#zebraqln420

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.