by Jonathan Blocksom at 11:05 PM | Permalink