I am so beat, I want to take a nap.
On Friday afternoon I received some packages in the mail (it was quite a week for packages!). One was from my grandfather, a whole box full of papers, must be a couple hundred, that he’s written over the years with a focus on european roots and paganism. Very interesting stuff so far, but it’s going to take some time to go through. The second package was a couple CDs I ordered last week, I finally got Jonn Serrie’s Lumina Nights and the Mediaeval Baebes’ Worldes Blysee. My ears were very happy.
Friday night was fun, we had a couple friends over and watched One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which I’d never seen. Great movie. Michael fired up the grill for beef and turkey burgers which turned out great. I love having a grill! I had a glass of wine, but it was just too hot out and my stomach wasn’t in the mood for drinking more than that.
Saturday morning I spent getting the scanner going. It’s a nice canon scanner, that is powered by USB (cool!), but as far as I could tell, doesn’t have support in linux. I installed the driver in Windows, and then started looking for free OCR software. I discovered gocr, which managed to turn this:
Still wistful, I foresee an awakened heroic consciousness in almost any child unleashing
into:
Still wi8tfui, I fore8ee an awakened he,oic con8ciou8negg tn gimogt gny Ehi’ld yniegg
Eek. It’s a TCL script, and takes forever too, very disappointing.
I finally settled on SimpleOCR in Windows, which touts itself as “The only Royalty Free OCR API. The only free OCR application.” The version you can download is free and it’ll always read typed documents, but only gives a 14 day trial of their handwriting recongnition software (which sucks anyway, from what I read). Fine with me, all I’m doing is scanning typed documents.
What am I scanning? I might have mentioned a while back that I have a collection of short publications that my grandfather published in the 80s about European-Americans. Called “Heritage Trails” it was an attempt to revive European heritage in the US, and offered articles about European ethnic roots, ethnic recipes, and contact information for ethnic groups across the country. I was a great little publication, and before the internet came along, publications like this served an important role in bringing like-minded people together. But aside from glancing at it from time to time, I never paid much attention to it until recently when I started looking into pagan stuff again. These were some great articles! I must share them with the world!
And so started my quest to put these online. There are a total of 80 pages, only in paper form. I thought about just sitting there and typing them all out, but after doing this for two articles I realized how insane this was, and that’s when the scanner borrowing offer was made %)
Once I got SimpleOCR going I started scanning the Heritage Trails, page by page, and getting them converted into text.
In the late morning Michael and I went out to do some yard work. We continued clearing the weedy rock pile from the end of the driveway, and moving the rocks to border one of the trees in the back yard, but it was so hot out. I was barely out there for an hour when I called it quits. Michael stayed out there until about 3pm, and it showed, he got a ton of work done out there. He also decided to order some mulch, so we calculated how much we needed and were able to schedule a delivery for Sunday.
While Michael was still outside working on the yard, I chilled in the A/C and scanned stuff. I pulled out a bunch of family photos to scan as well to break up the day a bit.
After Michael was all indoors and showered, we decided to meet up with Bob for dinner (too hot to cook at home!). So around 4 we left for Unos. The meal was less than impressive, the drin
ks I ordered doubly so (can you put more than a drop of liquor in this, please?), but the company was good, and made for a nice evening. When we got home I hopped online. Michael opened a bottle of red wine and we worked on our computers until it got late. Around 11 I went to bed.
This morning I got up around 8, puttered around until the phone rang around 9. It was the mulch store down the road, asking if it was ok if he dropped the mulch off in 10 minutes. I said it was and rushed downstairs to wake up Michael and get dressed. The mulch delivery started our day of yard work.
I got to work on the garden plots, which I needed to weed, then mulch.
They look so much better, they were so overgrown with weeds, hopefully the mulch will keep that under control. I also spent part of my time out there putting mulch around a couple trees and mulch around the mailbox. I went in around noon, it was too hot.
Michael worked on the back yard, which was the difficult shovel and wheelbarrel work. He filled in all the rock-surrounded plots in the back yard.
It looks so good. Afterwards he did some weeding in the front and put a bunch of mulch in the empty garden plots in the front of the house. He didn’t come inside until after 3.
I finished my Heritage Trails scanning project, and got to work on the website. I already had a skeleton version of it up, but hadn’t filled in much content yet. The very much under construction page can be found here: http://princessleia.com/heritage_trails/
It’ll take some time for me to edit all the articles, SimpleOCR is good, but it still makes mistakes, and I’ll need to read through all of the articles and compare them to the hard copies for accuracy. Then I need to format them in simple HTML (just put paragraph tags around the paragraphs, the rest of the site is a php-driven template). Anyone want to help? %D
*Yawn* Now I think I’ll go start getting dinner ready, if I stay in this chair much longer I might fall asleep.