I was not really sure how to name the title of this article. Jocr is a freeware that makes it possible to capture to capture a set region, a window or a full screen image in Windows and use character recognition to write the text of the image into a notepad file. The only prerequisite as far as I can tell is - unfortunately - a copy of Microsoft Office 2003 or newer with Microsoft Office Document Imaging installed which you can find under the Office Tools tab of the installation CD. The language that you are using has to be supported by Microsoft Office Document Imaging, about 20 are supported next to English of course.

Using Jocr is actually a pretty straightforward process. Choose if you want to capture a region, window or desktop and use the mouse to draw the region or to highlight a window that should be captured. It is not necessary to select something if you choose to capture the whole desktop of course. A preview of the captured image will be shown in Jocr and all that is left to be done is to click on recognize to start the character recognition.

continue reading "Capture image and convert it to text"

Amazon offers a huge product catalogue on their different (country) websites which has one major problem and that is clarity. Navigating through the content can be really painful, especially if you only want to check the current price of several items that you would like to buy. One way to handle this would be to store all products as bookmarks and check them manually every day to see if the price was reduced. This is however not very practicable.

The free Amazon Price Watcher aids you in this task. It allows you to search many Amazon stores - including those for the United States, Great Britain, Germany and Canada) - using the Amazon Price Watcher interface. Just search for products in selected categories and save interesting results in a library. The library offers fast access to information such as price and availability including a price chart which displays the overall price trend.

continue reading "Amazon Price Watcher"

I think we all experienced frame drops and artifacts in avi movies which is pretty annoying if it happens during the whole movie. I found a media player called HDngn which is able to interpolate new frames in realtime using Direct Show and Open GL. This is achieved by using frames more than once and algorithm that recalculate everything in realtime.

I would not say it is the perfect media player yet but it surely has some nice interesting features that no other player offers yet. The drawback is that it currently supports only a limited amount of filetypes and not enough possibilities to change the configuration of the player at all. It took a while until I was able to remove the logo of the player from the upper right corner. I had to edit the lua file which was used to init the interface.

continue reading "Fix Avi Frame Drops and Artefacts on the fly"

Crap Cleaner has been released in a new version just a day ago and I decided to take another look at it. I removed all options during installation except the one that would create a start menu entry in Windows - no need for additional toolbars on my system. I especially wanted to take a look at the Issues tab which someone mentioned in the comments sometime ago.

The Issues tab in Crap Cleaner scans the registry for missing shared dlls, activex issues, unused file extensions, obsolete software and many more entries and displays them after finishing the scan. You may then click on fix all issues which prompts to backup your registry before continuing. After that the first issue is displayed with information why Crap Cleaner decided it is one.

continue reading "Crap Cleaner a second look"

I’m currently using the Screen grab extension in Firefox to save complete websites as pdf files to read them later or print them eventually. Screen grab has some limitations, mainly size of the website that should be saved and that it only works in Firefox. I sometimes use Opera or want to convert other documents such as emails to pdf.

DoPDF looks like the perfect replacement for Screen Grab. It is a freeware application for Windows and takes only a few megabytes of hard drive space. It adds a virtual printer to your installed printers in Windows and you can choose to make it the default one. Please make sure that the Print Spooler service is running during installation, otherwise the setup of the virtual printer will fail.

continue reading "Free Fast Virtual PDF Printer"