OCR (optical character recognition) is a powerful (although imperfect) tool for getting data out of scanned images and documents. As it turns out, it’s possible to do in Linux from the command line without too much trouble. The main tool you will need is tesseract . You can install it with this command: sudo apt …read more…
Well, not really. At least not how I tend to think of that word. What really happened is that I found a LaTeX package I like (sim-os-menus) but it didn’t behave the way I wanted it to, so I dug into the source code and figured out how to make it work the way I …read more…
A short time ago I needed to make a calendar in a spreadsheet in which all the months are situated vertically one after the other on the same sheet. There are two possible solutions here: Find a calendar for 2026 and then laboriously type in numbers. (And then laboriously go back and proofread the entire …read more…
Maybe I’m just grumpy but I am sick and tired of seeing ads all over the place. We are constantly inundated with pleas to buy more stuff. I use adblock extensions on my desktop web browser, but that is not an option (apparently) on my Android phone. I try not to spend a lot of time …read more…
I wanted to write some sudoku tutorials in LaTeX, but had to figure out how to draw the grids first. Turns out it’s super easy with Tikz, and even easier with LaTeX macros.
rbenv
I use Git a lot. I’m not a terribly sophisticated user, because I don’t do a lot of branching. I mainly use it as a way to keep track of ongoing projects. But sometimes I need to do something a bit more complicated than I am used to and so I head over to the …read more…
One of the most annoying things I run into when using a computer is that I click in a box to start typing, and the cursor is blocking what I’m typing, so I can’t see it. (This also happens at work when I’m Windows 11.) It’s annoying, because sometimes I make a typo and I …read more…
The great thing about using Linux is that you have a number of command line tools that can accomplish tasks and are generally faster than GUI-based alternatives. The Linux tool for manipulating video files is ffmpeg. Its official documentation is here and one version of the man file is here. General Use The format for …read more…
I create a lot of booklets. Usually, this is because it’s a great way for me to put together some files and take them with me. I can slip them in a briefcase or backpack, and pull them out to read whenever I have a few spare moments. I recently had a situation where I …read more…
So I did a thing, and I posted it to Reddit: Most applications in Linux come with a man page—essentially, an online manual. You can invoke this for any installed app with man <application> where <application> is the name of the app in question. I will say that the quality (and size) of these vary by …read more…
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rbenv
