Straight from its Nest

I’ve been dabbling with Linux functionalities again these days so I found the inavailability of Pidgin since the previous weekend somewhat a hassle. I’m used to being available for relatives and friends using YM that’s why I took notice. I let a day pass thinking it could have been a temporary glitch.

I decided to look at it more closely, however, when the problem was still there the dawn on Tuesday. So to anyone still in the dark here, read on.

Turned out, according to Celtic Wolf, that an update in the Yahoo Network last June 17 was the culprit.An update seemed to be order so it was off to Pidgin’s official site. There, a confirmation of the problem was posted right at the main page so everything was straightforward from there.

After a few clicks and copy-pasted lines at the terminal, Pidgin was back in action.

Over OCR

I’ve never given a thought on OCR stuff much before because I never thought of a situation I would end up actually needing it.

Just early this day, I actually needed to find a solution towards that direction.

More specifically, I have a PDF from school with lengthy code in it and I need to have both server and client codes running. While the intuitive step of having the program files is to copy and paste everything, it turned out that things won’t be easy as that. It turned out that the text turned out garbled when pasted in Notepad++.

As a previous endeavor has shown, my tinkering inclination actually had me try to have the garbage figured out–how values map to the other. After a while I gave up though. I thought I should have ended up typing the 6 page mammoth instead of ending up having to spend an entire day decyphering the thing.

The only thing left for me to try was the OCR solution. Not wanting to have additional software installed though, I spent a few clicks at Google and found a surprising solution. Surprising in the sense that I never thought I’d find something of actual use for MS Office’s OneNote, its Copy Text from Picture functionality was literally a lifesaver here.

OneNote's Copy Text from Picture

So after a few clicks on Adobe Reader’s Snapshot tool before getting the text from OneNote, I got what my codes. Well, sort of since there were a few glitches in the translation that I had to correct still.

I’ll happily take that over straining these fingers having to retype everything though.