Title text: The heartfelt tune it plays is CC licensed, and you can get it from my seed on JoinDiaspora.net whenever that project gets going.

Transcript

2003:

[Cueball approaches a bearded fellow.]

Cueball: Did you get my essay?
Bearded Fellow: Yeah, it was good! But it was a .doc; You should really use a more open-
Cueball: Give it a rest already. Maybe we just want to live our lives and use software that works, not get wrapped up in your stupid nerd turf wars.
Bearded Fellow: I just want people to care about the infrastructures we’re building and who-
Cueball: No, you just want to feel smugly superior. You have no sense of perspective and are probably autistic.

2010:

Cueball: Oh my God! We handed control of our social world to Facebook and they’re DOING EVIL STUFF!
Bearded Fellow: Do you see this?

[Inset, the bearded fellow rubs his index and middle fingers against his thumb.]

Bearded Fellow: It’s the world’s tiniest open-source violin.

  • greenskyeEnglish
    361·
    10 months ago

    I really, really hate that so many people still try to share ebooks as PDFs. Why that was ever a thing makes no sense to me. Yes, I absolutely wish to read a 500 page novel on portrait letter size pages with tiny font that completely ignores my screen size.

    • oatscoop@midwest.socialEnglish
      8·
      10 months ago

      I’ve given up on trying to find certain books in sane formats. Thankfully Calibre is really good at converting PDFs to actual ebook formats.

      There’s a bit of a learning curve, and sometimes I have to do a little semi-automated cleanup – but it works.

      • greenskyeEnglish
        4·
        10 months ago

        Really? I must have had a particularly troublesome PDF. It was almost like running it through OCR, generating hundreds of weird typos and formatting errors when I tried to convert with calibre.

        • oatscoop@midwest.socialEnglish
          3·
          10 months ago

          The OCR struggles with some PDFs for whatever reasons: font, formatting, etc.

          There are 3rd party PDF OCR websites/programs that work better. If I’m having issues I run it through one of those first.

          • greenskyeEnglish
            2·
            10 months ago

            Any suggestions? Even the good ones had error rates that might not matter for a couple of pages, but when scaled to a 500 page book, even a 1% error rate results in an annoying level of typos.

            • oatscoop@midwest.socialEnglish
              1·
              10 months ago

              I use gImageReader + Tesseract, but that probably doesn’t meet your criteria. Unfortunately OCR is very rarely perfect unless the input is perfectly clear and with a “OCR friendly” font/formatting. There are “AI powered” OCR out there, but I can’t speak to how well they work and I don’t know of any free ones.