It’s really hard managing all of the tapes that I create with my digital video camera– it’s too hard to remember what scenes and times are on any given tape, and too time consuming to transfer all of the tapes to hard disk or DVD.

It should be fairly simple for a video camera to create a digital “index sheet” of the scenes on a tape that could be transferred to a computer very quickly, whenever a tape fills up. The index sheet would include a representative shot and the beginning and ending times for each segment on the tape. Then all that’s needed is a PC UI for browsing and querying your collection of snippets.

Many cameras (e.g. Sonys) already have flash memory for still photos, so this seems to be mostly a software problem.

When I got my blackberry I needed a way to forward other email accounts into the blackberry account. Here’s a little python script that does just that. Nothing special, but it does show what a great language Python is for this sort of thing.

# This Python script polls an IMAP account for new mail and# forwards it to other accounts.

# philbo at mailblocks dot com

import imaplib, string, smtplib, time

#—————————————————————-# CUSTOMIZE THIS INFO FOR YOUR EMAIL ACCOUNT

imap_server = ‘imap.source.com’imap_username = ‘yourname’imap_password = ‘password’

fromaddr = ‘yourname@source.com’toaddrs = [’yourname@destination.com’]

# interval in seconds for how frequently we check for new mailcheck_interval = 60

# you might need to customize this information if your# SMTP server is different than your imap server

smtp_server = imap_serversmtp_username = imap_usernamesmtp_password = imap_password

# No changes required beyond this point#—————————————————————-

while 1:    try:        server = smtplib.SMTP(smtp_server)        server.set_debuglevel(1)        server.login(smtp_username, smtp_password)

        M = imaplib.IMAP4(imap_server)        M.login(imap_username, imap_password)        M.select()        typ, data = M.search(None, ‘NEW’)

        for num in string.split(data[0]):            typ, data = M.fetch(num, ‘(RFC822)’)            server.sendmail(fromaddr, toaddrs, data[0][1])

        M.logout()        server.quit()        time.sleep(60)    except:        pass