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Thursday, August 30, 2012

auctions and other news


































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8 comments:

  1. A speedy recovery to you, Peter, don't let Satan get your nose. ( :

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  2. Satan got your nose?

    Hmmmm... At least he had some witty repertoire.

    Actually.... WTF?

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  3. My glasses are still on my face so I guess Satan hasn't gotten me yet!

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  4. Hope you get well before the holiday week end. Watch yer nose....

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  5. Ha ha, there must be quite a nasal collection in Hell!

    I've had the same experience with the captchas. I used to just randomly hit some number keys and it would accept them. (I don't like enabling whatever Google is doing -- these look like numbers on private residences spotted on Google Street View, or something.) But now they usually know when you're trying to cheat. Have they already successfully run OCR on these images? Or are they sending each image to several people, then denying your interpretation of it when it doesn't agree with the others'?

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  6. Me too vis-a-vis the captchas. I think Richard's second guess is probably correct. Now they're probably sprinkling in ones they're already sure of with others they still need data on. it's insidious. I'm seriously considering not ever commenting on blogs that use it. (paranoia will destroy ya)

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  7. I noticed the new ReCaptcha system as well. Up to now, they mixed a known captcha which had been recognised by a high number of people (usually the bent word) with a new one, a word from Google's Book Scanning (and OCRing) project, which only few people had solved so far. When enough people solved the new word and the answers were mostly congruent, the "new" captcha would become a known one. Also, instead of a word, StreetView numbers were shown. As these are/were usually "new", you could enter random characters and ReCaptcha would accept it.
    Now, maybe the engineers came up with a new hurdle: My guess is that they're pairing the number with the approximate number the house should have, so you're only allowed to enter numbers in the fitting number block, maybe if the number is 1270, you can only enter numbers from 1250 to 1300, or whatever Google's guess from the map is.
    However, I actually prefer entering numbers slightly off over helping them making my own typecasts machine-readable.

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  8. I was watching both those goodwill auctions too... Almost bid on that voss but no case so I let it go.
    The optima went for cheap.

    Now there's a red Olympia SF: the last couple on eBay have gone for hundreds of dollars.

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Let me know if capcha comes back. Thanks for commenting.

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