[HN Gopher] I started a paper website business
___________________________________________________________________
I started a paper website business
Author : tinyprojects
Score : 972 points
Date : 2021-12-14 12:17 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (daily.tinyprojects.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (daily.tinyprojects.dev)
| georgecmu wrote:
| This is really cool. Use of GPT-3 to augment OCR is an amazing
| (and, retrospectively, obvious) insight and a great immediate use
| case for these language models.
|
| I wish Remarkable took this idea -- they really oversold their
| OCR capabilities[1]. It works great in their support and promo
| videos, but I found the actual performance to be absolutely
| terrible.
|
| [1] https://support.remarkable.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/36000266143...
| visarga wrote:
| It's an old idea, using a language model on top of character
| level OCR. Works well for general text but doesn't solve random
| sequences of digits and letters. So you can't use it to correct
| your invoices where you have lots of out-of-dictionary tokens.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > using a language model on top of character level OCR
|
| But if you know you're going to use a language model after
| the OCR, then you don't OCR to a single character, but rather
| to a distribution of character similarity (e.g. the 90% least
| similar or clipping at a certain similarity threshold). Then
| the language model should have more to work with (although
| TBH its work becomes more complicated).
| georgecmu wrote:
| If a dictionary satisfies your definition of a language
| model, yes, with predictably poor results[1]. If I understand
| correctly, Google Books approach[2] represented a major
| improvement in accuracy of automated OCR (and this is for
| _printed_ text!), but I would venture to say that
| implementing a language model like this would be far beyond
| the scope of a 'tiny project'.
|
| [1] https://tesseract-
| ocr.github.io/docs/Limits_on_the_Applicati...
|
| [2] https://tesseract-
| ocr.github.io/docs/Improving_Book_OCR_by_A...
| bloak wrote:
| I've always found it somehow ironic that a human can
| correctly recognise printed characters even if parts of them
| are missing and the word is misspelt or in a language the
| human does not know at all, but computers have to resort to
| language models because an exact comparison of part of the
| image with other parts of the image (where the same letter is
| printed in the same font) for some reason is not feasible?
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Brains do patten recognition much better than computers
| (albeit slower)
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| For now.
| twic wrote:
| What could possibly go wrong?
| https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres...
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| I actually just now bought their subscription with the
| particular idea to use it with my reMarkable.
|
| Then I only now realised I don't actually want my notes public,
| I hope there is some form of access control built into this! :D
| ineedasername wrote:
| _some form of access control built into this!_
|
| It would also be great if you could delete a page by taking a
| picture of the notebook entry completely scribbled out, or a
| video of tossing it into the fire. We need a product roadmap
| for this!
| kragen wrote:
| This is cool, but what's GPT-3's pricing model and roadmap?
| appwiz wrote:
| Pricing is at https://openai.com/api/pricing/
| codebook wrote:
| I like write on paper. I have written journals for 14 years,
| which now fill one section of my bookshelves.
|
| This year I switched from fountain pens and clairfontaine notbook
| to E-ink tablet, Supernote A5x.
|
| the main purpose is to keep the record in digital formats, And so
| far I am satisfied. The OCR sucks, though. I hope Supernote may
| adopt the GPT-3.
| aerovistae wrote:
| A lot of this seems manageable to me - like I could imagine
| myself being able to build it - but I have no idea how the author
| handled the domain names part and hosting all these websites. How
| did you just "throw together" a registrar and a hosting service?
| Seems like they built heroku and namecheap as side facets to
| their "tiny project." I must be missing something.
| Graffur wrote:
| Why isn't this marked as a Show HN?
|
| Also this seems like a lot of effort for 4k a year. Of course,
| hopefully you get some more subscribers to make it worth while.
| folli wrote:
| > this seems like a lot of effort for 4k a year
|
| Is this Hacker News or Get Rich Quick News?
| thinkski wrote:
| Feature idea: bundle a webring, so when viewing one paper website
| can get connected to others.
| mbildner wrote:
| Can you clarify/ expand on this idea?
| nzach wrote:
| I think GP was talking about this:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring
| [deleted]
| anonymouse008 wrote:
| Incredibly cool! This should invite a whole new type of blogger
| to the internet - well done!
|
| Curious - I'm looking at your other projects as well and the
| design is quite good. Are you using a firm for design, or do you
| have any front end frameworks to recommend? For some reason
| design consistency the way you have it is extremely hard for me.
| cableshaft wrote:
| So I diligently kept a pen and paper journal about my game
| designs for three years (wrote about 100,000+ words on paper).
| Switched to digital for a year, wrote 120,000 words just in 2019
| (starting every morning sitting at a Starbucks and writing it
| helped), switched back, then switched back again, doing less and
| less words each year (for 2021 I'm at like 15,000 words, so
| pathetic, it's only like 12 entries total, need to get back into
| it).
|
| But for the pen and paper I was manually transcribing it to
| digital (and still only transcribed about half of it). I didn't
| know OCR had gotten that good (and still suspect my writing isn't
| clean enough for great OCR).
|
| But maybe I should give this a try, might be enough to get me
| back in the habit. Also trying to avoid doing as much typing
| lately (because of some arthritic-like pain in the fingers on one
| hand, although it's my writing hand :/)
| cableshaft wrote:
| So this got me trying out various things for dictation and
| transcription, as that would mean I wouldn't have to type quite
| as much.
|
| I tried using Windows Speech Recognition, and it's
| unfortunately seems to be pretty garbage. Tons of mistakes I
| had to manually correct, couldn't say too much at all without
| it being so garbled I didn't remember what I really said to
| correct it manually.
|
| But then I found out about built-in Apple Dictation on Macbook,
| which sends it to Siri, and I tried reading some old journal
| entries, and it's actually pretty darn good! I might be able to
| get through transcribing my other notes using it with minimal
| corrections. Just need to make sure you state punctuation, or
| else it doesn't really put any into it.
|
| Still didn't seem that great for programming code though. Would
| be cool if I could find something decent for that.
| ineedasername wrote:
| _Windows Speech Recognition, and it 's unfortunately seems to
| be pretty garbage_
|
| Dragon Naturally Speaking (a paid product) is pretty good at
| normal dictation. My workplace bought me a copy when I was
| recovering from wrist surgery and it wasn't bad, especially
| since I could still use one hand. I've seen people mention
| using it for programming, with a bit of difficulty and a
| learning curve. But you can create your own custom commands,
| which is pretty much required if with keywords in a language
| that don't have a dictionary entry.
| atlantic wrote:
| I occasionally suffer from arthritis in my right hand. I've
| found that regular use of Baoding balls keeps it at bay.
| artificial wrote:
| Bummer with the hand! Have you taken any supplements or do any
| exercises? Not sure if it's an RSI but there's hope out there!
| bserge wrote:
| Google's OCR (as found in Lens, Docs and whatever) is insanely
| good. At least that was my impression based on my own notes (my
| writing is horrible and I often add very small side notes).
|
| Oh yeah, camera quality makes a big difference.
| [deleted]
| TurkishPoptart wrote:
| How do the domains work for this? Are they automatically created?
| zepearl wrote:
| Excellent idea/project and result, and interesting&funny to read.
| And I loved your second-last sentence :D
| Gtex555 wrote:
| Whitelisting this website on my Adblock cause you opened with a
| TL:DR.
| arbuge wrote:
| It's a wonderful project. There's something romantic about it,
| for sure.
|
| And if I could plug my own project, you could also do it by just
| sending emails: https://publicemails.com.
| kroltan wrote:
| Ironically, it seems like half of the emails there are just
| spam.
| arbuge wrote:
| It's a free service right now. I'm thinking converting it to
| a paid one like the one in the article might solve this
| problem.
| kroltan wrote:
| To be clear I did not mean it as a dig on your service!
| It's a really cool idea, sorry for not saying it before. It
| was just a perfect irony.
|
| You could also do some heuristics like not accepting emails
| with excessive HTML. Though I'm not sure how much it'd
| work, since you already require confirmation so presumably
| the spammers actually have someone authorizing the
| publication. (I didn't test your flow since I have nothing
| that warrants posting to say)
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Neat idea :)
| irae wrote:
| That is not the first time I see one of your stories and it
| always brings me a smile to see your new ideas and how implement
| them.
|
| It also amazes me how some countries make it so easy to open a
| business. Doing so in Brazil would be a legal nightmare. Your
| projects are super inspiring and I always have a mind to leave my
| job and start doing the same. I should probably move to the US or
| Canada first, otherwise it might not be possible for me.
| TekMol wrote:
| Why would it be a legal nightmare in Brazil?
| irae wrote:
| Just for starters, every company is a liability for you as a
| person. Your "equivalent of credit score" will be forever
| impacted by each legal entity you start.
|
| A company in Brazil needs to fit into categories. So if you
| have an e-commerce company that sells food, you can't use the
| same entity to provide a service, for example, the email
| provider with emojis the original poster did previously. You
| need a new legal entity for that.
|
| If you have one of the companies not pay by itself, closing
| it is a nightmare. I have a company that is closed, not
| debts, not a single problem, for 15 years already inactive.
| That company is considered a liability for my current company
| and me as a person. Once you have 3 companies in your name,
| you start having trouble in Brazil, as you fall into "risk"
| territory for taking credit, opening accounts, renting
| offices or apartments, etc. And if one company wants to
| receive payment in foreign currency, you also have to
| generate quarterly financial reports, and all sorts of
| bureaucracy. Each step of the way you find new problems.
|
| The rules are so extensive and so hard to navigate that you
| can't be the only person working on that. If you want to be
| like the original poster, you need an accountant that will
| charge you per company a fair amount of money, and it will
| still give you a lot of work to communicate with your
| accountant about each of the issues.
|
| Yes, it is OK for someone that was always an employee to open
| a restaurant and have a living from that afterwards.
| Specially since it is a well stablished business category.
| But serially opening companies in Brazil is not a good time
| at all.
|
| Disclaimer: I am not a professional in this area, I am a
| software engineer and I do have 2 companies in Brazil, one
| operating and one closed. Most of my knowledge is either
| self-taught or learning through my business accountant.
| forinti wrote:
| It's not hard at all to open a business in Brazil, unless you
| work with things that require safety inspections (food, health,
| chemicals, etc).
|
| Closing a business is a bit of a bother, but it is mostly a
| question of waiting.
| irae wrote:
| No it is not. You might find it simple, if you don't compare
| to places that are easier.
|
| First you need to file all the paperwork. Then you wait. Once
| you get approvals, you can't do anything without a bank
| account, and opening the bank account is a lot of trouble
| too, because they want to triple check everything.
|
| From zero to operational is a long way, and with lots of
| legal liability along the way. I have a company closed for 15
| years that still counts as a liability to me when I try to do
| anything, like renting an apartment.
|
| You might be right in "opening" paperwork only being kinda
| OK. But you certainly can't do it like the original poster,
| that codes for a week or two, opens a new business and move
| on to new projects in series. (Yeah, not every project of his
| is a new company, but IIRC the larger ones become new
| companies).
| bicx wrote:
| This is the kind of project that keeps me inspired. Well done!
| phantom_oracle wrote:
| I like this idea for the very simple fact that I now know its
| plausible to write blog content with a pen and paper and then
| some GPT-3 AI will scan those words and make it into digital text
| for me.
|
| Sparing my hands from using a keyboard!
|
| Brilliant idea!
| fourtrees wrote:
| Aw man, _almost_ did this myself a few months ago when I was down
| with COVID. You make me reall want to revisit the idea! Grats on
| your success.
| didip wrote:
| When Pg told people to build a business that doesn't scale, he
| meant this.
| rkangel wrote:
| PG did NOT tell people to build businesses that don't scale. He
| told people to OPERATE businesses in ways that don't scale.
| That is of course true for this business - the overall model
| scales extremely well, but obviously what they're doing at the
| moment isn't scaleable. It _is_ however an excellent proof of
| concept of the business model.
| chinathrow wrote:
| Well, this business scales easily, what am I missing?
| thepete2 wrote:
| I think the point is that him sending out notebooks (he only
| has 100 of) doesn't scale.
| chinathrow wrote:
| Ordering from an established supplier connection (in China)
| scales.
| jethro_tell wrote:
| I . . . Bet he could buy more . . .
| tester756 wrote:
| just wait 2 decades and maybe he'll be top1 online shop
| swlkr wrote:
| This is really cool. The idea to separate the writing part from
| the computer entirely (not just the internet) is genius. Also,
| GPT3 helps out a bit there too.
| criddell wrote:
| The OCR coupled with GPT3 worked much better than I would have
| guessed it would. I wonder how much of that is on the device
| and how much is in the cloud?
| nathanfig wrote:
| Inspiring
| thepete2 wrote:
| Out of curiosity: Is the first OCR example really the best you
| can find? Is there no open source solution that outputs good
| results for handwritten notes?
| foxhop wrote:
| There are open source "computer vision" libraries which work
| really well, but, also there is a file on your filesystem with
| all the words, so you could pass over the OCR'd text to fix
| "typos".
|
| Paper website will likely be cloned if it works.
| gwern wrote:
| If you're referring to /usr/share/dict/words, no, you can't
| just pass over it to fix typos - it doesn't even have the
| proper noun 'Bel-Air' in it!
| rexreed wrote:
| How does this GPT-3 based correction system work on unique names
| (last names) or on numbers or on things that can't be learned
| from an Internet corpus?
| distrill wrote:
| Likely not great, if it hasn't seen it before. You could fine
| tune it if you had large amounts of data that sat outside of
| the internet corpus, but it doesn't sound like that's happening
| here.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| I love this, for the simple fact it's one step closer for me to
| be a programmer without needing to sit at a computer or even use
| one. It's very far fetched right now, but I would love that.
| donio wrote:
| We've had that before (mainframes, punch cards), it's not that
| great.
| allie1 wrote:
| There's a "dunder mifflin" joke somewhere in here
| dgritsko wrote:
| It's actually in the post itself, if you read it!
| twobitshifter wrote:
| It would be great to see Gpt-3 taken further than this so there's
| less need to mess with the layout afterwards. Maybe you describe
| a sketch and Gpt-3 draws you their best bike riding avocado? Or
| you add something that says "photos from todays trip" and it
| spins up the album roll. This would detract from the simplicity
| and may not make the product any more successful- but it would be
| very cool.
| throwaway47292 wrote:
| next step, self hosted paper website on a pi zero :) send them
| the notebook and the pizero, make dyndns ipv6 only thing and let
| people selfhost
|
| nice project!
| helipad wrote:
| Fun idea. I have a memory a website from years ago that was
| photos of writing on a whiteboard or fridge. I'm certain it
| wasn't accessible nor SEO-friendly though it was inadvertently
| mobile friendly.
| n9com wrote:
| How are you handling international tax?
| ushakov wrote:
| not the OP, but Stripe has a Tax feature (they bought TaxJar
| last year)
|
| https://stripe.com/en-gb-de/tax
| [deleted]
| maliker wrote:
| Reminds me a little of jeffbridges.com/latest. Dude hand letters
| and draws his entire website. Might be cool to have an option to
| keep the original writing without the OCR?
| zeckalpha wrote:
| I hope View Source shows an image of the paper using source
| mapping
| jgtrosh wrote:
| I'd prefer the opposite: display the scanned page but with the
| OCR'd text virtually placed on the page (and accessible as alt
| text or something) like a proper OCR'd PDF.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| No, thanks. It's terribly hard to read strangers'
| handwriting.
| aaroninsf wrote:
| This is so much less interesting than I was hoping based on the
| title and premise.
|
| Oh well.
| rado wrote:
| Awesome.
| tmjdev wrote:
| Ben Stokes is an inspiration to me. I get excited reading any of
| the TinyProjects posts. It's so refreshing to see a solo dev
| building and shipping so much. Hoping I'm tracking for that kind
| of ability as a full stack dev.
| strzibny wrote:
| Love it, best of the tiny projects so far;)
| throwawaycities wrote:
| All his projects are fun...one of his prior projects (mentioned
| in the article) is Mailoji.
|
| I registered a few and messaged him suggesting it would be cool
| if I could transfer the Mailoji email addresses with a code so I
| could hide them in NFTs only the owner could see...I think by the
| very next day he added the transfer code feature (and didn't fail
| to give it the attention of his own style complete with an emoji
| gift box).
| reginold wrote:
| Mailoji looks neat! Do you have a link to the gift box feature?
|
| You and the author might also check out the new ENS (Ethereum
| Name Service), it support emojis for use as crypto
| identity/wallets. "Triple pures" (three base-level emoji) are
| popular as a wallet address.
| throwawaycities wrote:
| At the time I used the gift feature it was just an option
| within the dashboard, but checking now there is an entire
| page explaining it (really well done)
|
| https://mailoji.com/gifts
|
| And I'm a giant fan of ENS as a protocol. FYI even though
| there is a 3 character minimum because they use Unicode there
| are a few hundred emojis that are technically 3 characters
| allowing for registration of single character emoji ENS
| names. Beware though Unicode also allows Zero Width Joinder
| characters so there are people who add them in bad faith in
| attempt to sell desirable names to unsuspecting buyers that
| don't get what they think they are paying for.
|
| Edit: the link was bad, but example of legit single character
| emoji ENS is [pirate flag].eth you can search it directly in
| the ENS App
| _nickwhite wrote:
| I love the ending. Seriously, if you're a TLDR; person and just
| here for the comments, go read the article (it's short) and come
| back.
| slingnow wrote:
| OK, I did that. I'm back. Now what?
| mikestew wrote:
| Spoiler: the author of TFA eats their own dogfood. If you
| were looking for a big, M. Night Shyamalan twist at the end,
| you'll be disappointed.
|
| OTOH, the article _is_ worth a read.
| enryu wrote:
| Best article I read in a long time, kudos
| bee_rider wrote:
| It would be cool if this could spit out research papers.
|
| Computers are useful tools but they can be quite attention-
| destroying.
| johnnyo wrote:
| How do you add things like emojis and inline images?
|
| I don't see anything in the text that maps to either in the
| output?
| rackjack wrote:
| How does it handle images?
| SirYandi wrote:
| Also how about italics / bold and heading / date subheading
| formatting. Perhaps there is a short manual editing step before
| publishing?
| hyperpallium2 wrote:
| Reminds me of David Rees' _Artisanal Pencil Sharpening_
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=KabOfnbS4TQ Hipster co-marketing
| opportunity?
| ushakov wrote:
| i love that it doesn't scale!
| Philip-J-Fry wrote:
| It feels less like a paper website business and more just like a
| traditional website builder except with some OCR to turn notebook
| pages into web pages.
|
| Like, you've still got to edit the page to add links, images,
| colours, etc. In fact, that seems like the most complicated part.
|
| It's a fun gimmick and a nice selling point. But someone will be
| able to use this idea for Wordpress/Wix/Squarespace plugin. Would
| be surprised if they didn't produce their own feature to do the
| same thing eventually.
|
| It'd be way cooler if you could draw links on the page and it
| would figure that out. Or draw a box with some links in it and
| generate a header. Draw a box for a place holder image and
| generate that. The next iteration would obviously be using paper
| to design the actual site and then using CV to generate the
| markup/styling.
| closetohome wrote:
| Yeah it's integration of OCR and a lightweight CMS that also
| conveniently rolls together fees for hosting and GPT3.
|
| I was a little surprised that the paper part is used _only_ for
| plain text. It would sort of make sense to have at least a few
| formatting and layout features.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Disagree because:
|
| * I primarily see this as, not a traditional website builder,
| but as a way to take _paper journals_ and transform them into
| web journals /blogs.
|
| * As someone who has tried all manner of tools and software for
| journaling (literally like tens of software apps), I've found
| that my brain just works best with a nice paper journal and a
| great pen (I highly recommend the prismacolor premier fine
| marker). It just works far better for me than anything else.
|
| I'm so glad this project is at the top of HN. It is the
| ultimate "hacker project" of someone that scratched a personal
| itch, and found out other folks would be willing to pay for it.
| noodle wrote:
| Wouldn't be HN without the "you can build this trivially"
| [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224] response.
| MCneill27 wrote:
| It's pathetic. So many egos that need to be assuaged every
| time a clever execution they didn't do is brought to their
| attention.
| [deleted]
| setr wrote:
| IMO it's a generally good mentality -- the fact that
| dropbox is not _that_ hard for your average programmer to
| replicate (by plumbing with existing tech) is exactly why
| you have so much variety in the software space.
|
| Of course, turning a functional program into a function
| business is no simple feat, but no one should be looking at
| these things and thinking "it takes a genius with a once-
| in-a-lifetime idea" -- because, well, it clearly doesn't.
| And it's really not the most incredible or innovative idea.
|
| The intelligence was largely in transforming something you
| could do into something you could easily do -- and identify
| that it has a potential for profit, and identify how to
| extract that profit, and executing on it long enough to
| achieve that profit.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation
| of what someone says, not a weaker one that 's easier to
| criticize. Assume good faith._"
|
| " _Please don 't sneer, including at the rest of the
| community._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| No doubt we're all more motivated by ego than we believe we
| are, but comments that take a supercilious stance and put
| everybody else down don't help--and are not part of the
| culture we're hoping for here.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| I think that's in play either way--people need to tell or
| be told that their idea is actually technically
| challenging, unusually insightful into business or users,
| etc. Critics are silenced because there must be no way
| they've read patio11 if they're posting, etc. Capacity for
| mutually appreciative disagreement is low on HN.
|
| The average business is not brilliant and yet is still not
| easy to execute long enough to succeed. Life is hard.
| [deleted]
| Drew_ wrote:
| "You can build this trivially" is a fair criticism once you
| build your own products and realize how rampant IP theft is.
| Aside from that, the infamous dropbox comment you linked
| doesn't at all say "you can build this trivially".
| habibe wrote:
| Not word for word, but pretty close: "...you can already
| build such a system yourself quite trivially..."
| InGoodFaith wrote:
| Wouldn't also be HN without the misinterpretation of
| BrandonM's response.
|
| Here is dang's comment about that topic/meme [1]
|
| 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29178442
| Philip-J-Fry wrote:
| I'm not saying it's trivial to build this. I'm just saying
| that the "paper website" part is greatly exaggerated. The
| real meat of the pie is in website builder which _is_ more
| complicated than tweaking some parameters on some off the
| shelf OCR/GPT3 solutions.
|
| It's cool, I've never shipped a project like this, and
| probably never will. But I've worked on my fair share of
| software so I know what it takes behind the scenes.
| option_greek wrote:
| You are not looking at this from user perspective. It's
| very much a paper based flow for them. Where it wins is
| that it lets people forget about digital devices while
| creating their content while letting them choosing to share
| some of it online post that. There are magic notebooks,
| magic pens etc that use ocr to achieve the same but you
| still need to do the creation using those devices (which
| are at least twice the $99 price).
|
| Because you are a developer, you are thinking in
| gpt/ocr/website building etc. Lot of people especially
| older generations eager to share stuff will find this
| useful if not amusing. For them its write something on
| paper and get a link back. Real users don't care about
| WordPress plugins.
| cxr wrote:
| > You are not looking at this from user perspective.
|
| They are looking at it that way. Because what you just
| described would be great for the user. The only problem
| is that what you described doesn't match how this service
| actually works. That it should work like but doesn't is
| the entire basis for Philip-J-Fry's comments. Both
| comments here make it clear enough what he or she is
| talking about, so the response admonishing them (to
| empathize with the users) is odd.
| trulyme wrote:
| You both have a point, except yours is a narrow(er)
| engineering one. OP solved a real-world problem, and
| actually solved enough of it to be useful to many people,
| who were thrilled enough to become customers. That is
| impressive by itself, but what makes it even more
| impressive is that it is a new niche!
|
| Would adding new features make it easier to create more
| complex pages? Yes. Would it improve the experience for the
| users? I doubt it. It's like adding full text editing mode
| to a chat - technically viable, but takes away the magic -
| just give me text and emojis and stop there.
| bluecatswim wrote:
| That's not what parent said at all, if anything he meant the
| very opposite. He was just suggesting missing features. The
| site is a nice tiny project but it's not what you'd expect
| when you think of making websites from paper, you'd think it
| would understand layouts and convert them to CSS or let you
| create a sitemap from a tree but as it is it's just OCRing
| text and uploading it to a page with an editor next to it.
| underdeserver wrote:
| A blog is more about the content of a single post than about
| the links inside.
|
| When I'm reading a post, I rarely click any links at all.
| claytn wrote:
| I completely disagree. No one is ever going to write out a url
| by hand on notebook paper. Even in the rare case that a url
| would fit on a single line, it's just needlessly cumbersome
| work to do. I think the project author did a great job allowing
| for further site customization (styles, images, etc.) without
| overcomplicating the hand-written portion.
| Philip-J-Fry wrote:
| I don't mean writing out a URL...
|
| You could name pages like "Home", "About", "My trip to
| Paris". And then write on the piece of paper "[link to My
| trip to Paris]"
|
| Or you could write "[link from Posts]" to add it to a common
| listing.
|
| You'd basically just create a written form of Markdown.
| claytn wrote:
| Oh I misread. That type of linking definitely feels doable.
| Images & styles are a whole other can of worms though
| [deleted]
| FalconSensei wrote:
| My main impediment for using anything like that is that my
| handwriting is incomprehensible to anyone except me. Like, my
| wife takes some time to figure out what it's written there, and
| sometimes - after long enough time passes - even myself
| d0gsg0w00f wrote:
| Maybe there's an inherent bias that people who prefer to hand
| write have better handwriting and therefore have a better
| experience. It's possible that most people with bad handwriting
| are more prone to want to type.
| SeanFerree wrote:
| Love it!
| ineedasername wrote:
| I love this. It's hilariously written at the same time that it
| shows building something that is useful into a business without
| worrying about whether it would scale to Unicorn size.
|
| On the downside, the Moleskin IDE the custom one the author had
| made in China are extremely biased against people with bad
| handwriting. More attention to accessibility may be required.
|
| Seriously though this seems great if you have a bunch of notes
| and journals that you'd like to digitize. I have a small journal
| with my own recipes from over the years, and digitizing it has
| been in the back of my mind for a while-- if Paper Website can
| defeat my astoundingly awful handwriting.
| TwelveNights wrote:
| I like using paper to journal about my day or write about random
| thoughts I might have that I'd like to flesh out further through
| writing. A few inconveniences of writing it though is that you
| might want to selectively share some stuff from time-to-time,
| lack of ability to add media (though a portable printer kinda
| solves this problem), and having a limit of space, relying on
| indexing journals when they fill up. A lot of the caveats are
| solved by privately blogging, though I do miss writing instead of
| typing everything.
|
| Something like this is almost a sweet spot of keeping the paper
| version as a "draft copy" while being able to enrich a digital
| version of your journal. As someone in the thread mentioned,
| being able to have private pages would likely encourage people to
| try it out for their journalling purposes. Otherwise, the project
| looks amazing!
| throwawaymanbot wrote:
| Humanity can be awesome. I Love the whole spirit of this project.
| SCUSKU wrote:
| Hey Ben, just wanted to say great post! A lot of these comments
| are fairly negative, and I imagine they can weigh on your psyche.
| I just wanted to say I am thoroughly impressed with your
| execution on the project as well as your ability to market your
| product. Really impressive stuff, big fan :)
| giarc wrote:
| A neat idea would be to allow prisoners that don't have internet
| or computer access to publish their own writing in an easy way.
| Sure, a family member could take the letters and published
| themselves, but it might be neat to see the image of the letter
| from prison as well.
| mh- wrote:
| This was a fun read. Love the twist at the end.
| _virtu wrote:
| Slightly off topic, but I'm a bit of a paper snob at this point.
| While Moleskine is not the bottom of the barrel I still find for
| use with fountain pen inks they're not the best. You haven't
| lived until you try out some Tomoe river paper.
|
| Check out TarokoShop's notebooks:
| https://www.etsy.com/shop/TarokoShop?ref=simple-shop-header-....
| picture wrote:
| The Clairefontaine paper used in Rhodia's Rhodiarama notebooks
| are also excellent. The soft cover Rhodiarama are some of the
| best paper for really watery inks. Another fantastic option is
| Midori's notebook paper, their whole design and the open grid
| option are really pretty. https://www.midori-
| japan.co.jp/md/en/products/mdnote/ Also if you're willing to
| over pay, the Kleid 2mm grid notebook with OK Fools paper are
| among the highest quality I've used. It has handy feature of
| detachable pages too.
| jen729w wrote:
| While we're on paper, I have a Field Notes "Expedition"
| special edition. [0] It has waterproof paper which is 'fun'
| but actually pretty useless as ink doesn't really hold.
|
| So I had it for years and it went unused. And then I used a
| pencil! (Mitsubishi 9850 HB, thanks for asking.) [1] Oh and
| it is _the most fun in the world!_ It's like writing on a pat
| of butter with the tail of a fox. It's the smoothest thing
| you've ever felt.
|
| Now it lives in the kitchen and I record meat temperatures
| and whisky cocktail ratios and it is my favourite book.
|
| That is all.
|
| [0]: https://fieldnotesbrand.com/products/expedition
|
| [1]: https://pencilly.com.au/product/mitsubishi-9850-hb/
| noahbradley wrote:
| If you want some waterproof notebooks that aren't quite as
| impractical as those Expedition ones (they always smeared
| for me too), you might try Rite in the Rain. Had a great
| time using those over the years.
| gcheong wrote:
| Fun fact - I worked for a bit in Japan for Yupo (the
| company that makes the paper of the same name and used in
| this notebook) as part of the project team that was
| overseeing the construction of the Yupo plant in Virginia.
| I was originally hired through an English language school
| on contract to help with editing the English translations
| of their technical documentation but also got to do some
| things like porting a sheet temperature simulator from MS-
| DOS to Windows.
| allenu wrote:
| I may have to try out Tomoe some time. I used Moleskine long
| ago but eventually moved away to Leuchtturm 1917 notebooks. I
| find their paper works really well for my fountain pen usage. I
| even write on both sides of each page, something I avoided on
| cheaper notebooks.
| martneumann wrote:
| I could see a good use case for those planning/kanban/mind
| mapping meetings where you plaster a whiteboard with notes and
| drawings. Scanning or photographing that isn't so nice.
| Formatting it into a pleasant, readable wesbite would be pretty
| cool.
| asicsp wrote:
| Discussion about the site mentioned in this article:
|
| "Paper Website: Start a tiny website from your notebook"
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29174478 _(32 days ago, 271
| points, 70 comments)_
| abadger9 wrote:
| I've done some OCR side projects during hackathon weeks over the
| years (with google tesseract). This is a neat idea, I can only
| imagine the difficulty with which transcribing the variety of
| terrible handwriting will cause frustration and an eventual flood
| of refunds.
| deegles wrote:
| He really glosses over how he uses GPT-3 to correct the text...
| poxrud wrote:
| It looks like he's first using tesseract to recognize his
| handwriting and convert it into text. Tesseract doesn't do a
| perfect job so the recognized text is full of mistakes. He
| treats the mistakes as spelling mistakes and "asks" GPT-3 to
| correct them. This is a very clever idea and will greatly
| improve current OCR efforts.
| amenod wrote:
| That's a really interesting part, and probably why the OCR
| works good enough for such case.
|
| Not sure about legal implications of using it though:
|
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/23/1008729/openai-i.
| ..
|
| EDIT: it seems I have misunderstood the article - OP probably
| uses MS API to access GPT-3 anyway, so the point is moot.
| jsmith99 wrote:
| From the screenshot I suspect the real secret is that it
| gives the user a chance to correct errors after scanning.
| etskinner wrote:
| They might consider it a trade secret of sorts. If I were
| them, I wouldn't want someone to just take the idea and
| undercut me.
| folli wrote:
| I think from his explanation in the article it's quite
| straightforward to implement it yourself: get a GPT-3
| subscription at OpenAI or MS Azure, use the API as
| described in the article, voila.
|
| But the idea is genius indeed.
| gambiting wrote:
| Yeaaaah, his handwriting is actual certified art compared to
| mine . I can't get _anything_ to recognize my handwriting
| reliably, including the text recognition built into iOS with
| Pencil - it 's just useless.
| tbihl wrote:
| To second what the other commenter said to you: I have seen
| someone with terrible handwriting fix it. He decided he
| cared, found pens and notebooks he really liked, and started
| using them attentively. People treat pens like they're all
| the same, but the drying time, line thickness, weight, drag
| across the paper, etc. all vary enormously, and if you care,
| you can probably find the right tool and get your handwriting
| to a point where you're happy with it.
| sombremesa wrote:
| I disagree on the suggested method, but I agree that
| handwriting can be improved. Someone who writes in
| prescription cursive isn't going to get better with a new
| pen and different paper. It takes deliberate practice and
| attention to detail.
|
| This is why "a poor craftsman blames his tools" is an
| adage.
| mprovost wrote:
| I have terrible handwriting and have had the idea in the
| past to try and relearn with a new style. Like maybe the
| way they teach French children in school! But when I
| looked online for a book on how to learn handwriting as
| an adult they were all for veterans who had lost their
| dominant hand and that was incredibly depressing. Anyone
| have a good resource?
| sombremesa wrote:
| Just copy writing you think is good, and keep a daily
| journal where you write exclusively in that style. It'll
| be slow going at first, but it works. Takes about a year
| before it's totally natural.
| talor_a wrote:
| I decided I hated having chicken-scratch handwriting around
| the end of high school / beginning of college. I literally
| did writing worksheets (tracing over letters) like I was in
| kindergarten. And if I wrote a messy word / letter on my
| homework I'd cross the word out and do it again. It made a
| huge difference, and I started getting compliments all the
| time on my writing. It's slipped back into average
| territory since, but it definitely works!
| hahamrfunnyguy wrote:
| I can't even recognize my handwriting reliably.
| rileyphone wrote:
| Same - I find I typically use writing as a tool for thought
| moreso than a record that I will come back to, though I
| occasionally take a pass through old notes to see if I had
| any forgotten gems.
| criddell wrote:
| You can change that.
|
| After I started using a Palm Pilot, my handwriting improved
| significantly and the changes seem to have been permanent. I
| get basically 100% accuracy with the Apple Pencil in iOS.
| globalise83 wrote:
| There is a delicious irony in the fact that you are
| training yourself using a reinforcement learning approach
| to meet the needs of an imperfect machine learning
| application.
| criddell wrote:
| An inexpensive bit of consumer tech. was able to
| accomplish something that years of human teachers could
| not.
| deepdmistry wrote:
| I don't see an issue in that, we can meet machines part
| way to make it easier for both of us
| Fiahil wrote:
| I have the same issue with my remarkable 2 : My handwriting is
| not OCR-able
| edoceo wrote:
| Practice! I found a guide for writing letter like architect,
| helped me a bunch, after like 30 days of learning new letter
| shapes
| fesoliveira wrote:
| Could you post a link to this guide? My handwriting while
| not horrible could use some improvement, and is not helped
| by the fact that I am left handed.
| JadoJodo wrote:
| I'm uncertain if this is the one parent mentioned, but I
| found this guide with a quick search:
| https://artdepartmental.com/blog/architectural-lettering/
| edoceo wrote:
| This is good too! I got books from the library.
| FunHearing3443 wrote:
| Trying the free trial - this is awesome! And it actually read my
| truly awful handwriting quite well. The website design and the
| technology is inspiring. Thank you!
| mNovak wrote:
| All I want is a dead easy way to make a landing page + account +
| payment options for a tiny prototype SaaS like this (e.g. I
| supply a few APIs as 'backend' and the rest just works) -- quite
| similar to the One Item Store the author made. I can only imagine
| how many people have had to repeat all the same boring steps for
| some small proto.
| rambambram wrote:
| Big smile on my face, fun read and nice video.
| xwdv wrote:
| Wow, the ending of this blog post felt like an incredible twist
| in a movie was just revealed.
| giarc wrote:
| To me it felt more like a magician revealing a hidden twist.
| OliC wrote:
| What a great idea. We need more of this sort of thing.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > My girlfriend watched me, puzzled. After convincing her that I
| hadn't gone crazy
|
| Now _there_s a startup idea for you! How did you manage to do
| that? Much more interesting story :-P
| FarmOfFriends wrote:
| whats the input to gpt-3? is it only the text outputted from the
| handwriting recognition?
|
| im just wondering if GPT-3 can be used as a spell check for
| speech to text use cases
| 094459 wrote:
| I am so happy about this site as a few months ago I had a similar
| idea after speaking to some relatives who wanted badly to blog
| but was just terrified of the tech. After chatting for a while
| afternoon in between copious amounts of tea and cake, we came
| upon a design that involved pen/paper or a typewritten page, and
| an app that would convert this into a blog post. I hope this does
| really well and will be sharing this with that group.
| dash2 wrote:
| Three above this story on the front page is an article called
| "The Web Is Fucked", complaining about how there's no character
| on the web any more, and lamenting the 90s, Geocities etc. etc.
| I'd say this story refutes that one.
| jaypeg25 wrote:
| I wish Stumble Upon still existed just so I could find the
| weird corners of the web again. This site and Reddit sort of
| fill that but also don't quite fit it at all.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| So much this!
|
| I don't really think it's that the niche stuff has moved away
| from the web - it's that nearly every functional discovery
| mechanism (that my now 30ish year old self knows about) has
| been captured by advertising or killed.
|
| When all you ever get served up is links to the same drivel
| promoted by folks who have no honest interest or curiosity,
| but are essentially mercenary marketing/sales (sorry -
| _influencers_ blegh...), then the web starts to _feel_ like a
| bland wasteland.
|
| Some of this is entirely related to being older - but I do
| genuinely think the current tech powerhouses on the web are
| trying their damn hardest to kill off any & all organic
| discovery mechanisms they can. Often through completely
| disingenuous means. If that fails, they buy them and shutter
| them, or roll them into the brand where it becomes the same
| drivel again.
| aniforprez wrote:
| Not to be a downer again but reddit is pretty much dead for
| this. It's turning into FB more and more every day with a lot
| of young kids and teenagers filling it with memes and begging
| for engagement and such. It's not much of an aggregator
| anymore and is turning into more of an actual social network
| now except they still have "anonymous" profiles
|
| I guess it's what the people running it want but I find
| myself going there less and less every day and only look at a
| few curated subs
| rkangel wrote:
| I've found Reddit improved by careful curation of my
| subscribed subreddits. If I spent most of my time in there
| rather than /r/all then it's great. I still feel like
| scrolling through memes on /r/all from time to time and
| that has the beneficial side effect of helping me add to
| those subscriptions.
| waltbosz wrote:
| This is true to an extent, but I find that reddit culture
| seeps its way into all subs. There is a overreaching lack
| of seriousness.
|
| It's my observation that the average redditor is more
| interested in gaining upvotes via silly class-clown
| behavior, than actually contributing meaningful
| conversation. Or interested in upvoting silly comments.
|
| Even in subreddits where the topic of discussion is
| something serious, such as a forum for advice seeking,
| people can't help but reply to posts with jokes.
|
| What is worse is when people are downvoted for a reply
| which is intelligent and serious, but is contrary to
| popular opinion.
| MCneill27 wrote:
| It's so bizarre to me that StumbleUpon came from the same
| mind as Uber (well one of the minds).
|
| However true or untrue all of the political intrigue,
| journalistic threats, etc., it's just crazy to me that such
| an innocent corner of the web that I loved so much in the
| mid-late 2000s was sending death threats to journos in London
| not 8 years later.
| slingnow wrote:
| Yeah, you're right. One counterexample definitely invalidates
| the entire argument.
| amelius wrote:
| Uh, this story uses GPT-3 to "improve" content based on a huge
| training set. Do you think that this will increase diversity
| and bring more character to the web?
| dash2 wrote:
| What? It uses GPT-3 to improve _spelling_.
| duxup wrote:
| We remember the fun stuff, but you had to look for it even back
| in the day.
| dylan604 wrote:
| "Back in my day," we had to look for fun compared to the
| expectation that fun will be delivered to you at your beck
| and call. How times have changed. When you grow up with
| something, it's just accepted as normal. You have to have
| known a time without it to truly get the difference.
| duxup wrote:
| "Facebook didn't provide me what I wanted...THE WEB IS
| DEAD!"
| pkdpic wrote:
| This makes me remember that my primary way of finding new
| things on the web back in middle school was just typing
| educated guess urls in until I found something.
|
| Makes me wonder how interesting the web might be if I just
| started doing that again, and how boring it might have been if
| I'd just had a working search engine back then.
|
| Then again I also seem to remember getting bored enough with
| the web to only spend an hour or two on it at a time. Also I
| was in middle / elementary school so that might have played a
| role too.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _This makes me remember that my primary way of finding new
| things on the web back in middle school was just typing
| educated guess urls in until I found something._
|
| It was nice back in the early days when you wanted U.S. state
| government information, you could almost always enter
| something like http://state.xx.us and get the state's home
| page, then explore from there. (Where xx was the state
| abbreviation.)
|
| Cities were very often http://city.state.xx.us.
|
| Now many (most?) states have vanity URLs, and the cities are
| worse. I think Chicago's changed its URL at least three
| times.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| Google built their index by externalizing the human cost of
| curation, aka Webrings. Now all the webrings are dead,
| because humans are easily tempted by lazy search into not
| maintaining them. I wish they weren't. They were a better
| form of curation than anything since.
| daledavies wrote:
| I once made a website called bobswhitetrousers.com,
| absolutely noone ever visited.
| MMS21 wrote:
| If you did that now you'll run into sites with no content but
| a banner at the top with contact details so you can buy the
| domain.
| bckr wrote:
| Yep, I got it on the first try. personalrobotics dot com.
| Not a neat robot hacker website, not even a company selling
| robots. Just a $300k domain squat.
| dhosek wrote:
| Or a page full of ads.
| dylan604 wrote:
| or much much worse. NSFW klaxon alarms and visits from HR
| for viewing this content at work type situations.
| pkdpic wrote:
| Thats a good point, I remember a bit of this back in the
| day but not sure how common it was. One my best friend and
| I still joke about to this day was tree.com, I seem to
| remember it wasn't even for sale, just a squat for squats
| sake or something. Good times.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Parking domains have been a staple of the internet since
| its inception.
| dylan604 wrote:
| oh the days of the under construction animGifs
| twobitshifter wrote:
| This is a great idea and I'd love a future with an explosion of
| paper websites. However, I'm saddened that after all the
| attention and clicks the annual revenue is only $3600. It really
| shows the difficulty of getting someone to pay for your service.
| I wonder if an alternate revenue model would have been more
| successful?
| [deleted]
| ushakov wrote:
| where is your business based and have you registered an LLC?
|
| do you make a separate LLC for each project?
|
| how much did it cost to launch the business and what does is cost
| to keep running (lawyers/paperwork/admin)?
|
| i'm scared of starting my own tiny projects, because of all the
| bureaucracy involved to even get started
| soared wrote:
| You don't really need to register an llc or do any of that for
| your projects that are not big.
| ushakov wrote:
| how do you legally accept money then?
|
| clarification: i'm in EU
| benmmurphy wrote:
| If your turnover is low enough you don't need to be VAT
| registered in the UK. Also, in the UK you can be VAT
| registered and be a sole trader.
| ushakov wrote:
| do you think as a foreign citizen i'd be able to setup a
| UK Limited?
|
| i'm familiar with Companies House though
| marci wrote:
| Are you in the EU or the UK?
| rosndo wrote:
| If you're not on any sanctions lists there shouldn't be
| any issues.
|
| Your residency/citizenship does not play any part in
| forming a UK LTD. It might affect your ability to open an
| account with some banks though.
|
| These guys are okay
| https://www.99pcompanyformations.co.uk/ The whole process
| takes a few minutes and costs almost nothing.
| cbushko wrote:
| I think you just take the cash using Stripe or whatever. It
| gets deposited in your bank account and you claim income
| tax on it.
| ushakov wrote:
| i don't want liability
| chinathrow wrote:
| What are you talking about? You make revenue, you
| disclose the revenue, you file taxes. Doesn't matter if
| you do it as a private person or as an LLC.
|
| You can incorporate to reduce liability easily, it does
| not cost a lot of money in most jurisdictions.
| spiffytech wrote:
| In the US, anyone can sell good or services and do business
| without formally registering as a business. You're
| automatically classified as a sole proprietorship, with
| your legal name as the business name. But there's no
| liability protection, since you and the business are the
| same legal entity. That's where LLC or incorporating comes
| in, along with lots of other reasons to want to formalize
| the business as a legal entity.
| mwint wrote:
| It's not that bad - make an LLC right now (in most states, it's
| a single form to start one), then you have no excuse. Taxes are
| easy.
|
| You probably don't even need the LLC, but I like having a bit
| of a legal umbrella (though chances are, no one is going to sue
| you unless your project gets big)
| hahamrfunnyguy wrote:
| I have a number of smaller businesses/products that are part of
| one business entity: - IT Consulting practice - Eletronic
| device business (sells a single product via internet/mail
| order) - YouTube channel/blog - Fledgling SAS product that's
| not yet launched (consumes money, not makes it)
|
| I live in the US. To incorporate here, you file paperwork with
| your state. You don't need a lawyer, just send in the filing
| fee(s) with the completed paperwork. If I remember correctly,
| fees were somewhere around $100-$200. I have an accountant do
| my corporate taxes. He charges me $400. I file the sales tax
| paperwork myself on my state's web site. It's basically: How
| much do you owe us? And then you pay it. Most eCommerce
| storefronts keep track of the sales-tax stuff for you so it's
| easy.
| kragen wrote:
| I wonder what value you could add to this with a notebook printed
| with digitally referenced paper? By printing an unobtrusive sort
| of barcode on each page, you could determine which part of which
| page of which notebook each scanned pixel came from, and what
| lighting conditions it was photographed under. What could you do
| with that?
|
| Well, the simplest and most greyface application is forms; you
| can define particular areas of each page as being particular form
| fields. If you're blogging, you might have a field for a "slug"
| that appears in the URL, for example, or a field for tags, or
| checkboxes for some tags (plus a special page to declare the
| meanings of the checkboxes). Or, if you're tracking expenses, you
| could have a checkbox for each expense category and columns for
| the date and the amount. For recipes, you might have a section
| for listing ingredients, with a column for unit of measure, a
| column for quantity, and a column for the ingredient name. Etc.
|
| For me, the special feature of paper notebooks that cellphones
| and other computers suck at is drawing. If I want to draw a
| diagram or illustration, it just works much better on paper: my
| pencil point occludes much less drawing area than my finger does,
| there's no tracking error where the ink appears 2 mm to the side
| of the point, it has much lower latency, and I can draw finer
| lines. But scanning those drawings into a computer is a pain,
| because I have to illuminate them evenly and hold them flat while
| I photograph them, which still probably involves some perspective
| distortion. Barcodes on the paper, together with reference lines
| and reference color swatches, could solve that problem, as well
| as providing information about which parts of the paper are
| occluded, if any.
|
| For a few special applications like numismatics and entomology,
| the paper could provide a precise physical measurement reference
| for specimens.
|
| Combining drawing with filling out forms, you can make a font
| from your handwriting; this is enormously easier if you can
| correct the various distortions. In
| http://canonical.org/~kragen/oilpencil/ I spent about 24 hours
| fiddling with various graphics programs, but there was a website
| I found somewhere where you can print out a form, draw the font
| on it, upload the scan, and download your TrueType font. This
| kind of thing might help with training OCR, too, especially if
| you don't have access to GPT-3. (Or if OpenAI decides to
| peremptorily destroy everything you've built because one of your
| users uses your service to write about their dead fiancee:
| https://towardsdatascience.com/openai-opens-gpt-3-for-everyo...)
|
| Other ways to combine drawing and filling out forms include
| sketching orthographic projections to build 3-D models; coloring
| a coloring book; drawing maps for Minetest and similar grid-cell
| games (especially 2-D ones); drawing heightfields; and sketching
| different keyframes of an animation to automatically morph
| between. You could even draw a 2-D continuum of keyframes, thus
| providing an animation character that's continuously variable
| along two different axes; you might put time on the theta axis
| and some sort of emotion along the radius axis.
|
| (You can also apply these ideas with drawings that are input via
| other media, such as touchscreens, Wacom tablets, and mice, not
| only scanning paper. When you're scanning paper it's hard to get
| feedback as you're drawing, although you could maybe glance at
| your cellphone screen periodically, or use a projector like
| DynamicLand, or have a continuously updated monitor using a
| webcam feed. It could even use the occlusion information from the
| barcode to patch in remembered images wherever your hands were
| occluding the paper.)
|
| What should the barcodes look like?
|
| In 02001 Anoto announced their "Digital Paper" approach:
| https://www.wired.com/2001/04/anoto/. As explained in
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_paper this uses an
| unobtrusive 2-D barcode scanned by a camera in a "digital pen"
| (later called the "Fly Pen", 02005) to locate the pen in an
| enormous global "virtual desktop"; I think the NeoLAB "Neo
| smartpen" works the same way. This was all before cameraphones
| went mainstream and high resolution. They got 300 patents but
| fortunately everything they filed in 02001 expires this year.
| Anoto's barcodes use a grid of slightly displaced grid dots.
|
| The Fly Pen provided a sort of graphical user interface on the
| paper, using audio for output. It was sort of aimed at kids doing
| schoolwork and playing games. It failed in 02009. The founder
| started a new company called Livescribe focusing on notetaking;
| the Livescribe smartpen allows you to spatially organize and
| annotate a continuous audio recording. It has been more
| commercially successful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livescribe
|
| Tiny unobtrusive dots might not reproduce reliably on a cellphone
| camera, though having been published in WIRED in 02001 means the
| technique is in the public domain (or will be next year). A
| better idea might be to use thin horizontal and vertical grid
| lines whose thickness varies slightly, perhaps in a pastel
| subtractive primary like cyan, magenta, or yellow; then you can
| optionally remove them in software after scanning. Scanning a
| whole page at a time, instead of a tiny area around a pen point
| like the "digital pens" described above, gives you a great deal
| more space for redundant page ID data in the barcode; probably 48
| bits or so is sufficient.
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