Shutting Down

After 6 months without any updates I've come to the realisation that I cant afford to keep beep my stuff up to date so I'm going to close it to new registrations on September the first and turn off the whole site at the end of September.

Sorry for closing it down but Beep My Stuff doesn't generate enough revenue via amazon referrals to cover the cost of running the site and other services such as Delicious Library, Library Thing and Shelfworthy offer more complete and crucially better supported products.

Thanks for all your support over the years, I've really enjoyed it but it's time for me to move on. Id like to remind beepers that they can export their entire library via Home/You Tab/Export Library.

Be seeing you,

dazza, the ex beep master :(

Twitter Integration

I've added twitter integration to Beep My Stuff. This means that if you have a twitter account you can link your Beep My Stuff account to it and when you add items to your library a tweet will appear in your twitter stream

If you add a lot of things at once you will get a tweet saying "I added 5 things to my library" and a link to your recent additions.

At the moment ONLY things you add to your library will be tweeted but in the future I plan to add tweets for rating and item, marking an item as read, lent, finished etc. I'll add options to turn these features on and off as well so you can customise how twitter and Beep My Stuff work together.

If you are worried about privacy let me assure you that only public items added to public libraries will be tweeted and if your library is private.... well why would you want to integrate it with twitter anyway!

To link to your twitter account log in to Beep My Stuff. Go to your Home and click on the Twitter tab and the click on the "Sign in with Twitter button". Follow the instructions on the twitter website and all should be linked.

Any feedback is much appreciated.

Beeping Improvments

Well it's been quite a while since I did a code update to Beep My Stuff. Sorry for that.

To make up for it I have just given the beeping section of BMS a good overhaul. I've added support for Barcode readers, cue cat scanning, faster searches and better item editing.

The first thing you will notice is that the different ways of entering data are now in seperate tabs. I hope this makes it a lot easier to use.

Barcode Readers

You can get cheap (£20) barcode readers on ebay that are USB and basically pretend to be keyboards. You can now scan in up to 20 barcodes in to a big text box, press add and all the items will be added to your library without the page even refreshing :) Even the cheapest barcode scanner will suffice, as long as it can read UPC or EAN codes. Most read hundreds of different barcodes.

Cue Cat

The CueCat is a weird little USB thing. It is basically a simple barcode scanner that you run across the barcode and it pretends to be a keyboard typing out a long string. It available on Ebay and from various retailers on the internet. Just google it.

Like the barcode section you can input up to 20 cuecat codes and they will be added to your Library.

There is a small security concern with the cue cat. The code sent to BMS includes a unique code for each cue cat. BMS doesn't use this code as it already knows who you are and I don't really care if you use one, two or a hundred different cuecat scanners to enter your library. Anyway, the unique cue cat code is NOT stored in the BMS database at any point.

Faster Searching

Adding items via searching was REALLY slow due to page load times. So I've updated the search to use AJAX (which means the webpage doesn't need to reload). I hope it's more usable for people without scanners/webcams.

Better Editing

Sometimes amazon doesn't know what we are beeping so you need to enter things by hand. This has also been AJAX'ed making it a faster experience.

I hope you like the new tabbed interface. I think it's a lot cleaner and much more pleasent to use. Please report any bugs and let me know if you like it or hate it.

thanks.

Built in Web Cameras: Hack for Beeping

A long standing problem with Beep My Stuff has been that the web cameras built in to laptops can't focus on barcodes held close to the lens. Well I've got a hack to work around the problem. It's not pretty and it involves taking a disposable camera apart :)

Before we get going I'll state the obvious that this will void your camera's warranty, the camera will not function as a camera after this and some photo labs will not take the camera roll from a disassembled disposable camera. I am also not responsible for you stabbing your hand with a screw driver or shocking yourself with the capacitor that might be in the camera. Please be careful.

The cameras with flashes in them contain a VERY large capacitor that will give you a VERY NASTY shock. Please don't do this if you are not confident with electronics. I am not responsible for your actions. You have been warned.

A few days ago I read this article on Make about taking apart a disposable camera to take close up photo's on an older generation iPhone. Well the first thing I thought was does this work on a MacBook Pro with Beep My Stuff and I'm happy to say that it does.... and it works really well :)

It takes about 10 minutes to take apart a disposable camera. It cost me £5 from a local pharmacist (if you ask nicely they may give you a used one for free, they just bin them anyway). All disposable camera's are broadly the same so I can't see why you shouldn't get the cheapest camera you can find. You may even have one lying around, remember they expire after about a year so you can make use of an old one hidden in a cupboard somewhere.

Firstly a word of warning IF your disposable camera has a flash it will have a big capacitor in it and this will give you a nasty shock if you touch it's terminals. So be careful.

So first thing to do is make sure that the flash is discharged by taking a photo with the camera. If the capacitor was charged there will be a flash and a good chunk of it's energy will have been dissipated.

Around the edged of the camera you should see little plastic tabs holding the body together. Carefully unclip those revealing the inside of the camera.

Now remove the battery to stop the capacitor charging up again. My camera flashed while I removed the batter so keep your fingers away from the capacitor while doing this. The basic rule of thumb is to keep your fingers off of the circuit board and metal bits :)

The lens we want is the one that goes up against your eye when you are taking a photo. In this camera I needed to take all the parts of the camera out to remove it safely. Just take your time and most things will come out quickly and with little effort. Remember these cameras are assembled by people and are made to be quick and easy to put together so they come apart in a logical way.

I had to use a hack saw to remove the lens from it's plastic moulding. It's a little bit fiddly so watch your fingers. Once it is separated I used some sticky tape to hold it in front of of my MacBook Pro's web camera.

Now a barcode that is held at 3-5 cm's from the camera is nicely in focus and beeps quite well.

I'm going to think about a cradle to hold the lens in front of the camera so I don't get a sticky laptop. If anyone has any ideas please comment. If you know of a cheaper source for a lens like this then please comment.

Lastly I know this isn't perfect and I'd love to solve this problem in code but I don't think this is going to happen. It's kind of fun destroying the camera as well :)

Happy Beeping :)

Exporting Your Library

Yesterday I added an export option to Beep My Stuff. Once again this was the highest rated task in the feedback tab so I implemented it :)

So how do you export your library? Go to your home on Beep My Stuff and you will see an Export Library option.

Clicking it will bring up a page with a list of fields that you can export. Check the ones you want and uncheck the ones you don't. Click export and you will download a CSV file of all the items in your library.

So what can you do with the CSV file? Well the CSV file is a very simple file with each field seperated by a comma (,). A CSV file is easily imported into a Spreadsheet such as Microsoft's Excel or the free and very capable Open Office. From there you can do whatever you want with it.

There are some restrictions on the data that Amazon provides about products so unfortunately images and reviews are not available in the export other then that... it's all yours :)

Happy beeping,

dazza

Tagging your items

I recently added tagging to Beep My Stuff. Tagging is a simple way for you to organise your library using keywords that mean something to you.

You can add tags by entering a semi-colon (;) seperated list of tags into the text field. For example horror; scifi; mystery

To tag an item you drag the tag from the tag list on the left and drop it on the item you want to tag. To tag more then one item you can shift-click to select multiple items.

Once an item is tagged you will see the little gree tag mark next to it's icon.

Here you can see my tags from my library. You can browse my library here: http://www.beepmystuff.com/metaldazza. Try out the tags and let me know what you think.

I've added some FAQ's on tagging to the BMS FAQ

Happy Beeping

BeepMaster

Mobile Phone BMS

In the feedback tab there has been a very popular option for a Mobile version on Beep My Stuff. Unfortunately I've got some bad news. Beep My Stuff uses Amazon to gather information on items that are beeped. Amazon specifically disallow the use of that data on mobile phone applications unless written permission is given. Unfortunately Amazon has declined to give BMS permission.

As much as I'd like to write an iPhone, gPhone and Symbian app BMS would be nothing without the data that Amazon provides so I will respect their wishes.

The silver lining may be that I can now use my time to make the website EVEN better helping everyone enjoy their libraries and share their stuff with friends.

Happy beeping.