391–400 of 749 posts
Deleting the empty "Email attachments" directory that OneDrive keeps making inside my drive. Systemd timer unit does the trick.
Wouldn't it be better to use inotify than a timer? I forget if systemd supports it or not, but it's simple enough independently: https://superuser.com/questions/181517/how-to-execute-a-comm...
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Has it ever chopped up a squirrel, or the neighbor's cat?
I'm no expert, but Cats and Squirrels would be pretty good at hearing and seeing danger, even feeling vibrations nearby. I doubt they'd get caught by a lawn mower at walking speed.
I have a robot lawn mower that is wire guided. Instead of the traditional lawn mowers that basically cut the grass in all directions (making a sloppy cut pattern) my mower knows how to cut in straight lines so you get a traditional cut pattern. It also has the ability to dump the grass cuttings into a composting bin. Basically, I put down wire guide cable into the lawn and into the cement as well. It is all powered b…
Has it ever chopped up a squirrel, or the neighbor's cat?
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There are no general solutions, unfortunately. Every PDF-generating system will do things differently, so parsing them must be custom for each type. Generated PDFs are usually very systematic, though, and PDF commands are text (compressed). You can uncompress with PDFTK: pdftk input.pdf output output.pdf uncompress Then try grepping or using whatever tools you like (there will be binary parts of the file still, like…
I just tried it on a bank statement and the only text I see is the PDF commands (stuff like "/MediaBox [0 0 612 792]", "/F1 125 Tf", and whatnot). There's no actual PDF content text that I can find, whether it's my name, the bank name, or anything else.
TJ is "Show text, allowing individual glyph positioning" which means strings are not necessarily in the PDF as the strings themselves, but have glyph positioning info mixed into them. This is the most common issue I've come across.
Another possibility is that the fonts have been combined/compressed/butchered, so that they're not using ASCII/Unicode (this can sometimes save space by combining bits of multiple fonts. Searching for Tj/TJ/'/" should tell you if that's the case. If it is, technically there should be a translation table somewhere in the PDF file (so that clipboard operations work in PDF viewers). Look for CustomEncoding, I think.
Particularly bad PDF creation libraries can put characters in one by one.
Characters (alone or in strings) can also be in there as octal or hex.
Finally, particularly obnoxious libraries can do it without text commands at all, but convert everything to vector drawing commands, or even worse, bitmaps.
I couldn't remember CustomEncoding, and this came up when I searched. Seems helpful: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29467539/encoding-of-pdf...
http://gopi-kori.blogspot.com/2013/08/auto-login-to-hathway-...
I have also automated all bathroom lights and lights on basin to switch on based on motion sensing using these cheap switches
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Home-LED-light-PIR-Infrared-...
This saves energy by solving my problem where I used to forget switching off the lights many times.
I have semi-automated cooking for the week ahead. We recently started cooking meals for the week ahead on Sundays and then freezing them. The aim was to give us more time with the kids and to cut down on housework. To save time on the Sunday cooking session I have cobbled together a very clunky, and I mean VERY clunky semi-automated cooking system. It comprises a Raspberry PI which controls a couple of WiFi mains swi…
A friend is getting such a system to production for Indian recipes with Mechnical Chef [1] The demo looks incredibly cool [2] [1] http://www.mechanicalchef.com/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBB0ZaN1paE
Maybe not what anyone was expecting, but we've automated all the cleaning in the house. The clothes get washed, folded, and ironed. The trash gets taken out. All the plants get watered. How? The oldest form of automation. We pay someone to come and do it. We have a cleaning person come twice a week.
When I lived in India, it was cheaper to hire someone to wash clothes and dishes by hand than to buy a washing machine or dish washer (and the place we lived wouldn't have had anywhere to put them anyway). [Though half the time we did these things (by hand) ourselves.]
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So this. I’ve consciously refused to install irrigation so I’ll have to go out to the garden and hang around there.
I've often commented that I'm glad I have to water the garden because it's an excuse to just stand around looking at plants. I don't like watering grass because grass is boring and requires a ton of water, so rather than install irrigation, I ripped out all the grass and planted more interesting plants. (Drought-tolerant xeriscaping is common in my area, so this isn't unusual.)
Hard to overstate how good this is for one's mental health.
I have semi-automated cooking for the week ahead. We recently started cooking meals for the week ahead on Sundays and then freezing them. The aim was to give us more time with the kids and to cut down on housework. To save time on the Sunday cooking session I have cobbled together a very clunky, and I mean VERY clunky semi-automated cooking system. It comprises a Raspberry PI which controls a couple of WiFi mains swi…
You don't have this pushed to a repo somewhere, do you? It would be great to be able to see how you do some of this.
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I just tried it on a bank statement and the only text I see is the PDF commands (stuff like "/MediaBox [0 0 612 792]", "/F1 125 Tf", and whatnot). There's no actual PDF content text that I can find, whether it's my name, the bank name, or anything else.
There are a few possibilities. The main PDF commands for text are "Tj" and "TJ", so you can try searching for them. Text commands must also be between "BT" and "ET". Maybe a bit harder to search for are the other two text commands: ' and ". TJ is "Show text, allowing individual glyph positioning" which means strings are not necessarily in the PDF as the strings themselves, but have glyph positioning info mixed into t…
Immediately preceding the Tj's are a lot of non-text characters that don't look like anything human-readable. Immediately following them are other other commands (Td, Tf, rg, k, etc.) which are preceded by numbers. There are no CustomEncodings. So I guess this means I can't really grep anything?