Popping the thing open to short the power switch when it was ‘locked’ was my introduction to PC internals, electronics in general, and disobedience :)

I’d have been about 8 at the time. Good years.

After that I think we had some nondescript P3 beige box and then went to a Haswell P4. Ran hot as lava.

P2 with MMX. Think we ended up getting a Voodoo 2 for it as well. Same SoundBlaster and some ridiculously small disk and RAM. Win95. It even had a turbo button and a locking power button.

It was an upgrade from our Amiga 1200.

Fond memories of shoulder surfing the BT guy when he came to our house - peeked a test number for dialup and got about half a year of internet for free.

The more services that lock out my country, the better.

Even my home instance has done it.

Direct consequences are the only way to get it into the thick skulls of the people that This Is Bad.

If your devices rely on a service that you do not control to work - then accept the fact that one day, suddenly, they will not work.

As bad as they are in that way (and many others), I can only consider Dell or Lenovo for mainstream laptops. They are the only manufacturers, to my knowledge, that make service manuals readily available or at least easy to obtain.

If it’s not a terminal or expensive fault, I’d just rather fix it myself than deal with customer support anyway - even in warranty.

Where I am, it is the retailers problem to solve up to 2 years from purchase. This covers the terminal cases.

For desktops I’ll just build myself, and make a point to offer builds to friends & family in the market.

a customer support line that wasn’t outsourced to the other side of the planet

Onshore support is indeed a bloody rarity these days.

We have an LJ1010 that just refuses to die. All we feed it are cheap knock-off carts and it continues to churn out the pages.

Only thing I’ve had to do is force the driver into thinking everything is label stock. The fuser is weak, so the label setting gives it a little more oomph.

Good luck :)

Spreadsheet jihad

Pinching this. What a phrase.

Feels like the dirt is butter and the drill is a blowtorch.

Has gone suprisingly well.

Tesseract failed in some places, making some of the sub-headings come out in what looks like Klingon. HF have varied their paper stock dimensions as well, which caused a few things to be clipped.

Acceptable output for manual corrections.

Preview:

Expect a DM soon-ish.

Good news, they went through the ADF without too much trouble. Images just need a little contrast adjustment.

The copier used also OCR’d the whole lot, so they’ll be searchable.

Welcome.

Didn’t realise just how many I had - a whole box file full and overflow from that.

I’ve had a nice morning so far sorting, de-duping and remembering the time I coated half the kitchen in sesame seeds…

Been meaning to do it for ages so cheers for the incentive!

Britain is weird too.

they do block Mullvad

Not well enough it seems. Still reachable for me on some exits, but not all.

I’m not sure ofcom are going to download an app

Also a valid point 😂

Python, Tesseract, OpenAI and my 3 remaining brain cells have now combined to form a working script that will rename the scan file names to whatever it reads in a certain section of the card.

Doing them by hand would be a nightmare 😅

Now I am wondering the same.

And looking down the rabbithole of Tesseract OCR haha.

I’ve done less useful things with a Monday morning before. PDFs, and I will try to suss a way to set the file names programatically.

A handful may come with ‘pre-printed accidents’ but all will be legible :)

As long as the scanner can handle the slightly thicker paper stock they use, we should be golden.

lemmy.ca notes that 87% of their surveyed users are mobile as of their census in 2023, with the lion’s share coming from apps rather than mobile browsers (that would be blocked).

If we have a similar split here, not handling app traffic would undermine the original purpose of the geoblock. “Use an app” is a much lower bar than “Use a VPN” in terms of accessibility.

Only you know the figures though :)

If you don’t mind them auf Englisch, I’ve got a hoard of them and time with a duplex scanner.