Got mad at Amazon breaking the ability to decrypt my library books via Kindle for PC and resurrected an old technique:

1. Screen recording of Kindle for PC
2. hit the space bar as fast as humanly possible to page through the entire book in like a minute
3. use ffmpeg to remove duplicate frames from the resultant video
4. use ffmpeg to dump out each frame/page to a separate file named after the page number
5. use tesseract to do OCR on each page and dump that output into a single text file

This works ridiculously well.

(Simply holding down the space bar slows down page rendering, resulting in captures of partially rendered pages, which thwarts the duplicate detection. I'll probably improve this by firing my own spacebar press event sequentially.)

@stefano excellent post, I wholeheartedly agree. When we buy from small businesses we:
- talk directly to the owner, always someone who cares, put their hearts at work, are proud about doing it well, and have their lives dependent on it
- do not pay for unexplainable overheads and time-lags, and will definitely not been led by the nose into nonsensical labyrints of buzzwords, lingo, meetings, powerpoint, and bureaucracy
- contribute to the local economy

Long live small businesses 🙂 !

LOGGING ON

What if sustenance, but also whiskey?

when you retoot yourself

“Eldritch Spirits”
Painting nr.3 for the challenge I host over on ig.

#TraditionalArt #MixedMedia #Gouache #ColoredPencil #DarkArt #FolkHorror

"Hey, I've got a really cool idea for a mandatory requirement in the corporate login flow".

...

Everything breaks. Nobody can log in. The wheels of commerce grinds to a halt. Good thing it's not critical infrastructure or anything. Ahemn.

@oatmeal Thank you for putting this down, and taking the time to run through all these parts of it. You hit multiple nails on their respective heads.

Let’s talk about AI art.

https://theoatmeal.com/comics/ai_art

Cynicism is the only worldview that guarantees you’ll never be wrong -
because you’ll never risk being right.

The cynic always wins the argument.

And loses everything else.

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/why-cynicism-is-just-moral-cowardice

Having an IVR message that says "Did you know we have a website?" Is so 2003.
Put a banner at the top of your website that says "our call centre is staffed with human beings and we are not experiencing a high volume of calls" you cowards.

Old, but worth reposting.

Splitting the difference

#birds #wildlife #nature #photography

A very inelegant SC2K experience in Windows 95, but this Toshiba Tecra 510CDT is a total beast. It's from 1996 (early PB1400 would be a good comparison) and has so many ports, lights, buttons, and latches 😅

This is why they call them comics.

#Batman

@c_dan4th what legends.

After racing neck-and-neck for an hour in their last regular-season race, after four years of riding together and competing in the friendliest possible manner, Joe and Gavin decide to finish with class.
#colorado #mountainbiking #biketooter

@Valheru that explains the questionable plastic surgery some of the women appear to have gone through