Free your LG P500 Optimus One
Inspired by the FSFE’s “Free Your Android” campaign, I finally found the time to get rid of the restricted pre-installed Android on my LG Optimus One P500 using this guide (be careful, it requires MANY steps). I have now CyanogenMod 7 running - it’s beautiful, it’s fast and it does not require you to buy into the Google universe. There was, however, one major roadblock I encountered: After installing the custom ROMs, my phone wouldn’t connect to the mobile network anymore.
A bit of searching found me a solution, however: You have to install something called “old baseband fix” (download here). Now, everything works as advertised and my Android is finally free!
A short how-to: Scanning and formatting books on Linux / Ubuntu
Mainly as a collection of bookmarks for myself - as I have become interested in saving and liberating public domain books - here comes a short tutorial how to go from a scanned-in book (as a PDF file) to a nicely formatted book, and even an OCRed text on Ubuntu.
You need for this to work
- the ImageMagick tools
- pdftk
- tesseract OCR
- and the fantastic Scan Taylor software
Put the source PDF file into an empty directory, then execute the following commands (I’ll assume that the PDF was scanned with 400 dpi)
pdftk source.pdf burst dont_ask
for i in pg_*.pdf; do convert $i $i.png; done
for f in pg_*.pdf; do convert -quiet -normalize -density 400 “$f” “$f.png”; done
Now you have a bunch of PNG files in that directory. Now open Scan Taylor, create a new project and choose those files as source, and a new, empty directory as output.
You have now to go through all the steps, but most of them can just run on the default settings without you having to actually do anything (the little “play” icon, next to each step).
At the end of this process, you will have the output directory filled with “TIF” files.
Now, execute the following commands:
for i in *.tif; do convert -density 400 $i $i.pdf; done
pdftk pg*.pdf cat output final.pdf
for i in *.tif; do tesseract $i output$i -l eng; donecat outputpg*.txt > output.txt
(Of course, this assumes an english source text, otherwise you have to substitute another -l parameter for tesseract).
Now you will have, in final.pdf a nicely formatted PDF file, and in output.txt an OCR-ed version of your book. With a bit of work, and using for example pandoc, you’re not far away from having a usable ebook.
