Brad_Wosmek - Slashdot User

Open Source OCR That Makes Searchable PDFs 133

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 22, 2010 @03:21PM from the word-of-advice dept.

An anonymous reader writes "In my job all of our multifunction copiers scan to PDF but many of our users want and expect those PDFs to be text searchable. I looked around for software that would create text searchable pdfs but most are very expensive and I couldn't find any that were open source (free). I did find some open source packages like CuneiForm and Exactimage that could in theory do the job, but they were hard to install and difficult to set up and use over a network. Then I stumbled upon WatchOCR. This is a Live CD distro that can easily create a server on your network that provides an OCR service using watched folders. Now all my scanners scan to a watched folder, WatchOCR picks up those files and OCRs them, and then spits them out into another folder. It uses CuneiForm and ExactImage but it is all configured and ready to deploy. It can even be remotely managed via the Web interface. Hope this proves helpful to someone else who has this same situation."

The World's Strongest, Most Expensive Beer Served Inside a Squirrel 228

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday July 22, 2010 @02:48PM from the it-still-beats-toe-drinks dept.

If you have $765 burning a hole in your pocket, and a penchant for drinking alcohol out of a taxidermied animal, the good folks at BrewDog have just the drink for you. Their latest creation, called The End of History, is a 110 proof beer that comes packaged in a variety of small stuffed animals.

Growing A House From Meat 133

Posted by samzenpus on Friday July 09, 2010 @03:13PM from the delicious-future dept.

baosol writes "From the boundary-pushing team of archi-visionaries who brought us the fabulous Fab Tree Hab comes a new (and somewhat disgusting) way to grow a structure — using animal flesh! The In Vitro Meat Habitat is a futuristic concept home composed of meat cells grown in a lab. The creator of the concept, Mitchell Joachim, is a futurist with a twist– he says he is actually developing the concept in a lab."

WoW On an iPad Via Gaikai 121

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday May 06, 2010 @03:29AM from the that-doesn't-even-look-like-english dept.

Gametap writes "If cloud gaming works for enough genres, it can't help but find popularity. Even just a game like WoW might be enough to make it happen, and Gaikai's Dave Perry posted a picture of doing just that on an iPad. So is it the future or not? Could somebody make a tablet with nothing more than a screen, battery, network port, and video decoder, and have it be a good gaming platform? Will it change the mobile, PC, console, and TV world as we know it? Lots of questions, lots of skepticism, lots of players and money being invested — but one thing is for sure: it will be very interesting to see how this evolves."

OpenSSL 1.0.0 Released 105

Posted by Soulskill on Monday March 29, 2010 @04:31PM from the sweet-when-is-2.0 dept.

hardaker writes "After over 11 years of development since the start of the OpenSSL Project (1998-12-23), OpenSSL version 1.0.0 has finally hit the shelves of the free-for-all store."

Youtube Pulls Original "Rickroll" Video 97

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday February 25, 2010 @01:13PM from the keep-rolling dept.

@VentureBeat writes "Youtube pulled the original 'Rickroll' video Wednesday night. Don't worry, after a lot of email about the loss of such an important piece of cultural history, Youtube put it back up, saying that they're never gonna say goodbye to the video that's had over 30 million views."

Gran Turismo 5 Delayed 122

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday January 14, 2010 @03:01AM from the running-on-fumes dept.

RogueyWon writes "The Times is reporting that Polyphony Digital's Gran Turismo 5, likely to prove a key title for the PlayStation 3, has been delayed indefinitely, despite an expectation that it would be released relatively early in 2010. The delay seems likely to impact Sony's plans to bundle the game with the PlayStation 3 console in time for the important spring sales period in Japan."

Minnesota Introduces World's First Carbon Tariff 303

Posted by timothy on Wednesday January 06, 2010 @05:29PM from the hey-cut-that-crap-out dept.

hollywoodb writes "The first carbon tax to reduce the greenhouse gases from imports comes not between two nations, but between two states. Minnesota has passed a measure to stop carbon at its border with North Dakota. To encourage the switch to clean, renewable energy, Minnesota plans to add a carbon fee of between $4 and $34 per ton of carbon dioxide emissions to the cost of coal-fired electricity, to begin in 2012 ... Minnesota has been generally pushing for cleaner power within its borders, but the utility companies that operate in MN have, over the past decades, sited a lot of coal power plants on the relatively cheap and open land of North Dakota, which is preparing a legal battle against Minnesota over the tariff."

IDEs With VIM Text Editing Capability? 193

Posted by timothy on Wednesday December 30, 2009 @03:30PM from the one-keybinding-to-rule-them-all dept.

An anonymous reader writes "I am currently looking to move from text editing with vim to a full fledged IDE with gdb integration, integrated command line, etc. Extending VIM with these capabilities is a mortal sin, so I am looking for a linux based GUI IDE. I do not want to give up the efficient text editing capabilities of VIM though. How do I have my cake and eat it too?"

Comment Re:mis-represented? (Score 2, Informative) 261

by Brad_Wosmek on Thursday November 29, 2007 @08:16PM (#21526393) Attached to: IBM Sues Company Selling Fake, Flammable Batteries

I was shopping for a new battery for my T43 last month and ran across Shentech through Pricegrabber. Their price really stood out versus reputable sites like newegg. I can say that in the late October timeframe they were in fact advertising them as "Genuine IBM/Lenovo" OEM batteries. I almost bit, but my "this is too good to be true" alarm stopped me. I ended up buying an OEM battery off of ebay.

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