<div><h2style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><ahref="posts/use-your-mail-client-for-physical-mail/index.html"> How To Use Your Email Client For Physical Mail </a></h2><istyle="font-size: 0.8em;">Mon, 17 Feb 2020 11:55:42 +0100</i><pstyle="margin-top: 0.5em;">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 ... <ahref="posts/use-your-mail-client-for-physical-mail/index.html">Continue reading</a></p>
</div>
<hr><div><h2style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><ahref="posts/simple-static-blog/index.html"> Creating a Simple Static Blog </a></h2><istyle="font-size: 0.8em;">Sat, 08 Feb 2020 12:14:16 +0100</i><pstyle="margin-top: 0.5em;">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 ... <ahref="posts/simple-static-blog/index.html">Continue reading</a></p>
</div>
<hr><div><h2style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><ahref="posts/introduction/index.html"> Introduction </a></h2><istyle="font-size: 0.8em;">Sat, 08 Feb 2020 09:30:06 +0100</i><pstyle="margin-top: 0.5em;">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. ... <ahref="posts/introduction/index.html">Continue reading</a></p>
<item><title> How To Use Your Email Client For Physical Mail </title><link>https://hugot.nl/posts/use-your-mail-client-for-physical-mail/index.html</link><description><h1>
How To Use Your Email Client For Physical Mail
</h1>
<p>
Whether it&#39;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&#39;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&#39;m
looking for. I figured that it&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;t as simple as just emailing a scanned document to ourselves
though: email clients are smart, but they can&#39;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&#39;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&#39;m lazy. I didn&#39;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&#39;t require you to setup postfix, let me know! I might consider
authoring one if it&#39;s useful to more people than just myself. The script
don&#39;t recommend using it if you don&#39;t fully understand its contents, it&#39;s
not a polished user experience 🤓.
</p></description><pubDate>Mon, 17 Feb 2020 11:55:42 +0100</pubDate><guidisPermaLink="false"> How To Use Your Email Client For Physical Mail NDc2MDg1MjYxIDQxODUK</guid>
</item>
<item><title> Creating a Simple Static Blog </title><link>https://hugot.nl/posts/simple-static-blog/index.html</link><description></description><pubDate>Sat, 08 Feb 2020 12:14:16 +0100</pubDate><guidisPermaLink="false"> Creating a Simple Static Blog MjU5OTIyNDIwMyA2MTI5Cg==</guid>
