Matthew Lem mlem8

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

Amphetamine

Simple toggleable menubar replacement for Caffeine in Hammerspoon, utilizing ASCIImage (for vector) to create the amphetamine icons. Motivated by the official Caffeine app's icon looking bad on Retina

Get latest version here: amphetamine.lua

Save as amphetamine.lua in ~/.hammerspoon/ and put amphetamine = require "amphetamine" in your init.lua

These links no longer work. Springer have pulled the free plug.

Graduate texts in mathematics

duplicates = multiple editions

A Classical Introduction to Modern Number Theory, Kenneth Ireland Michael Rosen

Don't use VPN services.

No, seriously, don't. You're probably reading this because you've asked what VPN service to use, and this is the answer.

Note: The content in this post does not apply to using VPN for their intended purpose; that is, as a virtual private (internal) network. It only applies to using it as a glorified proxy, which is what every third-party "VPN provider" does.

A Russian translation of this article can be found here, contributed by Timur Demin.
A Turkish translation can be found here, contributed by agyild.
There's also this article about VPN services, which is honestly better written (and has more cat pictures!) than my article.

ABOUT

about:config settings to harden the Firefox browser. Privacy and performance enhancements.
To change these settings type 'about:config' in the url bar. Then search the setting you would like to change and modify the value. Some settings may break certain websites from functioning and rendering normally. Some settings may also make firefox unstable. I am not liable for any damages/loss of data.

Not all these changes are necessary and will be dependent upon your usage and hardware. Do some research on settings if you don't understand what they do. These settings are best combined with your standard privacy extensions (~~HTTPS Everywhere~~ No longer required: Enable HTTPS-Only Mode, NoScript/Request Policy, uBlock origin, agent spoofing, ~~Privacy Badger~~ etc), and all plugins set to "Ask To Activate".

What forces layout / reflow

All of the below properties or methods, when requested/called in JavaScript, will trigger the browser to synchronously calculate the style and layout*. This is also called reflow or layout thrashing, and is common performance bottleneck.

Generally, all APIs that synchronously provide layout metrics will trigger forced reflow / layout. Read on for additional cases and details.

Element APIs

Getting box metrics

elem.offsetLeft, elem.offsetTop, elem.offsetWidth, elem.offsetHeight, elem.offsetParent

What / Why

Deploy key is a SSH key set in your repo to grant client read-only (as well as r/w, if you want) access to your repo.

As the name says, its primary function is to be used in the deploy process in replace of username/password, where only read access is needed. Therefore keep the repo safe from the attack, in case the server side is fallen.

How to

Generate a ssh key

	function* crossBridge() {
	const reply = yield 'What is your favorite color?';
	console.log(reply);
	if (reply !== 'yellow') return 'Wrong!'
	return 'You may pass.';
	}

	{
	const iter = crossBridge();
	const q = iter.next().value; // Iterator yields question

	{
	"APIGatewayServiceRolePolicy": {
	"Arn": "arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/aws-service-role/APIGatewayServiceRolePolicy",
	"AttachmentCount": 0,
	"CreateDate": "2019-10-22T18:22:01+00:00",
	"DefaultVersionId": "v6",
	"Document": {
	"Statement": [
	{
	"Action": [

	var AWS = require('aws-sdk');
	var http = require('http');
	var httpProxy = require('http-proxy');
	var express = require('express');
	var bodyParser = require('body-parser');
	var stream = require('stream');

	if (process.argv.length != 3) {
	console.error('usage: aws-es-proxy <my-cluster-endpoint>');
	process.exit(1);