Archive for the 'software' Category

Scanning with sane’s scanimage from an ADF scanner to PDF and OCRed Text

Using libsane and tesseract, you can scan from an ADF (or non ADF) scanner in Ubuntu 7.10 to a PDF and OCR’ed text document with a few easy steps.

First we need to make sure we have the necessary packages installed.

apt-get install tesseract-ocr sane-utils

Continue reading ‘Scanning with sane’s scanimage from an ADF scanner to PDF and OCRed Text’

ntfsundelete

Just did a stupid thing and deleted a whole tree of file on a windows partition. Never fear…ntfsundelete is here.

sudo ntfsundelete -u -d /destination/directory -f -m *.jpg /dev/sda1

Run without the -u option and -d options to show what can be recovered.

On ubuntu/debian to install it do:

apt-get install ntfsprogs

Getting to know PostGIS

I am making the plunge to get more informed with how to use PostGIS. It is pretty impressive so far. Here is a quick tutorial which shows you how to get started and loading in a shapefile to play around with some fun SQL querying. I assume a basic understanding of the linux command line and some basic SQL skills.

To get started in ubuntu 7.04 (should work in 7.10 and debian too):

$ sudo apt-get install postgis postgresql-8.1-postgis

Next we’ll start setting up the PostGIS environment.
Continue reading ‘Getting to know PostGIS’

Intuitive Flight Selection Interface

Flight Chooser
While ITA Software doesn’t allow you to purchase directly from their flight search, they do provide a nice airfare search and grid view where you can see mapped out in time how much of the day the flight and associated layovers will take. Pretty neat.

Synergy

Synergy is a network KVM. It is great if you have multiple computers. I have a setup with a Powerbook, WinXP and Ubuntu Laptop all controlled by the same keyboard and mouse (across four screens) merged together into one desktop. It is a beautiful thing… Some simple config examples after the jump.

Continue reading ‘Synergy’

BBC Video

Interesting news in the world of BitTorrent. The BBC has agreed to make much of their content available through Zudeo. I haven’t used Zudeo at all, but it looks like it is probably just a pretty front end to Azureus, everyone’s favorite BitTorrent Site.

Debian Package of the Day

Another attempt at showcasing an interesting Debian package each day.  They have already shown one of my favorites along with something I didn’t know was out there.  python-scipy is great and has helped me produce the spectrogram I posted about a few weeks ago.  And scribus looks like it will be an interesting application to explore further…heads off typing apt-get install scribus.

Working on CV in LaTex

More LaTex fun. I realized I could create both a CV and a Resume using LaTex by separating out the sections (education, publications, work experience, awards) into individual files. LaTex has an \input{filename} function which is useful for splitting large documents up. It just inputs whatever text is in that file like you had typed it in the main file. Once I break up the parts, such as education, publications, work experience into different files I can create an uber document that references things appropriate for the CV, and another referencing only those appropriate for the resume. Then I only need to edit the appropriate section file and it updates both, yay LaTex.