Gl.ib.ly

Ever do phone conferences? Ever put your microphone on mute only to be asked a question and then scramble your mouse to unmute your microphone? Well I do all of the above, well, until I came across a forum post at the Skype forums. I gave the guy's suggestion a go using ⌘M as the mute/unmute button but that only minimized the window. So, instead, I chose ⌘Z and it worked a charm; note, you will need to wait a little after call starts ringing before you can hit the keyboard shortcut. Plus, the keys are nice and close on the keyboard.

Yesterday somebody gave me a USB key with ~1000 JPEGs on it. Each JPEG was a scanned page, ugh, and the task was to find some useful information about topic X. Now each JPEG was about 1-2mb and I needed to do something useful with these images quickly. So what follows is quick walk through of how to do Optical Character Recognition (OCR, that means taking silly image files and ripping out any text identified in them) on Linux or in my case a Mac.

Continue reading "Doing OCR on linux/Mac"