Tech

Tech-focused ramblings. Computers, blogs, and whatever else fits.

ABBYY FineReader Amazement and Disappointment

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I’ve spent much of the past three days giving myself a crash-course in ABBYY FineReader on my (Windows) work laptop, and have been really impressed with its speed, accuracy, and ability to greatly streamline the process of making scanned PDFs searchable and accessible. After testing with the demo,I ended up getting approval to purchase a license for work, and I’m looking forward to giving it a lot of use – oddly, this seemingly tedious work of processing PDFs of scanned academic articles to produce good quality PDF/UA accessible PDFs (or Word docs, or other formats) is the kind of task that my geeky self really gets into.

Since I’m also working a lot with PDFs of old scanned documents for the Norwescon historical archives project, tonight after getting home I downloaded the trial of the Mac version, fully intending to buy a copy for myself.

I’m glad I tried the trial before buying.

It’s a much nicer UI on the Mac than on Windows (no surprise there), and what it does, it does well. Unfortunately, it does quite a bit less — most notably, it’s missing the part of the Windows version that I’ve spent the most time in: the OCR Editor.

On Windows, after doing an OCR scan, you can go through all the recognized text, correct any OCR errors, adjust the formatting of the OCR’d text, even to the point of using styles to designate headers so that the final output has the proper tagging for accessible navigation. (Yes, it still takes a little work in Acrobat to really fine-tune things, but ABBYY makes the entire process much easier, faster, and far more accurate than Acrobat’s rather sad excuse for OCR processing.)

On the Mac, while you can do a lot to set up what gets OCRd (designating areas to process or ignore, marking areas as text or graphic, etc.), there’s no way to check the results or do any other post-processing. All you can do is export the file. And while ABBYY’s OCR processing is extremely impressive, it’s still not perfect, especially (as is expected) with older documents with lower quality scan images. The missing OCR Editor capability is a major bummer, and I’m much less likely to be tossing them any of my own money after all.

And most distressingly, this missing feature was called out in a review of the software by PC Magazine…nearly 10 years ago, when ABBYY first released a Mac version of the FineReader software. If it’s been 10 years and this major feature still isn’t there? My guess — though I’d love to be proven wrong — is that it’s simply not going to happen.

Pity, that.

🧪 Test Post 21 of Several

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Test twenty-one of several as I try to troubleshoot blog issues. Will probably be deleted later. Sorry for flooding your feeds.

  • Posting from: WordPress web interface.
  • Images: One, from Media library.
  • SOM post delay: 30 seconds.
  • Emoji in title: One (🧪).

Active plugins:

  • Share on Mastodon
  • WP-Optimize
  • Docket Cache
  • Classic Editor
  • Classic Widgets
  • Easy Markdown
  • VS Meta Description
  • GP Premium
  • Akismet Anti-Spam
  • Disable Emojis (I wonder….)
  • Relevanssi
  • DX Out of Date
  • Posted Today
  • CP Media Player
  • Term Management Tools

🧪 Test Post 20 of Several

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Test twenty of several as I try to troubleshoot blog issues. Will probably be deleted later. Sorry for flooding your feeds.

  • Posting from: WordPress web interface.
  • Images: One, from Media library.
  • SOM post delay: 30 seconds.
  • Emoji in title: One (🧪).

Me and two friends. Test image only.

Active plugins:

  • Share on Mastodon
  • WP-Optimize
  • Docket Cache
  • Classic Editor
  • Classic Widgets
  • Easy Markdown
  • VS Meta Description
  • GP Premium
  • Akismet Anti-Spam
  • Disable Emojis
  • Relevanssi
  • DX Out of Date
  • Posted Today
  • CP Media Player
  • Term Management Tools

Test Post 19 of Several

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Test nineteen of several as I try to troubleshoot blog issues. Will probably be deleted later. Sorry for flooding your feeds.

  • Posting from: WordPress web interface.
  • Images: One, from Media library.
  • SOM post delay: 30 seconds.
  • Emoji in title: None.

Me and two friends. Test image only.

Active plugins:

  • Share on Mastodon
  • WP-Optimize
  • Docket Cache
  • Classic Editor
  • Classic Widgets
  • Easy Markdown
  • VS Meta Description
  • GP Premium
  • Akismet Anti-Spam
  • Disable Emojis
  • Relevanssi
  • DX Out of Date
  • Posted Today
  • CP Media Player
  • Term Management Tools

Test Post 18 of Several

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Test eighteen of several as I try to troubleshoot blog issues. Will probably be deleted later. Sorry for flooding your feeds.

  • Posting from: WordPress web interface.
  • Images: One, from Media library.
  • Emoji in title: None.

Me and two friends. Test image only.

Active plugins:

  • Share on Mastodon
  • WP-Optimize
  • Docket Cache
  • Classic Editor
  • Classic Widgets
  • Easy Markdown
  • VS Meta Description
  • GP Premium
  • Akismet Anti-Spam
  • Disable Emojis
  • Relevanssi
  • DX Out of Date
  • Posted Today
  • CP Media Player
  • Term Management Tools

Spooky Season Redesign

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Just because I can, and I haven’t done anything like this in ages, I’ve given my blog a minor redesign for spooky season. Just color and font tweaks, nothing major, and this site is so low-traffic that I doubt many people other than me will notice, but hey — that’s okay too.

Screenshot of this blog, showing the design with pumpkin-y ornages and yellows, and headers using classic creepy fonts.

Enjoy spooky season, everyone! Less than a month until Goth Christmas! ;)

Threadless

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It took less than 24 hours for me to delete the Threads app from my phone.

Hate groups Libs of TikTok, Moms for Liberty, Gays Against Groomers, and PragerU are already on Threads and harassing people. Apparently PragerU even already has a blue “verified” checkmark.

I’ve updated my bio there to say that I’m not using the service, and put up a post similar to this one telling people why I’m leaving and where to find me.

It had already given me a bad first impression, as there is only one feed and it’s all an algorithmic constant stream of crap from obnoxious randos and (so, so many) brands, with no way to filter it out to just the people you actually want to follow or get a chronological view of posts.

And there’s no way to add alt text to images, so accessibility is obviously an afterthought, at best.

Threads does not get my recommendation. If you choose to explore, good luck and stay safe.

My Twitter Archives

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Thanks to this simple Twitter archiver, I’ve just added my Twitter archives to my website, and added a link under the “Worth Reading” header menu item (though whether or not they’re actually worth reading is debatable).

While I wasn’t one of the most prolific users out there, I had my share of silly, serious, inane, or thoughtful things to say over the years, and it would have been a shame for them to have entirely disappeared. So I’d downloaded my data before deleting it and locking down my account, and have had it sitting on my computer waiting to find the right way to get it online somewhere. Nice to have them visible again.

(I actually have them all also imported into this WordPress blog, but the tool I found to do that imported them all as their own specific post type intstead of adding them as standard posts, which means they’re not easily visible. Maybe someday I’ll figure out how to either covert them to regular posts or incorporate this other post type into the rest of the blog. For now, though, they just sit in the database.)

2023 WWDC Thoughts

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Thoughts as they came during the WWDC keynote…

  • 15″ M2 MacBook Air: Nice! But since I got a 13″ M2 Air not long ago, I’m not due to upgrade for, oh, a decade or so.

  • M2/Max/Ultra Mac Studio: I have no need for a Mac Studio. My M1 Mini does me just fine, and I don’t think I’ve ever really stressed it. But if I had absolutely ridiculous amounts of expendable cash, I’d love to get one of these.

  • Apple Silicon Mac Pro: Again, I have no need. But if I had more ridiculous amounts of expendable cash than necessary for the Mac Studio, sure, let’s toss a Mac Pro on my desk! (But starting at $7k…this seems unlikely.)

  • iOS

    • iPhone
      • Customized contact posters: Looks slick. But since it’s pushed to other people’s phones, hopefully they can disable it either globally or by contact. I could easily see “pranksters” sending some…interesting images that way.

      • Live voicemail transcription: Okay, that’s nifty.

    • Facetime

      • Facetime voicemail: Also nifty. But I don’t Facetime very much, so maybe not for me.
    • Messages
      • Looks like some nice incremental upgrades. Check-in is an interesting balance between convenience and creepy.

      • Custom animated stickers will probably land somewhere between fun and annoying.

    • Autocorrect is due for updates, but a Transformer language model? Hopefully I get the Autobot release and not the Decepticon release.

    • I’ve never been able to reliably get into any sort of journaling routine (I can’t even keep this blog going without months-long gaps…), so I doubt the Journal app will change that, but for people who are into this sort of thing, yay?

    • Standby will make a nice bedside clock while traveling (I don’t keep my phone by my bed at home)…but I’ll need to upgrade to a phone with an always-on display to really take advantage of it (I’m still on an iPhone 11, though, so it’s getting close to time to upgrade…maybe this fall?).

    • I get Siri triggering when I don’t need her often enough with “Hey Siri”, won’t shortening that to just “Siri” make that problem worse?

  • iPadOS

    • Widgets and Lock Screen customizations are things that look like they should be really useful, and I’ve never taken the time to try to set them up and figure out how to make them work for me.

    • PDF improvements? Actually, these are looking pretty nice, particularly being able to fill out forms that have been “scanned” with the camera. And the live collaboration on PDFs in Notes.

  • macOS

    • Next version name: Sonoma.

    • Widgets on the desktop, for those who aren’t driven up the wall by a cluttered desktop! (My desktop might occasionally get one or two files dropped on it temporarily as I’m actively working on them, then they get put back away. I hate a cluttered desktop.)

      • Heh. You can tell they recorded this more than a couple days ago, with the Apollo for Reddit call-out.
    • Though I’m not much of a gamer and likely won’t do much that benefits from this, it is nice to see gaming-focused improvements.

    • Oh, the presenter overlays and gesture effects are going to be giving Camo Studio and mmhmm a challenge, at least at the basic feature level. As with any Sherlocking, it’ll depend on what they can do above and beyond the basics.

    • Safari Password family sharing is good, but I agree with those who think that Apple should pull their password/keychain stuff out into a standalone app instead of having it buried in the preferences.

    • Profiles is long overdue, but will be nice to have outside of Chrome.

    • Webapps is just the macOS version of iOS’s feature that I never use, right?

  • That guitar is great. Obviously.

  • I like the AirPods Pro audio features and improvements, I just wish I could get used to how they fit.

  • Oh, AirPlay in hotels needs to get widespread fast. I’d love to have that instead of trying to figure out if the hotel’s TV will let me plug in an HDMI cable.

  • If I used FaceTime more, I’d be more interested in the AppleTV integration. Nice to tie that into continuity camera.

  • watchOS

    • First question: Will my Apple Watch 4 support Watch OS 10? Or will I need to add that to the “upgrade soon” list? Other than that, looks to be the expected incremental updates.

    • The updates to the hiking part of the workouts app are neat, but are they available on the iPhone too? Some of those (like marking the last known cell signal point) look really useful outside of when using the app for a hike.

    • Again, the Mindfullness app and mood tracking look nice…but are they limited to the watch? Okay, looks like that’s also on the phone.

    • How many children have Apple Watches? More than I’m aware of, obviously.

  • Wow…”one more thing”! Haven’t heard that in a while.

    • The Apple headset (Vision Pro) looks a lot like the goggles the away team wore in TOS’s The Cage.

    • I’m still not sold on my need for or interest in AR, but the demos are pretty fascinating to watch.

      • Movies and TV are so often used as demos, because you can get a virtual “big screen”, but it still seems kludgy to have to strap this thing to your head instead of just looking at a TV.
    • I do like that it doesn’t need controllers, but just tracks your hands and gestures. Must be sensors on the underside of the goggles.

    • The screen showing your eyes to other people was an accurate rumor. I’m surprised. That’s…again, somewhere between neat and creepy, but at least last first blush, looked very uncanny valley.

    • How difficult must typing be with a virtual keyboard? At least with the iPhone/iPad screen you have that to type on, even if you can’t feel the individual keys. But without any physical contact? (This is also one of the issues I have with nifty sci-fi holographic user interfaces.)

    • Seeing people on FaceTime calls with the headset, sure. What do they see?

    • Wait, a 3D camera? Interesting.

    • Disney’s on board, huh?

    • Okay, time to get some of the tech details. This’ll be interesting.

      • I still can’t imagine wearing something like this on my head for hours at a time, let alone a full workday.
    • They’re actually addressing the “how do people see you on FaceTime?” question.
      • Okay…your own personal uncanny valley avatar! Yikes.
    • Snark aside, there’s a lot of neat stuff here. Definitely not for me, at least not at this stage, but it’ll be very interesting to see where it goes over the coming years.

And now, cue all the hot takes on how bad all of this is and now doomed Apple is once again!