2015 — 1 March: Sunday — rabbits!

I may yet regret this, of course,1 but I've just fired up the Thunderbird email client under Linux for the first time on BlackBeast and the thing is madly downloading over 24,600 emails. I shan't hold my breath. A correspondent had mildly complained about the detritus GMail was appending / may still be appending (for all I know) to the end of my web-based emails recently. Sorry about that. (I admit, I prefer Thunderbird's user interface, for all that Google's web-mail is very cleverly done.)

Meanwhile...

... the first results2 of my bit of gentle tinkering yesterday afternoon with Inkscape are now available for inspection, starting here. In combination with the GIMP, I think I shall be able to struggle by without Xara (and Fireworks [and Paint]) in future. I've yet to touch so much as a drop of WINE (for trying to run DVD Profiler). My next investigation will probably be into the world (if any) of available OCR options under Linux.

On balance, two weeks into this forced 'experiment' I hafta say I'm very impressed. Desktop Linux has come a long way since I last tried to make a full-time "go" of it, back in early 2008 (on Ubuntu).

Though, let's be honest, back then I was still so badly shaken up by Christa's death that my not exactly legendary powers of concentration were barely able to keep me fed and clothed...

It's a nice, sunny...

... morning, which will only encourage my daffodils to venture out even further. Next thing you know, a tulip or two may yet spring up.

It could...

... just be me, I fear, but people seem to think the funniest things. Even perfessers of media studies at Georgia Tech. Source and snippet:

Here's an exercise: The next time you hear someone talking about algorithms, replace the term with "God" and ask yourself if the meaning changes. Our supposedly algorithmic culture is not a material phenomenon so much as a devotional one, a supplication made to the computers people have allowed to replace gods in their minds, even as they simultaneously claim that science has made us impervious to religion...
Computing-as-thought reaches the rank of religious fervor when we choose to believe, as some do, that we can simulate cognition through computation and achieve the singularity.

Ian Bogost in Atlantic


I love the idea of replacing a real thing by an imaginary thing and then asking "does the meaning change?" :-)

Breakfast? Already? What do you mean it's 09:50 — it can't possibly be!

It's taken...

... about one minute for Brian's two pieces of Python code to demonstrate — and thereby change (forever) — the way I shall in future be generating my interminable 'molehole' web-based lists of some of my reading, watching, and listening goodies. My simple text file list of 9,000 books3 loaded into a 1.3MB SQLite3 DB that was created by Python piece #1. That DB, in turn, got 'queried' by Python piece #2 and seemingly instantly disgorged two complete, differently-sorted, HTML lists in far less time than it has taken me to type this sentence.

The entire sequence of DB creation, loading, querying, and output took less than two seconds if you subtract my fumble-fingered attempts to navigate the terminal prompt to the correct folder in the first place, and type the two Python names in the right order, and without typos. Don't ask.

Dear Mama...

... somehow managed to fall asleep with her head on the corner of her bedside table. The nurse tells me she thus now sports a spectacularly-bruised eyebrow region (her tissue-paper-thin skin and her current blood disorder both come into play, it seems). But "she's cheerful, this morning" which is always good to know.

Reassuring...

... to see that a well-known and rather large online trader has what looks like a totally-baffled database search algorithm:

Indie cinema SF?

Not. Quite. What. I. Was. Expecting. Perhaps they should hire Brian? [Shocked pause] I've just discovered that scrolling the mouse wheel up and down moves me effortlessly between my six virtual workspaces. Providing the mouse pointer is actually in that neck of the woods up in the distant reaches of the top right hand corner of the screen. It's clearly nearly time for some lunch.

I've also just dug what looks like my Windows Thunderbird address book ("abook.mab") out of the wreckage of my Win8.1 system SSD. Of course, Thunderbird on Linux has snootily turned up its nose at my attempts to import it, so it will be my post-prandial task to retrieve some of my missing names and email contacts.

Pah!

I note it's six years to the day since I observed:

It's often struck me that people tend to stick with the tools they first used — unless, or perhaps, until a change of platform is forced upon them. Even then, the popularity of emulators and virtualised systems suggests nobody much cares for change.

Date: 1 March 2009


Perhaps that'll learn me! :-)

During my...

... recent change-of-OS-mandated PC interregnum, I still noted all the visual entertainments that showed up, but I wasn't in a position to scan any of them. Nor confident enough of my Inkscape / GIMP skills to display them. Hence, a catch-up. The first four titles:

Incoming recent titles 1-4

To that quartet, add another:

Incoming recent titles 5-8

And, to that, add this final triplet:

Incoming recent titles 9-11

Inkscape is delightfully easy for my (inevitably) simple-minded purposes, but its idea of "Export bitmap" is to churn out a .png file, so I whack that into the GIMP and re-export it as a .jpg to reduce file sizes. Turns out (surprise, surprise) I can live without borders and drop shadows. For the time being, at least. [Long pause] Purely as an experiment, I'm going to try keeping my scanned images 'full size' while in Inkscape, grouping and arranging them as I wish, but leaving the heavy lifting of scaling and image format changing to the GIMP. I suspect the end result will be a bit less like a Xerox copy of a Xerox copy.

In between another glorious episode of GoT #4 I've also been studying Brian's well-commented Python code; I should be able to adapt it to my other media lists. Ridiculous fun. (Definition of a hobby, perhaps?)

OCR?

It seems "tesseract" is the one to go for. Mind you, just like the package I installed under RISC OS long ago, it apparently needs to be trained first. And it feeds on 300dpi images. Fair enough.

One of the most accurate free software ocr engines that handles image 
files in tiff format (with filename extension .tif); other file formats 
need to be converted to tiff before being submitted to tesseract

That all sounds do-able. It will also be my first genuine use of the TIFF format.

  

Footnotes

1  I usually do. In this case, I now have to train it all over again in the art of junk mail recognition.
2  Eye-strainingly close examination of the A/V diagram will, alas, all too soon reveal my imperfect current understanding of Inkscape's interpretation of a "flood fill", for example. Seems I may yet have to start using layers after all.
3  Give or take — not counting an incoming trio on their way from Amazon right now, the current total is 9,011.