2015 — 22 April: Wednesday
And another sunny morning. Excellent.
I tried...
... but rapidly discarded both "The Imitation Game" and "What we do in the shadows" yesterday evening before retreating1 to the more reliable entertainments of reading, writing, and music.
I've also...
... convinced myself2 that UltraEdit is, for my purposes, the Best Thing Since Sliced Bread and in the enforced absence of my beloved TextPad (on a previous, quite widely-used [if not terribly popular] computing platform) probably the closest match to it. Well worth the minor investment. Over the years, I've paid far more for far poorer software, believe me.
Tesco's appalling...
... trading losses have at least explained the recent disappearance of its large store from Shed City down in Soton. Jack Cohen's spell "Pile it high. Sell it cheap." must have lost its magic, it seems. Wonder where I shall be able to buy the next set of granite placemats that I use as loudspeaker stands? Assuming, that is, I manage to drop something heavy enough on them to break my present set. [Pause] Petroc has just played a piece of music by Alan Hovhaness on BBC Radio 3. This is not common!
If I want my delicious fruit topping for my breakfast cereal I'd better power up the magnetron.
Talk about...
... taking the "long view". This amazing chart (in which David Raup3 had a hand)...
... helps Stewart Brand make his case. Mind you, it also points up the "tick tock" of upcoming extinction events slightly (very [very] slightly) closer to the sort of timescale that his "Long Now" foundation is interested in. I don't expect to be around quite that long.
Out of the mouths...
... of babes and innocents (and a then 15 year old son). These two extracts are from a pair of consecutive letters I wrote to dear Mama 20 years ago:
Peter has found his first week of work experience to be quite an eye-opener from the point of view of what it's like to be expected to show up every day between 8.30 and 5 with an hour "off" for lunch, but it's gone well. He's certainly enjoying being treated more nearly like an adult than I suspect he ever will be at school. And by Thursday, they had him spending all day with minimal supervision reconciling the payroll for groups of scaffolders around the UK and balancing the total correctly at a bit over the £2m mark...
Peter spent the last afternoon of his work experience driving around a digger and a mini-dumper truck, and excavating and filling back in a hole on some waste ground. He says he can't wait to get a car, wants to work there during the summer (though they don't offer summer jobs), but fully sees why we want him to stay in education for as long as possible as "it [the various jobs he was given in and around the Finance department] was so easy, it was boring!"
Such minor-league educational triumphs do occasionally occur to ease the strife of a parent's life :-)
As is often the case...
... the level on SourceForge of a program package I'm interested in trying out is newer than the same thing in the Linux Mint repository. This afternoon's example is gscan2pdf. I suppose OCR is not a mainstream interest, but when that's the function you want, nothing else will really do, will it? The project seems to be actively maintained by a chap called Jeffrey Ratcliffe. I shall give it a whirl after my lunchtime snack. OCR is just about the last4 of the functions I listed here as my initial batch of "must haves" following the malign implosion of my Win8.1 Pro system in February.
When you think how my initial attempt to do a tiny spot of OCRing in the Windows world turned out (click the pic to see the full horror)...
Still a few bugs in the system
... then I'd say this afternoon's first attempt in the Linux world is much more promising:
The left-hand image is the original scan. The right-hand image is the output text after it's been processed into PDF format — from which, of course, I can easily extract the raw text. My thanks to Iris, by the way, for supplying this clipping from her dreadful right-wing "Spectator" magazine. It amused me to see that the venerable Basil Ransome-Davies is still regularly winning these competitions in that rag (and, I expect, in "New Statesman" too).
No argument from me!
I spotted this snippet in an interview with Mr Raspberry Pi this evening:
It's one of the reasons why I like to ship RISC OS, because although RISC OS isn't a modern operating system and it lacks lots of things, it does show you what you get if you took an OS from the mid-90s and don't add any crap to it in the form of features people don't need. And the answer is blindingly fast.
I also spotted the new job Simon Phipps has found for himself.