Category: Thoughts

I’m Thankful For: Optical Character Recognition

My Dad, when reading books, uses highlighters on passages that he likes and wants to remember. This frustrates me when buying books: I’ll come across a great book, open it up, and someone has crudely underlined paragraphs all over the place. Often, at a thrift store, all of the books are pretty much common or not of a great topic, except one… and when I open that one special volume? Its pages are all marked up with underlining or markers.

Quite frustrating.

My way of noting special passages is different: I take a photo of the page with my phone, and use Adobe Acrobat’s OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to turn the text into editable text, as if it were typed in and not just part of a photo of a page. Adobe’s OCR isn’t bad, and I appreciate what it does considering I grew up writing everything with pens, pencils, and manual typewriters. Correction ribbons… ugh.

So, this is how I do things. I have a big file with all sorts of interesting excerpts from books that I’ve read.

But today, I found out about a better way to do this. I was taking a photo of some pages with my phone, when I accidentally discovered that the iPhone now automatically OCR’s text without even asking!

Even better, when I’m on my Mac Mini, to use the built-in OCR, all I have to use is the Preview app to open the photograph of the page, go to Tools > Text Selection (or even better, Automatic Selection), and the OCR goes to work! I just click on the page and after a few seconds, the cursor changes and I can select all of the text! The Automatic Selection option stays selected so I don’t have to do that every time.

Apple’s OCR (I can’t speak for any Windows OCR features) in my experience, works better than Adobe’s OCR, where lack of contrast and warped text due to pages not being completely flat, causes a lot of static junk text.

I just wanted to share that because this is one of those many useful features our phones and computers can do, but most of us miss it. If you would have told me back in the day that something like this was going to be possible, I would have had a tough time believing it. We take a lot of things for granted, and this is one of them. Also, being able to take unlimited high-quality videos and photos with a computer-phone that fits in a pocket. Some of us remember having to:

1 – Go to store, buy film.

2 – Load film correctly, pick shots carefully because there are only 24-36 to a roll.

3 – Unload film correctly.

4 – Take film to store.

5 – Return to store to buy prints.

So, two trips to the store, one opportunity to ruin the film. And, one was limited to how many shots were on a roll. Now, it is unlimited, with many options and features, and no trips to the store.

Anyway. There are more important things to be thankful for this Thanksgiving, but this is still something to be appreciated: useful technology that keeps innovating and bringing us more ways to be productive.

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An Example Of Insanely Great Design

Years ago, I worked at a job where we had these Mac Pro Towers, and mine was always solid with everything. No matter what graphics we had to manipulate, my Mac Pro was always up for the job, and actually spoiled me as it was faster than my big 27″ 2009 iMac at home.

My first few jobs in the graphics industry involved getting by with as little computing power and technology as possible, so this Mac Tower was something I always appreciated every time I worked with it.

A few years ago, I was talking to a friend about this, and he happened to have a tower just like the one I used to have, and he needed to find a good home for it. I don’t have any urgent need for one as my 2018 Mini fulfills my workload just fine, but that tower was a work of art, like most Macs were to one degree or another after 1997.

I do have some upgrades in mind for this tower, maybe a few projects I can put it to work on, but at the moment, I just like having it around. Having lived through the beige plastic era of computing, the design of this Mac Tower inside and out is something nice to have on display, I have no plans to ever let this one go!

Military Parades • U.S. Army 250th Anniversary Parade

I’ve been watching the annual Russian Victory Day parades for five years or so now, beginning-to-end. As someone who is actively interested in military history, it is fascinating to contemplate the logistics of putting such a precise performance with so many moving parts, with so many things that could go wrong. And they do it every year. And being a former marching band member (A-West High School), their 1,100-person marching band performance at the end is very impressive to witness.

Also, when I see photos or old newsreel of parades from as far back as World War I, these Russian parades are a frame of reference as to what it was like, similar to how Saving Private Ryan brought out some of the realism of grainy black and white World War II footage and photos in my mind’s eye.

There was criticism of the idea of the U.S. having a military parade, and all of it seems to be from people who didn’t think through how we’ve done this before, the last time was in 1991 after the first Gulf War. We do it a bit differently than Russia or North Korea, but it isn’t unusual. I did expect something more similar to the Russian parade, but some of their motivations for a parade are different, and they do it every year, so they have all of the repetitive logistics worked out over time, as where ours was a one-off for a 250th anniversary. A big difference I noticed is that the Russians are very precise with their marching in their parades, whereas our guys were very casual, many of them were more walking than marching. I would encourage anybody reading this to watch some of the Russian parades, they are quite different. Those have an additional purpose to show off their power to their “friends”, aka, “don’t mess with us, here is a sample of what we have and how precise we are”. Putin had all of his allies at the last parade, (And Fat Steven Segal, too!) and that was part of why they were there… to be warned that Russia is still strong and not to be messed with.

Our parade was more of a basic, narrated history lesson about the U.S. Army, with marching examples of the different uniforms from the major conflicts, and some examples of vehicles and equipment. The scale of the units involved were far smaller than the Russians’ parade, and the marching was VERY casual, and the parade street width was far narrower. A totally different kind of parade, but still a good one for such a big anniversary.

I did like how we had twice as many Abrams tanks as the Russians had T-90s this year, that couldn’t have been by accident. If I read this right, they got away with having 70-ton tanks on city streets by putting a different kind of track on them, but I’m not sure if that was all they did. I think the T-90s are about 50-tons or so, if not less.

In the days running up to the parade, there were also some neat boot-camp challenges, and opportunities for people to post near, on, or in Abrams tanks, Strykers, Bradleys, and choppers, as well as with various hand-held weapons. I would really have liked to have done that! (I did get to pose on a S-7 Priest 105mm Howitzer Motor Carriage self-propelled gun back in 1980, though, that was cool.)

Unfortunately, the Spanish-American war and the War of 1812 weren’t represented in the parade due to difficulties in getting the right uniforms. Something that doesn’t happen when you do this every year like the Russians do.

A lot of people are going to politicize this and try to paste-and-cut the idea that any military parade is exactly like parades put on by regimes throughout the world, but I would go ahead and disagree with that. The U.S. Army is celebrating its 250th anniversary, and armies do parade as part of being… well, armies. We did it at the end of all of our wars, and to some extent in parades across the country every year. We have a military as every other country does, and it is okay to have some parades every once in a while. The Army deserve a big celebration for everything they’ve done for this country over 250 years, and I would argue this parade should have been bigger than it was because of all the sacrifice that has been done on our behalf over the existence of our country.

It is also nice that although the Russians have a far bigger and more precise parade, and do it every year, we get to show off how our equipment is far better than theirs. That’s a smaller point of parades like this. There’s no way a little T-90 would hold up against a big Abrams, and we rolled out twice as many for our little parade than they had for their annual parade. And Abrams tanks look cooler, too. And don’t pop their tops with ammunition cook-offs.

Anyway. When reading history, especially military history, it is a good thing to recognize all the different facets of it: empathy for what it must be like in military life, and to be in battle. The logistics, the strategy, how things are made, how they work, the politics, foreign policy, the actual history and effects of outcomes, alternate possibilities, and of course, the human side of it, including the horrors of war for soldiers and citizens alike. And there are many lessons to be learned from history.

I know that a lot of people are going to knee-jerk react due to their politics, but I hope that this can be put aside for a day in order to recognize how fortunate we are to have had a military such as the U.S. Army, for the past 250 years. Plus, Abrams tanks are really cool!

Zoom Conference?

I think this is a scam to get someone to click on their link; very clever. I never looked at the links that zoom conferences came from, when I used to use Zoom, but I doubt that “tinyurl” is legitimate. If somebody’s mailbox is full of these, it would be easy to click on it, leading to who-knows-where.

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The Ugliest Building Ever

Driving to downtown on Colfax, I came across the ugliest building I’ve ever seen. They could have at least created something that would blend in, if they weren’t going to make the effort to build with a beautiful design, something uplifting, but no. We get a melted-plastic look.

I have read comments about the building, exclaiming that “at least it is different”. Just because something is different, doesn’t automatically make it good. Also, nearby, there is a courthouse that couldn’t be more cold and dystopian, as opposed to the one by the Capitol which is based more on Roman/Greek architecture.

This only makes me appreciate beautiful buildings that much more, as this monstrosity is the most shocking contrast between good, and bad. What they could have done with the money poured into this horrible idea is a missed opportunity to do something good for the millions of people who will pass by this building over its future.

More: This is the Populus Hotel, with 265 rooms. It is supposed to look like an aspen tree. I don’t have anything against the hotel itself, and don’t know if it is excellent or not, just that it is really ugly on the outside. I never thought for a moment of an aspen tree when looking at it.

Too Good To Be True

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When I see something advertised that is neat, or just a good deal, I take a snapshot, label the file, and save it in a folder. Recently I have had the need for some new shirts, so, I went to my Folder of Deals. In the time since I saved these (pictured) deals a few years ago, they have disappeared from the internet because they turned out to be scams. They would have taken my money for nothing, or given me some low-quality shirts. (According to posts I found about these “companies”.)

Also:

– Years ago I purchased a pack of six Apple-compatible charging cords; the quality of which was really, really bad. Eventually threw them into the trash.

– Last year I almost bought a VCR-DVD player that was advertised as able to record DVDs from VCR tapes. I researched that a little bit and it turns out it was a scam, but I was close to getting that. Too close.

– I few years ago I bought a USB stick that was claimed to hold 2TB of data, when in reality it just continuously overwrites existing data to give off that impression. It works, but putting too much on it is a bad idea.

However:

I’ve found some fantastic things out there as well; My Baerskin Tactical Hoodie is fantastic, my ReadFive Designs Star Wars Toy Guide is one of my most valuable (and rare) books, my Pale Blue Rechargeable Batteries are fantastic and my ZSA Moonlander keyboards have been outstanding. There are so many great products out there, but it pays to listen to your Spider-Sense when it starts going off. Suspicion and paranoia aren’t always bad things!

QuarkXPress 3.2

I’m a sedimental kind of guy; Also, I paid six-hundred dollars for this copy of QuarkXPress back in 1993, so I’m probably never going to get rid of it! This was my primary software for years, and actually was worth the price in the end. A great program. Far better than Corel Ventura, which I experienced a few years later.

Coming from manual and electric typewriters when I was a kid, (I found one in a trash pile once and used it until it fell apart!) these programs feel like science fiction and I still appreciate them more than most people do, although it is understandable why everybody takes these amazing programs for granted. Remembering those correction tapes for my typewriters gives me very bad memories! The first time I experienced the ability to just use different fonts, sizes, or spell-check, much less go back and easily edit anything, it was clear that typesetting had changed forever!

Long live InDesign! (And, XPress. Why not?)

Woodstock

Ten, maybe fifteen years ago, my Mom saw this framed Woodstock at a thrift store, and asked me if we should get it. I knew she liked Woodstock and bought it for her. It has been on a wall at home since then, and every time I see it, I’ve wanted to recreate it in Adobe Illustrator, it is really neat and represents my Mom pretty well. Also, to preserve it, and have the ability to recreate it if necessary. Every house should have Peanuts in it.

I finally got around to doing this, and while it would have been easier to take it out of the frame and scan it, I did the recreation from a simple iPhone photo.

Image Trace was used, but still had to create another layer for the larger yellow areas. Not the most intensive Illustrator project, but absolutely a worthwhile one.