9 batteries in 25 minutes - a new personal record

I went for a walk at lunch Friday, over to Towson and Hudson Trails shopping for eating utensils (found a foon for $2, not a spork, not a spoonfork, not a forkspoon, a foon).

On the way back to the office I decided to vary the straight-ish line I took to get there, and look for dead batteries in parking lots around Towson.

In an April blog, I had noticed how much battery hunting was like fossil hunting, or archeology ("first 3 were several feet apart, at the downhill side of the Middlesex shopping center parking lot, like dinosaur fossils collected at a flooded stream site") and this expedition was very similar. Here's the photo file log, showing the shots that I took, and excluding dupes:

385112 May 23 12:14 0523081214.jpg
425286 May 23 12:15 0523081215.jpg
470554 May 23 12:17 0523081217a.jpg
272830 May 23 12:18 0523081218.jpg
409044 May 23 12:19 0523081219a.jpg
348803 May 23 12:20 0523081219b.jpg
512043 May 23 12:25 0523081225.jpg
587916 May 23 12:35 0523081235.jpg
646898 May 23 12:37 0523081237.jpg

I used NetPBM tools to mosaic these into a 20K JPEG file.
















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$ jpegtopnm ${shot}.[Jj][Pp][Gg] | pnmscale -xysize 150 200 | ppmtojpeg > ${shot}-150x200.jpg
$ jpegtopnm ${shot}.[Jj][Pp][Gg] | pnmscale -xysize 150 200 > ${shot}-150x200.pnm
$ pnmindex -across=3 0523*200.pnm >batteries-20080523.pnm
$ pnmtojpeg batteries-20080523.pnm >batteries-20080523.jpg

And then Xpaint to show a closeup of one of the nearly buried specimens.

$ xli 0523081235-crop3.jpg
0523081235-crop3.jpg is a 541x378 JPEG image, color space YCbCr, 3 comps., Huffman coding
Building XImage...done

The ones wedged under the concrete parking barriers were the trickiest to find, and the shots are not so great since they were usually in shadow. I think the camera phone behaved adequately, though, despite my inability to see the screen in the bright sunlight.

$ strings graphics/0523081235.jpg | head -4
Exif
SAMSUNG Electronics
Anycall SCH-i760
2008:05:23 16:35:53

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