Document Scan and OCR - On a Phone!!!

Those who have come across my rants blog might have noticed that I like to snap amusing images and post those on my blog.  More often than not they end up looking something like this:

 

I just came across an application called "frontview" and the idea is that it can "unskew" pictures and basically make the camera work more like a scanner.  To test this out I snapped a picture of a book page from my Kindle:

After I snapped the picture, I started up frontview and selected the picture.  Frontview immediately detected the part of the picture like this:

Click scan and then rotating the result and it looked like this:

Here's the resulting image:

That is not too bad actually.  The final experiment was to see what Google OCR could get out of that.  A while back I created a pixelpipe service that upload to Google, so uploading the image from the phone was a "two click" process:

And:

My first attempt failed miserably.  Apparently Google did not appreciate the black border that was left in the image.  As a test I tried to remove the "border" so the image looked like this:

It is the same image as before - just cropped a bit.  This time the result was far more convincing.



That is pretty awesome really.  As far as I can see it made one mistake only.

PR 1.3

In the Maemo forum there seems to be a lot of bitching about the new PR 1.3 release.  I am not quite sure why because to me it works great.  The changes are subtle and only bug fixing as far as I can see but the effects in a few areas are dramatic.

First of all email.  The email application has for me been absolutely useless ever since I got my N900, but with PR 1.3 it has gone from useless to actually working pretty well.  Before when I started up email it would present me with a list of accounts.  I only got one (Nokia Messaging) so tapping that - and waiting about 10-15 seconds until a list of Nokia Messaging email accounts would show.  Select account and another 10-15 seconds.  Select inbox and another....  All in all - before I could read an email it would take well over 30 seconds - each time.  Now it's instant - so I actually do check my emails again :)

Second the browser.  It just works much much faster than before.

I haven't noticed any change in battery usage.  It is still for me acceptable as long as I am on Wifi OR GPRS and it still suck badly when on 3G.

Battery Life

The battery life of my N900 is actually pretty good:



The above graph show a day where my N900 has been online on Wifi all the time (I have configured automatically connect to any connection and switch to Wifi if available) and online on SIP, MSN, Yahoo, 3 Jabber Accounts during the hours I was awake.  As can be seen it should run just about 24 hours online.

Hiding your porn

I remember a while back there was some questions on the Maemo mailing list on how to "hide" certain images or videos from showing up in the media player or image library. Good news is that it would appear there is a bug feature in the media scanner making this possible.

I used rsync to copy my own image library to my N900. I created a directory on the memory card called images/ and the whole directory structure was copied into this directory. This resulted in a reasonably deep directory tree with directories like:

./images/Malaysia/Xmas2006

Images in the above Malaysia directory show up, while images in Xmas2006 does not. Same goes for videos. It's still possible to browse the images using a customised folder.

A bug? Yeah I reckon, but one which could have some fortunate side effects.

I now think I got the original post completely wrong.  It's not the directory depth that matters but naming.  It would appear that the tracker avoid directories named "Private".  It is however not immediately obvious why this is the case since there is no mention of this in the configuration file.  So

./images/Malaysia/Xmas2006

does indeed show up, whereas:

./images/Private/Xmas2006

does not.

There you go - still possible to "hide" private pictures from accidental view.

No Sense of Direction

Well - for a short while there I was under the impression that Nokia was getting serious about Maemo and then they just announced some kind of merge with another Intel project:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8516368.stm

When is Nokia going to realise that it is not about their bloody platform it is about applications and who the fuck is going to develop anything for Maemo now.  The way I see this Nokia effectively "flip the bird" to all early adopters and developers for the Maemo platform.

I browsed around at some blogs and saw lots of attempts to soften the blow: "Maemo6 is just the first instance of the new MeeGo platform".  BS!  It's an entirely different beast based on an entirely different platform.  It might use the same api's but the underlying OS is quite different (rpm/deb for one).

This is a bad idea and I for one will take another look at Android - at least Google seems to have a firm sense of which direction they are heading.

New version of ipcheck

I just uploaded a new version of ipcheck. This one no longer use external check to get ip address but check the actual interface address. Whether that's better or not I'm not too sure but for me personally it works better.

Free up space on rootfs

After enabling testing and dev I was running a bit low on free space on the root file system.  I started digging around and most is in /usr/bin and /usr/lib - but there was in fact about 30-40 MB of apt/dpkg related stuff in /var.  This part was quite easy to free with a few commands:

# mkdir -p /home/var/lib

# mv /var/lib/apt /home/var/lib && ln -s /home/var/lib/apt /var/lib

# mv /var/lib/dpkg /home/var/lib && ln -s /home/var/lib/dpkg /var/lib

# mkdir /home/var/cache

# mv /var/cache/apt /home/var/cache && ln -s /home/var/cache/apt /var/cache

That's about it - 30-40 MB freed on the root.