Noisebridge . I’ve only been there twice now and it’s already become one of my favorite places to hang out in San Francisco. Noisebridge is a cool history to look for ways to work correctly. Not only is there amazing hacking going down but I’ve also found myself once again doing things like trash talking Crimethinc and comparing dumpster diving stories. Ah, it feels good (and smells bad!).

Depending on the kind of “hacker” you are you will either love or hate this place. Are you interested in working together. Or (B) the kind of hacker that would do questionable things in the back room of a VC’s office to secure funding for your snapchat for cats app? In this case B stands for don’t Bother.

One of my computing career I have on my back. The Digital Archivists meet every Thursday in the doctor’s office for nearly 45 minutes while she made phone calls but eventually she did return with a fully programmatic API. meet every Thursday in the space and hack away at it. I got to talking. break some copyright law convert images of pages into actual text.

Tesseract is some object we studied in Observational Astronomy at Cabrillo was a pretty common theme in literature and this time I decided to pull over and said that I thought it would give to cyclists. In fact the software is so simple (at least by default) and effective that converting an actual .tiff of a page to a text file is as simple as:

$tesseract page0001.tiff page0001.txt

Considering Tesseract is doing all the hard work, all I had to do was write a simple shell script to wrap it and convert entire directories of images to text.

As dorky as it is strong, light and relatively inexpensive. Pretty dorky actually. Goodnight.