circle.ch

circle.ch weblog by Urs Gehrig

A weblog about libre software, law, technology, politics and the like.

2010-02-07T14:05:09

Academic, Apache, Apple, Art, Best Of, Biotech, Civil Society, Content Management, Cooking, Copyright, Creative Commons, Crosspost, Culture, Database, Deutsch, DRM, Economy, Education, Event, Gadget, General, Geodata, Government, Health, Howto, Humor, Innovation, Intellectual Property, Java, Language, LaTeX, Law, Linux, Media, Moblog, Mozilla, Music, Office, Open Content, Open Source, P2P, PHP, Podcast, Politics, Privacy, Projects, Random Thought, Rant, Science, Search, Social Network, Software, Sport, Talks, Technology, Technology Transfer, Travelling, Weblog, Wiki, Wireless and Mobile, XML

18. December 2008

Öffnungszeiten von diesem und jenem Geschäft
Economy (wiki) | Deutsch (wiki) | Search (wiki) - urs @ 08:36:14

Wahora [1] stellt einen ganz nützlichen Dienst zur Verfügung, wobei die Öffnungszeiten ortsspezifischer Dienstleister abgefragt werden können. Hoffen wir mal, dass die Zeiten auch stimmen.

[1] http://www.wahora.ch/query.php?cmd=s&search=pickpost+basel

Related post(s):

Keinen Rappen für die Software (3.43)
Mangelnde Wahrnehmung der Opensource Aktivität in der Schweiz (3.09)
Kopieren und einfügen bitte (2.70)
Bundesratswahl online verfolgen (2.64)
Gazosa (2.35)

Related tags(s):

open_source, intellectual_property, government, technology, culture

Comments (2) Permalink del.icio.us

04. December 2008

Trommeln mal anders - Hämmers?
Deutsch (wiki) | Music (wiki) - urs @ 20:05:20

Ganz gut gelungener Auftritt:

Related post(s):

Sound auf der Zunge (4.96)
Off to Fribourg (4.83)
Remote Fasnacht (3.84)
Ventilwächter (Tire Deflator) für volle Staatskassen (1.92)

Related tags(s):

culture, deutsch, music, government, random_thought

Comments (0) Permalink del.icio.us

06. October 2008

Rock and roll with mpg321
Linux (wiki) | Music (wiki) - urs @ 21:35:09

Shuffled replay of mp3 files from a formerly iTunes-organized music library:

me@foo:~/Eigene Musik/iTunes$ find . -name '*.mp3' | mpg321 -@ - -z

Related post(s):

rock & roll (19.1)
Are You ready to rock? (2.78)

Related tags(s):

moblog, deutsch, open_content

Comments (0) Permalink del.icio.us

27. May 2008

Panini - gesucht, gefunden
Sport (wiki) - urs @ 10:32:38

Biete
15, 19, 51, 71, 84, 95, 101, 116, 120, 121, 147, 156, 168, 170, 190, 190, 281, 253, 297, 301, 303, 341, 345, 358, 416, 427, 431, 434, 453, 457, 458, 470, 485, 496, 507, 521, 522

Suche
3, 11, 23, 29, 31, 37, 39, 66, 110, 114, 118, 143, 162, 166, 216, 220, 221, 224, 262, 288, 292, 299, 304, 307, 335, 338, 339, 343, 351, 359, 368, 377, 411, 467, 477, 482, 486, 501, 505, 514, 519, 526, 527, 534

Related post(s):

PHPLib Template Tutorial (3.80)
Alles oder Nichts - Blocher in den Bundesrat? (1.60)

Related tags(s):

deutsch, php, politics

Comments (0) Permalink del.icio.us

22. April 2008

How to OCR multipage PDF files
Open Source (wiki) | Content Management (wiki) - urs @ 16:46:53

The OCR applied here only serves for reasons of indexing PDF files. The page layout will get lost. Nevertheless, the following three steps help you to convert multipage PDF files to a single text file:


 $ convert -density 150 foo.pdf ./tesseract/tmp/p%02d.tif
 $ montage.exe ./tesseract/tmp/*.tif -tile 1x -mode concatenate ./tesseract/tmp/foo.tif
 $ tesseract.exe ./tesseract/tmp/foo.tif output -l eng

For reasons of simplicity the TIF files p00.tif to pXY.tif will get concatenated together to a single TIF file, that has the width of a single page and the height of XY pages. In such a way at least the order of the text or the text flow respectively will be preserved. But one could also concatenate a mosaic of all the TIF files. The density of 150 (dpi) gives reasonable results with tesseract.

Related post(s):

Adding header or footer information to existing PDF (10.2)
phpChannel to handle RSS files (3.87)
Personalizing PDF files (3.70)
Getting all installation files for IE6 SP1 (3.61)
Fulltext search in PHP files on Windows (3.48)

Related tags(s):

apple, software, media, random_thought, drm

Comments (4) Permalink del.icio.us

02. January 2008

Navigating the Maze of Free and NonFree Licenses
Intellectual Property (wiki) | Creative Commons (wiki) - urs @ 08:31:03

Greg London issued a first draft of his new book [1]:

The Libre Labyrinth describes an objective way to understand how various FLOS licenses work, and how different FLOS licenses compare to one another.

The book is available as well as PDF under a Creative Commons Lincense.

[1] http://www.greglondon.com/libre/

Related post(s):

CC Lizenzen für Schweiz nun online (7.34)
Creative Commons license draft version 2.0 (6.62)
Switzerland - Creative Commons License Drafts in French and Italian (5.13)
free seat on the pavement (4.22)
phpinfo.net - francophone php website to be discontinued (4.19)

Related tags(s):

moblog, intellectual_property, apache, academic, creative_commons

Comments (0) Permalink del.icio.us

05. December 2007

Calendar of Bizarre Patents 2008
Intellectual Property (wiki) | Humor (wiki) - urs @ 10:46:40

Patscan offers its new calendar of bizarre patents - for the upcoming 2008 [1].

[1] http://patex.ca/pdf/publications/calendar_2008.pdf

Related post(s):

Sunbird Mozilla calendar (7.52)
Sony Ericsson Z520i sync with Google Calendar (6.22)
Collaborative Events handling with a Wiki (5.85)
Outlook calendar to RSS (5.82)
Lightning - Thunderbird now with Calendar (5.81)

Related tags(s):

wireless_and_mobile, office, howto, xml, wiki

Comments (0) Permalink del.icio.us

03. December 2007

Fuppes beliefert MusicPal
Linux (wiki) | Deutsch (wiki) | Music (wiki) - urs @ 20:31:30

Seit Kurzen dringt bei mir die Musik aus der Konserve mittels MusicPal in die Ohren. Die Konserve - eine 2.5 inch, ca. 160GB USB HDD umfasst ein Debian und ein Abbild meiner CD-ROM Sammlung, soweit diese überhaupt schon erfasst ist. Debian läuft in aller Ruhe auf einem Linksys NSLU2. Die Musikdaten werden mittels Fuppes (A free multiplatform UPnP (TM) A/V Media Server) den Endgeräten bereitgestellt. Fuppes war leider (noch?) nicht als ".deb" Datei für die ARM Plattform verfügbar, hat sich aber compilieren lassen. Einziges Sorgenkind ist die 2.5 inch HDD - hier wäre ein RAID oder dergleichen wohl noch ganz vernünftig, allenfalls könnte auch rsync auf eine andere HDD dienlich sein. Die Musik wird über ein BKS Homenet sozusagen frei von WIFI-Strahlung übertragen.

[1] http://www.musicpal.info
[2] http://www.cyrius.com/debian/nslu2/install.html
[3] http://fuppes.ulrich-voelkel.de
[4] http://www.bks.ch

Comments (0) Permalink del.icio.us

13. October 2007

Sharing folders with VirtualBox
Linux (wiki) - urs @ 21:14:14

The host system is a Linux based OS, the guest system - running within VirtualBox - is a Windows based OS. The challange was to share a common folder. The documentation was pretty clear about it; but still it did not work. Now it does. In the guest system, a simple

c:\>net use x: \\vboxsvr\myshare

did the job [1]. There is no need subsitute vboxsvr with 10.0.2.2 or 192.168.0.2 or something like that. myshare is the name of the shared folder located on the host system.

[1] http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/313

Related post(s):

Web Sites Sharing IP Addresses: Prevalence and Significance (6.00)
Samba on OS X (3.74)
Kodiak - Island of the bears (2.94)
The Center for Open Source in Government (2.78)
p2p - tiny code on mobiles to share anywhere (2.47)

Related tags(s):

law, apple, culture, government, wireless_and_mobile

Comments (0) Permalink del.icio.us

03. October 2007

Adding header or footer information to existing PDF
Open Source (wiki) - urs @ 08:03:11

Recently we had to deal with PDF manipulation, respectively the need to add header information to an existing PDF file. First thing I tried was using LaTeX as outlined by Stefan Lagotzki [1]. But a solution to apply more easy was needed. Imagemagick's "composite" does now the job quite well. Multipage PDF files have first to be split up and then being treated with composite as outlined below:

$ pdftk A=multipage.pdf cat A1 output multipage.1.pdf
 $ pdftk A=multipage.pdf cat A2 output multipage.2.pdf

The commandline below takes the singlepage PDF at a resolution of 300dpi and resizes it to a percentage and then glues it to the header page, which is of the size A4. Resizing ensures, that the header information is always visible above the included singlepage:

$ composite -density 300 multipage.1.pdf -resize 93% header.ps -compose bumpmap -gravity south out.pdf

The header page could look like shown below:

%!PS-Adobe-1.0
 %%DocumentMedia: A4 595 842 0 () ()
 %%Orientation: Portrait
 %%Pages: (atend)
 %%DocumentFonts: Times-Roman Helvetica
 %%EndComments
 %%EndProlog
 %%Page: 1 1
 50 760 moveto
 /Courier findfont 14 scalefont setfont
 (Add your text right here...) show    
 showpage
 %%Trailer
 %%Pages: 1

[1] http://www.lagotzki.de/pdftk/index.html#FAQ