Posts

Showing posts from July, 2009

Indian Seafood Soup

Image
This afternoon my wife had to work, so dinner was on me. She left me a bag of assorted frozen seafood we bought at Woodman's in Kenosha defrosting in the sink. What to do, what to do... I had a half a vadalia onion left over in the fridge. Image via Wikipedia One yellow bell pepper. One heaping teaspoon of chopped garlic ( from the jar ). One heaping teaspoon of ginger paste. One large tomato. Two heaping teaspoons of lemon grass ( from the jar ). 1/2 Can drained garbanzo ( chickpeas ) beans. 1 15oz can chicken broth . 1 15oz can coconut milk . 2 cans ( use one of the others you emptied ) water. 4 chicken bullion cubes. 1/2 teaspoon red chili pepper . 1 teaspoon ground coriander. 6 green cardomom seeds. 1/2 stick cinnamon. 1 teaspoon yellow curry. 1 teaspoon fish sauce . 2 teaspoons ghee . 2 tablespoons olive oil . Salt to taste. Holy crap, that's allot of ingredients. In large'ish pot, add ghee and oil (oil keeps ghee from burning...it tolerates higher heat). Add cho

Using ImageMagick and Tesseract to sort TIFFs on Windows

Image
Recently I wrote a post about my search for a TIFF iFilter that would enable me to use VBScript to query a Windows Indexing Services server for file management. I found that since OCR is never always 100% accurate, neither were my attempts at sorting all the inbound EMR faxes we get each day. I did however, find Tesseract , a great product that was originally developed by HP and proprietary, and is now developed by Google and licensed under the Apache License v2, open source . It is one of the most accurate open source OCR engines available. It is quite basic, and in the version you obtain from the project page , it only operates from the command line, and without the libtiff library, will only do it's work on un-compressed TIFFs. More information can be found on the project pages , and Wikipedia . Doing some scouring, I aso found a front-end , and ArchivistaBox, a complete document management system . Image via Wikipedia I'm using it in Windows, so I needed to do one of

Traveling via Amtrak

Image
My wife, son and I recently took a trip to St Louis , to visit her Mom and Dad. We always have a good time, but don't look forward to the drive, as it takes 7 hours or so one way from 'lil old SE Wisconsin . Image via Wikipedia Thankfully, she looked into an older style of travel for our most recent trip to visit G'ma and G'pa; Amtrak . The cost is not much more than it is to drive. Fuel costs driving our mini-van is usually about $120, not to mention the fuel my son expends attempting to break out of his car seat ... The cost for our train ride was $188 with tax. Our son rode for 1/2 price since he is only 3. The trip took nearly the same amount of time, and we could ALL nap on the way down. We were able to bring a small cooler with lunch, play for a couple of hours in the dining car ( coloring books , puzzles, etc.) The only complaint I will lodge is customer service is a bit lacking. Our initial inquiries indicated we had the ability to check a bag, but foun