René Rebe

What sets ExactScan apart from competition? Well, for one it certainly are the now about 400 built-in drivers for various professional document scanners, that due the lack of a vendor’s driver for Mac OS X would otherwise not function on an Apple Macintosh at all.

On the other hand it is also our high internal standards for code quality that translates to higher quality images and general scanner behavior over other scan applications, including Apple’s ImageCapture or the vendor’s own Windows software.

Case in point are our new drivers for Canon DR-series scanners. From our past experience with other scanners and drivers we knew some areas where we could improve quality and scan speed; and we continued to collaborate directly with Canon as well as carefully analyzing the bits and bytes of the Windows driver’s USB I/O. The result of this sheer endless work? The next update will drive Canon DR-series scanners slightly faster; and the auto-crop and de-skew as well as image quality will be even better as well!

Made in Berlin; Germany.

Some days ago the first game created by ExactCODE went online.

Numery is a logic puzzle, a brain game. At first colorful tiles with numbers are shown for some seconds, then hidden, and the player then ask to combine them to a mathematical target result. By memorizing the location and values of the numbers, the player needs not only to remember them but also to sum it up to match the target result. Once you choose a number cell from your memory, you can not give it up. You can either stop and match the result or choose the next number by opening another cell. With each new level the dimension and thus the complexity increases from an initial four to up to 36 numbers, and the higher target result makes it more complicated, too.

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The last years I posted some Apple App Store review times. As the review times now got significantly longer I wanted to drop a note where we stand now:

August 15, 2012 06:31 Upload Received
August 15, 2012 06:33 Waiting For Review
August 30, 2012 10:14 In Review
August 30, 2012 10:20 Apple Pending Developer Release

So welcome two full whole weeks review time for your precious App updates :-/

You got a Canon DR-series scanner, such as a DR-M140, DR-M160, DR-3010C, DR-6010C or DR-6030,C older, or never and like to use it on an Apple Mac(intosh)? Search no more!

ExactScan now comes with built-in drivers to supper a whole range of Canon DR-series scanners, no matter if they are a couple of years old - or brand new!

Simply plug in the Canon DR scanner USB cable to a free USB port of your Mac, download and lunch ExactScan and the feature rich document capture application will list the scanner and batch scan at high speed on your Mac! Using ExactScan Pro you can even scan with OCR to searchable PDF, use the digital imprinter, and rely on many more automatic detection, such as automatic detection of colors and text orientation.

The possibilities are endless.

You have an archive of PDF files, e.g. scanned with the scanner driver standard software, that takes a lot of storage space?

Chances are OCRKit can reduce the file size quite a bit due it’s built-in color detection and advanced compression. Simply drag and drop the files on the OCRKit icon and it will do it’s work. If the files had no text from OCR before you even get searchable PDF along the way, … And usually the resulting files should be quite a bit smaller¹. Of course the same works with plain bitmap files, such as JPEG and TIFF.

The possibilities are endless.

¹) The size may increase for PDF files already stored as highly compressed PDF. We are working to further improve compression for future updates.

Looks like I (at least these days) have a little more time for the famous tip of the week series: It is long known (at least should be), that proper use of manual transmission (in cars) can greatly influence fuel economy and reduce the gasoline consume. This is archived by not driving out each gear, and instead upshift “quickly” into the next higher gear.

At least in Germany this is even standard teaching during driving school. Using drive-now car-sharing BMW Mini Cooper in Berlin for some time now I was wondering about the higher than expected gasoline consume of up to 10 liter per 100 km in central Berlin’s stop-and-go traffic. With some careful monitoring of the momentarily and average petrol consume in the digital display of the dashboard I figured out, that I upshifted too quickly for the Mini. Turned out that not up-shifting too early and rather going a little over the 2000 rpm mark brought down the consume from ~10 liter to something below 7 liter per 100km, …

In case you want to do something for the environment (and your wallet - or in reverse order) some conscious driving, monitoring and adaption can easily save some 30%, or more, …

Sorry, those of you with automatic (torque converter) transmissions are not in the fuel saving game anyway, …

Your milage may vary.

In recent times I had to do some more international calls, even including international calls to mobiles, than usual. Of course international calls are now the nearly only thing charged extra on bigger, e.g. office, plans. And they can be quite expensive, …

With some kind tip I was pointed to some Vodafone Germany Callya International pre-paid offer, that unexpectedly offers international calls, even including mobiles, into many countries as low in the single digit cent range per minute, …

So it really pays off to do some research, especially in esoteric situations, …

Being abroad over the May-day public holidays (in most of Europe), I had to compare some numerics without a spreadsheet at hand (traveling without my main MacBook, …). App Store hipsters would probably be lost, now, but knowing some good old Unix Kong Fu there was help around:

Cut’n paste the values (from an PDF, …) into raw txt files, and setup equations (with sed substitutions) to feed bc:

paste out in | sed ’s/\.//; s,[^0-9], / ,; s/^/100 * /’ | bc > res

And for the prettiness one can also paste together the table columns:

paste in out res

From the famous tip of the week series: The other day I was wondering what CLI tool I used years ago to mass convert / fixup encoding of text (e.g. program, source code) files and just could not find it, e.g. with googling, … As I just remembered, somehow, accidentally (maybe due to some T2 Linux maintenance work, …) I quickly wanted to share that note: recode. An older piece of software, apparently not updated since 2001, … (!?!?) Easy to use, just like this:

recode latin1..UTF-8 file.txt
recode UTF-16..UTF-8 …
recode cyrillic..utf-8 …

I guess you get the idea, …

In general I’m already not such a fan of those German public propaganda broadcast tax called GEZ. So every household and company has to pay this tax, and nowadays not only if you have a radio or TV (which some have not), but since some time also if you just have an “internet-ready” device. Like Sun SPARC station (a nice 25MHz, right?) or smartphone, … And as I happen to run a company I even have to effectively pay twice: once private, and once for the company. Don’t really know why, one should assume if one has an pay-per-view subscription one can only watch at one place, not simultaneously at home and work, …

Additionally, I’m also no fan of that massive money wasting, the public stations are practicing: from expensive sport event licenses, over expensive superstars at “Wetten Dass…?” & co, …

If it would be for me this would be called pay-tv anyway, and all paying subscribers would get a CI card and sorted out, everything is.

Whatever, I gave up to think about unlogical bureaucracy thinking a long time ago,

But when you already pay GEZ fees twice (!!!) you would assume you would be able to watch evening news on your “internet ready” device in the office when you (again) worked all Sunday (to pay all this taxes :-)?

Well, think again, … more than a third, if not nearly half of today’s Tagesschau I could enjoy this static images:

Did I mention I seriously want my double-payed GEZ money back? Opt-out of all this nonsense?? And certainly not pay even more, twice, after this upcoming GEZ fee reform???