#secondcopy

SecondCopy — Mode A is alive

I've got the Misrecogniser running end-to-end. The app now routes OCR + what3words + Ezra (GPT) into a three-line caption that sits comfortably in the APD register—grounded in what the camera sees, nudged by place, and allowed to be a little sideways. It will miscaption and misrecognise; it will also land on those odd, enlightening phrasings I wanted.

What’s happening on each label

Photo → OCR: pull concrete nouns/verbs from the page/scene.

w3w: fold in 1–2 words from the location (no slash soup).

Ezra prompt: ask for three lines, lowercase, field-note tone; line 2 must anchor to at least one OCR keyword.

Post-process: de-fluff, enforce anchors, keep it legible.

Output: ZPL to the Zebra QLn420 over Wi-Fi, plus a PNG “second copy”.

Quality of life

Preview now renders as a true 4×4″ square (matches the printed label).

Captions lean observational/philosophical rather than cryptic riddles.

Why I like it

SecondCopy treats misrecognition as material. The label is a tiny field report: context + place + a thinking error that occasionally hits the truth at an angle.

Next job — Mode B (Relay to Ezra)

I'm turning this from a private tool into a public submission app:

Users create as in Mode A.

Instead of printing locally, they tap Relay to Ezra.

The app uploads PNG + ZPL + metadata to a small cloud inbox (Firebase).

A home listener watches the queue and auto-prints to the Misrecogniser in the studio.

The user still keeps a “second copy” in Photos.

FIELD NOTES: SECOND COPY / THE MISRECOGNISER

First working tests of Second Copy in Mode A. A prosthetic camera-label — take a photo, auto-convert to monochrome bitmap, crop to label size, timestamp, GPS fix, What3Words code. OCR the scene. Seed the caption engine. Print to The Misrecogniser (Zebra QLn420) and save the label to the archive.

The effect is instant. A brutalist Polaroid. Moments shrink to 4x4” squares of thermal memory — an indexed misrecognition. A face, a street, a child, a receipt, a server rack — reduced to black-and-white halftone, coordinates, and a three-word anchor.

Bluetooth stubbornly refuses to print (despite a full day trying to find workarounds), but Wi-Fi keeps the experiment moving. Mode B will follow: remote submissions sent from anywhere, printed later or in public ritual — the Noise side of the album.

Why it matters here: APD makes comprehension a reconstruction. Seeing, hearing, piecing together from fragments. Second Copy mimics that — pulling from visual and locational clues, OCR fragments, language codes — and tries to produce a cohesive caption. Often it fails. But in that failure there’s something true. Misrecognition as a lens.

It’s recursion and duplication: the label is a copy of a copy of a moment. It’s language as identity and identity as label. It’s syncopation: the visual equivalent of being off-beat, a disturbance in the expected rhythm — as in hearing, as in signal, as in noise.

Second Copy — Misrecogniser: First Full Test

Tonight’s Xcode build pushed a full image-to-label print with automatic logo watermarking. From desktop → selection → live preview → thermal transfer — straight into the dot-matrix aesthetic.

Misrecogniser Online After a bit of wireless archaeology (and a detour through an SSID called Warehouse), the Zebra QLn420 is now fully configured over Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Setup was handled via the iOS app for initial network config, followed by CUPS integration on the iMac. Surprisingly easier than I was expecting in all honesty.

The printer has been renamed Misrecogniser, and is now part of the Second Copy station in the Glitch Lab — ready to output live labels, glitch transcripts, and autonomous Ezra interpretations.

Second Copy — Logo Development 📱 App identity / Process Zine sub-project

Even though Second Copy (the iOS app) may be a long way off — other priorities, plus the steep learning curve of building something so far outside my expertise — I wanted to document the design idea while it’s fresh, before it drifts.

The mark begins with the Process Zine // logo. I mirrored, rotated, and overlaid it onto itself, creating a copy of a copy — a lattice that reads almost like a hashtag. That resonance works on multiple levels:

Hashtag / Code — metadata, tagging, networks

Framing Hands — the visual gesture of composing an image (echoing Second Copy’s Brutalist Polaroid fieldwork mode)

Crossed Wires — a nod to the white paper on cochlear implant laterality and APD

Grid / Map — coordinates, wayfinding, GPS + What3Words location data embedded in each print

Copy Degradation — the act of duplication as a slow mutation; every reproduction moves further from the original

The images here are the first generation of experiments: clean prints, and then layered shots where the paper version is placed over the on-screen version — producing a ghostly echo, a literal overlay of one copy onto another.

New arrival to The Interpreter shelves: 🖨️ The Misrecognizer — a Zebra QLn420 mobile label printer.

This one came from eBay — an older sibling of the ZQ630 I currently use in my warehouse role. I picked it up because I already know its language; it’s a workhorse: sturdy, reliable, and perfectly suited as a remote/field printer. It also fits the self-portrait nature of the project — likely having lived a similar past life to my work unit, labelling goods inwards, tracking movement, and tagging goods outwards.

In Mode A (local field mode), it will roam beyond the lab as a kind of Brutalist Polaroid — capturing images, stamping them with GPS coordinates and What3Words locations, and issuing Labels of Interpretation direct from the strap. Glitched captions courtesy of Ezra. Black-and-white, adhesive, portable.

In Mode B (remote submission mode), Second Copy (my in-development iOS app) will open the portal to others:

Snap a photo, and the app auto-tags it with location and time.

Relay it to Ezra.

The Misrecognizer prints it live in the lab — a captioned artefact joining the growing archive. Visitors (in an art installation environment) can watch their image materialise in real time; a camera may even catch the ritual to VHS, feeding the glitch-loop.

Each print can be pegged to The Interpreter cage, filed into the archive, or appear in future Process Zine issues — including themed editions like One Day for Noise.