OCR with Google Docs

At last, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) online with Google Docs.

• Go to http://googlecodesamples.com/docs/php/ocr.php
• Use the link to sign in to your Google account.
• Click browse to find your .jpg, .gif, or .png file to be converted.
• Click 'Start Import'
• Your image will now open as text in a Google Doc

My testing showed a fairly accurate conversion with very few mistakes. Because I was doing this in Firefox a squiggly red line appeared under the mistakes and a right click quickly fixed those. (Not sure if it's Firefox or Google Docs that puts the squiggly red line under those misspelled words? Might be both...)

One feature that's not available yet which I'd love to see is the ability to import PDF's that hold scanned images of documents. For some reason I seem to have a ton of those. At the moment, the only way that I can find to import those is to click on each page in the PDF. Copy it to the clipboard. Paste it into Paint.Net and then save it as an image. I then import that image into the doc. This is only practical if your PDF has a few pages. If it has many then this is just not workable.

 

 

 

Improving Hauppauge Wireless Performance

My Hauppauge MediaMVP has been pausing every few seconds when I've been using it over wireless, basically an apparent bandwidth problem. If I hard wire it to the network then it gets rid of the problem. Recently I needed to use it wirelessly again and so I had to solve the problem. I tried a few things but nothing worked until I changed the Wireless Channel from 6 to 11. As soon as that was done it started operating very smoothly and without the previous jerkiness.

This blog post serves 2 purposes: (1) To record and remind me how I fixed the problem and (2) to ask any reader if they know why changing the Wireless Channel from 6 to 11 would solve the problem?

Other settings that I have on my wireless access point are:

Wireless Network Type: 802.11g Only
No encryption

Hauppauge

I recently indulged in two gadgets from Hauppauge that have turned one of my PC's on my home network into a Tivo style PVR.

An HVR-950 USB TV recorder...

...and a Wireless MediaMVP player.

I took a while to configure these toys but the end result seems to be pretty good.