Nick Lalande Anid4u2c

Using Python 3 + Google Cloud Vision API's OCR to extract text from photos and scanned documents

Just a quickie test in Python 3 (using Requests) to see if Google Cloud Vision can be used to effectively OCR a scanned data table and preserve its structure, in the way that products such as ABBYY FineReader can OCR an image and provide Excel-ready output.

The short answer: No. While Cloud Vision provides bounding polygon coordinates in its output, it doesn't provide it at the word or region level, which would be needed to then calculate the data delimiters.

On the other hand, the OCR quality is pretty good, if you just need to identify text anywhere in an image, without regards to its physical coordinates. I've included two examples:

####### 1. A low-resolution photo of road signs

Office Web Apps Viewer

('.ppt' '.pptx' '.doc', '.docx', '.xls', '.xlsx')

http://view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=[OFFICE_FILE_URL]

<iframe src='https://view.officeapps.live.com/op/embed.aspx?src=[OFFICE_FILE_URL]' width='px' height='px' frameborder='0'>
</iframe>

OneDrive Embed Links

Read through: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-java-with-apt-get-on-ubuntu-16-04

Then install Oracle Java 8:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install oracle-java8-installer

Read through: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/JDBCAndMySQL

Copying Data from a Google Sheet into Firebase Realtime Database in real time via Apps Script

If you're trying to do this, you came to the right place!

Watch this code work in real time: https://twitter.com/CodingDoug/status/942576182276497409

See also this gist for copying in the other direction: https://gist.github.com/CodingDoug/ffc4f050cc489a0280eb7f4cbe36af07

Setup

Normalize volume level with PulseAudio and simultaneous output

This should work conceptually on any Linux OS with PulseAudio but these particular instructions are for Ubuntu. There are two major reasons for using simultaneous output. The first is self-evident - we can output to say a bluetooth headset and wired headphones at the same time to enable two people to watch a movie with headphones on a single computer. The second reason is a sort of a convenience for setup. We know the simultaneous sink name so the default.pa config would work without modification so long as simultaneous output is enabled. If we were to set this up without that, we'd have to customize the config with our specific device sink name. That's totally doable but personally I always setup simultaneous output. That's why I haven't described the alternative in this gist.

Note: this guide explains step by step how to add Firebase to PWA Starter Kit.

If you already have some Firebase knowledge and you just want to get everything ready out of the box, you might want to checkout the Firebase branch on the PWA Starter Kit repo, that already contains all the needed files.

Deploying `prpl-server` to Firebase

Firebase Hosting alone is not sufficient for hosting the prpl-server build since it requires some server-side processing of the user agent string. Instead, you will have to use Firebase Functions for that.

Sign up for a Firebase account

	echo 'export PATH=$HOME/local/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.bashrc
	. ~/.bashrc
	mkdir ~/local
	mkdir ~/node-latest-install
	cd ~/node-latest-install
	curl http://nodejs.org/dist/node-latest.tar.gz \| tar xz --strip-components=1
	./configure --prefix=~/local
	make install # ok, fine, this step probably takes more than 30 seconds...
	curl https://www.npmjs.org/install.sh \| sh

	#!/usr/bin/env python

	import pygtk
	pygtk.require('2.0')
	import gtk # sets app name
	import gnomekeyring

	def hack():
	for keyring in gnomekeyring.list_keyring_names_sync():
	for id in gnomekeyring.list_item_ids_sync(keyring):

	import time
	from http.server import BaseHTTPRequestHandler, HTTPServer

	HOST_NAME = 'localhost'
	PORT_NUMBER = 9000


	class MyHandler(BaseHTTPRequestHandler):
	def do_HEAD(self):
	self.send_response(200)