Creekside Chatter

What do you know about Dwayne’s Photo Service of Parsons, Kansas? It is the place where the very last roll of the Kodachrome was processed.

A blogging client acts like a word processor, and because it is located on your computer’s hard drive, you can write posts even when offline. Blog clients also make it possible to update multiple blogs through a common interface.

There are many of these programs available, and one of them is Zoundry Raven. Raven is an open-source client, and it supports all of the popular blog formats like Wordpress or Blogger and is a good alternative to popular Windows Live Writer.

If you're looking for a desktop client to support your blogging efforts, this could be it.

A country house mystery involving a missing actress of exceptional talents and virtues, a bogus widow, a returned soldier, spies, plots and suspicions.

It's a "fun" mystery rather than an "edge of the seat" one.

Want to use your iPhone to photograph and OCR scan printed matter? Your chance may be coming soon. CNet reports that Creaceed’s Prizmo software, a desktop photo-OCR package that includes camera tethering and perspective correction, will soon be coming to the iPhone. No word yet on price; the desktop version costs $40.

The app’s crowning feature is that it can fix bad perspective, just like its desktop sibling, as well as let users snap photos without having to press the shutter button. Creaceed has devised a system through which users can simply say "take picture," so as to avoid any unintended shake or distortion from touching the screen.

It can then OCR the text and read it back, or send it to clipboard or various apps or cloud services such as Dropbox. It’s not clear from the article whether it will do the OCR on the device, or export it to a server for processing the way that Dragon’s Naturally Speaking for the iPad does with voice recordings. If the latter, then you would need Internet connectivity for it to work.

This could be a great tool for family researchers!

You may have noticed that not all the templates available on Office.com are created by Microsoft. We often work with partners who specialize in creating templates to provide some of their content to you, for free, on our site. Practical Spreadsheets is one of our newest partners. You can find their newly added Excel 2007 templates here.  They offer a variety of templates for personal and business purposes, from a convenient camping checklist, to a lease mileage tracker.

This simple family tree is just one of the many templates available, for free, from Practical Spreadsheets. See the rest here.

The school’s library just received nearly $400,000 of grant money to digitize 100,000 pages of microfilm from newspapers between 1836 and 1922. Choosing which pages make the cut will be up to a statewide selection committee.

“Part of the process too is going to be looking into our microfilm archives, what we have, the quality of the microfilm, what kind of shape it’s in,” says MacLennan.

Digitization will start in early 2011 and should take about 10 months to complete.

Nevertheless, in November 1896, two boys bicycling on the South Beach (present-day St. Augustine Beach) observed the carcass of a sea monster washing ashore. It was reported to Dr. Dewitt Webb of the St. Augustine Historical Society who undertook an investigation. The monster was described by a South Beach hotelier:

“The head is as large as an ordinary flour barrel, and has the shape of a sea lion head. The neck, if the creature may be said to have a neck, is of the same diameter as the body. The mouth is on the underside of the head and is protected by two tentacle tubes about eight inches in diameter and about 30 feet long. These tubes resemble an elephant’s trunk and obviously were used to clutch in a sucker like fashion any object within their reach.

“Another tube or tentacle of the same dimensions stands out on the top of the head. Two others, one on each side, protrude from beyond the monster’s neck, and extend fully 15 feet along the body and beyond the tail. The tail, which is separated and jagged with cutting points for several feet, is flanked with two more tentacles of the same dimensions as the others and 30 feet long. The eyes are under the back of the mouth instead of over it.”

At first, it was believed merely to be the head of a sperm whale. Later it was proclaimed by Yale Professor Addison Emory Verill to be a new species of giant octopus which the professor proceeded to name after himself even though he had never viewed it.
Later investigations have been undertaken by learned individuals from the University of Florida. Some have confirmed that it was a giant octopus; others and the most recent saying that it was a very large piece of whale blubber with a portion of the whale hide still affixed.

Thus, the mystery remains.