First thoughts on new internet access speeds provided by fibre-to-the-premises. This is an enlarged version of a submission to HN.
Incredible download speeds
Dialup to broadband
The move from dialup rates of 28.8kbs to ADSL (broadband) rates of 2Mbps changed the internet experience markedly from being largely static to allowing streaming video. It has also coincided with an apparent move towards the web (hypertext over HTTP over TCP/IP) and away from other protocols like gopher (which also sits atop TCP/IP).
From a mainly textual start the web has gradually become a rich multimedia globally accessible interface. The greater bandwidth available to carry data to end users has enabled rich media sites like YouTube to take off as well as making the sharing of static images and music (Flickr, GrooveShark, etc.) extremely easy and efficient. Now, for those in areas with broadband (>1Mbps) access to the world wide web, socialising that relies on the communication of large volumes of multimedia content or near-instantaneous text or voice communications (IM apps like AIM or GTalk and VOIP like Skype) has become commonplace.
The web but 200 times faster
What’s the new game?
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However here’s a review of the current state of OCR on linux distros from a user perspective. I’ve looked at OCR for Linux briefly before when considering PDF editing and OCR of text-as-image in PDF documents but it’s not really relevant to this.
Note this article is not yet finished!
Optical Character Recognition
OCR – What is it?
OCR applications take an image of text as their input and output the textual equivalent, or at least the applications best guess. Simples. Applications for this sort of thing should be readily apparent – editing documents that you scan in, performing automated content tagging, indexing images by textual content, reading receipt data, these sorts of things.
Popular linux OCR options
The most popular projects in OCR under linux are, in no particular order:
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On 17 and 19 May we visited London for work. Unfortunately we weren’t aware of the details of the London Congestion Charge scheme and have been issued with a Penalty Charge Notice (PCN).
What is the Congestion Charge
If you travel into central London (link to page with map of region) a charge is levied to basically encourage you not to use your own vehicle or to use a less polluting vehicle.
Why the fine?
We were in central London from about noon on 17 May 2010. Left about 9pm. My wife, to whom the charge has been issued as registered owner of our car, was under the presumption that the charge was automatically levied by sending a notice to our home address (registered with the DVLA, the route they use to establish the owner and used to send out a PCN).
I assumed that one would have to pay online or by phone but thought there would be a reasonable period in which to make this payment – there was not.
AQA exam board announced that they are dropping C, C# and PHP from their approved list of computer programming languages in the upcoming syllabus. Here are example exam papers from 2009.
Example exam papers from AQA
AQA Computing 2009
The following are AQA Computing exam papers from 2009 for units 1 and 2 of the A/AS-level exams.
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A list of tools to create screencasts (screen capture videos) and screen captures as well as some online web page image capture tools and full screen screenshot apps.
No-install screen cast applications
Video of my screen
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How to remove title bars and borders from windows in KDE[4]; this gives a Chrome browser like appearance to Opera and maximises screen area for any application.
Turn off KDE title bar
Keyboard shortcut
Alt-F3, Advanced > No border. WIll remove the border and remove the titlebar from a KDE managed window.
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