Title text: The heartfelt tune it plays is CC licensed, and you can get it from my seed on JoinDiaspora.net whenever that project gets going.


Transcript

2003:

[Cueball approaches a bearded fellow.]

Cueball: Did you get my essay?
Bearded Fellow: Yeah, it was good! But it was a .doc; You should really use a more open-
Cueball: Give it a rest already. Maybe we just want to live our lives and use software that works, not get wrapped up in your stupid nerd turf wars.
Bearded Fellow: I just want people to care about the infrastructures we’re building and who-
Cueball: No, you just want to feel smugly superior. You have no sense of perspective and are probably autistic.

2010:

Cueball: Oh my God! We handed control of our social world to Facebook and they’re DOING EVIL STUFF!
Bearded Fellow: Do you see this?

[Inset, the bearded fellow rubs his index and middle fingers against his thumb.]

Bearded Fellow: It’s the world’s tiniest open-source violin.


  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    81 year ago

    I’ve given up on trying to find certain books in sane formats. Thankfully Calibre is really good at converting PDFs to actual ebook formats.

    There’s a bit of a learning curve, and sometimes I have to do a little semi-automated cleanup – but it works.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      41 year ago

      Really? I must have had a particularly troublesome PDF. It was almost like running it through OCR, generating hundreds of weird typos and formatting errors when I tried to convert with calibre.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        31 year ago

        The OCR struggles with some PDFs for whatever reasons: font, formatting, etc.

        There are 3rd party PDF OCR websites/programs that work better. If I’m having issues I run it through one of those first.

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          21 year ago

          Any suggestions? Even the good ones had error rates that might not matter for a couple of pages, but when scaled to a 500 page book, even a 1% error rate results in an annoying level of typos.

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            English
            11 year ago

            I use gImageReader + Tesseract, but that probably doesn’t meet your criteria. Unfortunately OCR is very rarely perfect unless the input is perfectly clear and with a “OCR friendly” font/formatting. There are “AI powered” OCR out there, but I can’t speak to how well they work and I don’t know of any free ones.