This isn’t so much a product endorsement as a shameful confessional. I just downloaded Delicious Library, a Mac OS X-only program that organizes your home library of DVDs, books, videogames, etc.
It feels dirty how much I loved using this thing. If you’ve got an iSight (which I bought for some reason and haven’t had much use for as of yet), you can use it to scan in the barcodes on your stuff. And after a few false starts, it actually works. And I ended up scanning in my whole DVD collection. And then a few books I had lying around. And some games. And then some more.
And by that point I was just looking around the apartment for more stuff with bar codes on it to scan in. And it would accept them, and look up the information on amazon.com, and a computer voice would read back the name of the thing to me, and it would include a little picture of it on a little picture of a shelf. And it’ll sync it up with my iPod so I can tell when I’m out a store if I’ve already bought that Terry Pratchett book or have yet to get it.
And just like real porn, I kept alternating between feelings of excitement and then intense shame for enjoying it.
I mean, it’s normal to want to have all your stuff organized in alphabetical order and filed away on a computer, right? There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s only for insurance purposes, of course.
Yanno, this is almost enough to get me wanting to get a Mac.
And, certainly it is normal to try alphabetizing everything you own. (Chairs should be stored next to condoms, right?) Nothing to be ashamed of. Enjoy yourself, without guilt!
Yanno, this is almost enough to get me wanting to get a Mac.
And, certainly it is normal to try alphabetizing everything you own. (Chairs should be stored next to condoms, right?) Nothing to be ashamed of. Enjoy yourself, without guilt!
OMG, someone tell me there’s something like this for Windows, please. I would kill and eat a maggot-infested gangrenous plague rat for the ability to scan all the barcodes on my books and get them into a database.
Okay, now that cracked me up. (Although in my defense, that was about the least gay post I’ve made in months). If it helps turn you on or anything, I did scan in a couple of David Sedaris books…
Just an update for anybody who did get that library software. Someone has finally written an app that makes it somewhat useful; it’s called Delicious Exporter and generates HTML files from your library data. It’s still in beta, so you’re stuck with their layout and preset output and everything, but it’s pretty slick. Hopefully it’ll be integrated with the program itself at some point.
Well, using an iSight as a scanner is the flashiest part of the whole thing, but of course it’s not necessary. You can enter the UPC or ISBN codes by hand and it’ll find them just as well. To be honest, in practice the iSight barcode scanning is pretty slow and flaky. It was neat at first, but I think I ended up typing in almost as many codes as scanning them.