René Rebe

I got a nearly unused Oqo 01+ a few years ago for my vintage computer collection. You know, because it has “rare” Transmeta Efficeon cpu in it. As the original power supplies are apparently prone to fail, it already came without a power supply and I had to always use the lab supply on my desk (don’t ask, just the usual computer scientist office desk ;-)

Back in the day I found a bloodspot.com post form Ekawahyu Susilo, were he measured the pins - however, given the usual bitrot in the interwebs the post is now gone, and I peeled the most useful photo out of the archive.org to archive it prominently here as well:

(1) is VCC1, (2) is GND, and (3) is VCC2. Pin (4) is connected to GND and pin (5) is connected to VCC2. As far as I have found, VCC1 (5-6V?) is used for charging, while VCC2 (may be better lower at just 5V?) is used to directly run the Oqo, …

Update: now with video! ;-)

We just released a new application we were working on: re/compress 1.0 (or by our new versioning schema 17.1).

As I mentioned some years ago we have written a new PDF library from scratch for our portable port of OCRKit.

While we always simply wrote PDF ourselves, for reading PDF files we initially used macOS’ PDF framework. Until we ported OCRKit and ExactScan to Windows and Linux, too.

We could have simply find some open source code for that, but we ultimately decided against this. One benefit of knowing your own code is, that you can usually fix issues in a matter of minutes, instead of searching thru other people’s code for days or weeks. Customers are always amazed about our turn around time for bug reports, or on-site support ;-)

In the meantime we know PDFs inside out, and thru our involvement in the TWAIN Working Group even work with the PDF Association on some PDF standards. After having seen so many defect, non standard conforming, or simply not that compressed files in the wild at customers, we though: Why not factor out PDF optimization, recompression and error recovery into an own affordable App and started to work on re/compress.

Re/compress will go thru all the file’s objects, and re-writes them in the most compact and compressed way. If any recovery methods were needed to read defect or broken files, the new file will be written with all this corrections applied for other, regular PDF applications to be abel to read the file, too.

Additionally, for the big space savings, the images can be re-compressed, and optionally down-sampled to really reduce huge files to very lightweight ones for sharing, and mailing.

And best of all: Since we created our own cross-platform UI, re/compress is immediately available for Mac, Windows, and theoretically Linux, too (if you are interested in the later just drop us a note).

re/compress PDF.