<article> - <h1> - How To Use Your Email Client For Physical Mail - </h1> - <p> - Whether it's to re-read a conversation, find a plane ticket I ordered or - check when a meeting was planned, I often find myself looking up old - emails. It's usually easy to do so because email clients are designed for - the task: Many of them support full-text search and some even complement - that with neat tagging and categorization systems. To be honest I have - become completely dependent on those features for my day to day - life. Having full-text search and some sort of categorization for email - can be a huge time saver. When it comes to physical mail however, I still - have to browse through stacks of paper to (hopefully) find what I'm - looking for. I figured that it'd be nice to use my fancy email client to - deal with physical mail as well, so I found a way to do just that. Turns - out it's pretty simple! - </p> - <p> - The main objective here is to transform our physical mail into an email - that can be received, indexed and read by our email client of choice. Now, - one way to do that would be to type the contents of our mail into an email - by hand, but - <i> - ain't nobody got time for that! - </i> - . The (more appealing) - alternative is to use a document scanner. I have a single purpose scanner - unit from Canon that I hook up to my laptop for just this purpose. - </p> - <p> - It isn't as simple as just emailing a scanned document to ourselves - though: email clients are smart, but they can't understand a word of text - in our PDF or JPEG of a physical document. They need content to be in - plain text form in order to provide us with some of their best features - like full-text search. We'll have to somehow transform our scanned - documents into plain text that we can include in our email. To do this, we - can use tesseract. Tesseract is an optical character recognition (OCR) - engine, meaning that it can recognize text in images and extract it for - us. Installing it should be easy on Debian derivative distros like - Ubuntu. My laptop is running Debian unstable so I just ran - <code> - apt - install tesseract - </code> - and started using it. Using it is as easy as - upening up a terminal and typing - <code> - tesseract FILE.jpg - OUTPUT - </code> - . That command will save all the text that tesseract is able - to recognize in the image FILE.jpg to a file called OUTPUT.txt. - </p> - <aside> - <i> - Side note: I am Dutch, so most of my physical mail is in Dutch. To - make tesseract better understand my mail I installed the - tesseract-ocr-nld package using - <code> - apt install - tesseract-ocr-nld - </code> - . You can check what other language packs are - available by using - <code> - apt search tesseract-ocr - </code> - . - </i> - </aside> - <p> - All we have to do from there is copy-paste the contents of that file into - an email and send it to ourselves! Depending on the formatting of the - input document, the output may not always be pleasant to read. We can - account for this by including the original document as an attachment to - the email. That way we get the best of both worlds: we can use the search - functionality of our email client to find the document, and then read it - in its original form by opening the attachment. - </p> - <p> - This is all easy enough, but I'm lazy. I didn't feel like opening up my - email client and doing manual copy-pasting, so I decided to automate the - process a little further. I have postfix setup on my system to relay to my - mail server, so I can simply use the - <code> - mail - </code> - command to send - emails without a GUI mail client. I combined that with tesseract in a - little bash script. The script iterates through all of its arguments and - interprets them as filenames of scanned documents. It calls tesseract to - extract text from them, concatenates the results, attaches the files to an - email and sends it to my personal email address. Now all I have to do is - run the script with filenames of some documents and my job is done. If - anyone is interested in an actual program that does the same thing and - doesn't require you to setup postfix, let me know! I might consider - authoring one if it's useful to more people than just myself. The script - I'm currently using can be found - <a href="scan-to-mailpile.bash.html"> - here - (pretty) - </a> - and - <a href="scan-to-mailpile.bash"> - here (raw) - </a> - , but I - don't recommend using it if you don't fully understand its contents, it's - not a polished user experience 🤓. - </p> -</article> ... Continue reading
+Whether it's to re-read a conversation, find a plane ticket I ordered or check +when a meeting was planned, I often find myself looking up old emails. It's +usually easy to do so because email clients are designed for the task: Many of +them support full-text search and some even complement that with neat tagging +and categorization systems. To be honest I have become completely dependent on ... Continue reading
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+I love personal websites. It's amazing that people can share content with the +entire world just by writing some text and throwing it behind a web server. I +wanted to know what that is like, so I set out to create a personal website of +my own. As you can see I succeeded in doing so, but getting here wasn't as +straight forward as I initially thought it would be. I thought that, being a ... Continue reading
<article> - <h1> - Introduction - </h1> - <p> - Hello, welcome to my blog! My name is Hugo. I am a 22 year old Software Engineering - student from the Netherlands. Software development is a huge part of my life, I write a - lot of (weird) programs to scratch my own itch and most software I create - is - <a href="https://github.com/hugot"> - open source - </a> - by default. I also run a one-man - company that provides some IT services on the side. - </p> - <p> - Between working on projects and studying I like to watch movies & series, listen to music - & podcasts, ride my road bike and take hikes. - </p> - <h2> - What kind of blog is this? - </h2> - <p> - Because I'm quite new to this and I want to keep myself interested, I won't be - limiting myself to a single topic. You can expect me to post about a variety of topics - that may interest/annoy/excite me at any given moment. - </p> - <p> - May my posts be interesting and my posting schedule be consistent 🤓🖖 - </p> - <p> - I hope to see you around! - Hugo - </p> -</article> ... Continue reading
+Hello, welcome to my blog! My name is Hugo. I am a 22 year old Software +Engineering student from the Netherlands. Software development is a huge part +of my life, I write a lot of (weird) programs to scratch my own itch and most +software I create is open_source by default. I also run a one-man company that +provides some IT services on the side. ... Continue reading