There is only one FOSS weather app that claims to function offline, and it is broken. The f-droid.org repo shows many weather apps but none state that they work offline. It would be very useful to be able to quickly fetch the weather forecast when connecting to a hotspot, and then to later be able to view the latest forecast that was fetched. Because not everyone has a data plan or has continuous connectivity.

Anyone know of an Android weather app that can do that?

Update

I need it to collect the forecast for the next several days, ideally a week ahead. One suggestion was Breezy Weather but it seems to only cover the current day. Actually it goes 4 days out… good enough. Guess I’ll call this solved.

The only Android app I could find which advertises having offline capability is FOSS Weather, which is now archived and no longer on f-droid.org. When I launch it, there is just a blank screen and a menu. It’s wholly broken apart from the menu, but useless with just a config UI.

The MS Windows and Apple boot-licking communities have ABBYY FineReader. It does not produce LaTeX but it’s very slick and useful, as I mention here.

There is a linux CLI version but it’s not FOSS. It’s apparently not even software. It seems to just be a client that depends on a cloud service. So you have to trust them with your data and pay them too. Fuck all that, obviously.

IIUC, the library is FOSS 🎉

But what uses that NeoML library? If ABBYY’s FineReader uses it, then it’s the right logic… so the hardest work may be done already. We just need a tool to use it. Docs are here – and they’re a bit over my head.

A FOSS app could perhaps use NeoML and produce LaTeX output, which can then be edited.

Would someone please make that for me? 🙏

Suppose you have a scanned document. Scans are flawed, ugly, bulky, and sometimes contain sensitive info. How do you produce a clean vector PDF from that?

In the FOSS world, we have #Tesseract to OCR the PDF. This just generates the text for searchability but retains the ugliness and bulk. It would be crazy painful to extract the text and then use LaTeX to manually reconstruct the layout.

Windows has a tool named ABBYY FineReader Pro Edition. It performs the OCR, then it also finds text and images and puts numbered rectangles around them. It finds a matching font, style, and weight for the text and gives users a chance to delete rectangles at will before constructing a new vector PDF. I took the scan of a 1-page letter and dithered it to bitonal using FOSS, yielding 43k. Then processed with ABBYY, which produced a much cleaner vector PDF weighing in at 12kb. Most importantly, ABBYY makes it easy to omit sensitive blocks like names, addresses, and signatures, or overwrite them with “REDACTED”.

Is there anything like this in the FOSS world? I suppose not, but please correct me if I’m wrong.

I would love it if a tool could take an OCRd PDF and produce a LaTeX doc where every object would simply amount to a \put command with coordinates in a picture environment, so it could be edited in LaTeX.

Potential use cases:

1. Whistle-blowing. E.g. someone wants to leak a document but needs to strip it of forensic artifacts and certain sensitive data.
2. Activism. E.g. you complain to a public administration about some injustice, and they give a shitty anti-human reply. Simply publishing the response can help dish out some shame and embarrassment. But you probably don’t want your personal details like your address exposed, and you probably have to scrub the name of the administrator to respect their GDPR rights.
3. Digitizing paper books. You have a bound book but as you travel space and weight is scarce. You need an electronic format, perhaps even just as a backup. A raster scan is bulky, messy and does not scale well on different screens.
4. Binary blobs are not great for a version control system. Converting raster scans to quasi-text vector files makes edits possible as well as tracking the history of changes.

Update

FOSS libraries apparently already exist.

This is how I currently edit PDF bookmarks:

$ pdftk "$pdf_file" dump_data > /tmp/bookmarks.txt
$ emacs !$&
$ pdftk "$pdf_file" update_info /tmp/bookmarks.txt output new.pdf
$ mv new.pdf "$pdf_file"

It’s only great in some situations. It’s not great if there are no pre-existing bookmarks because there is no structure to edit. I then have to find another PDF that has bookmarks, then copy the structure into the metadata dump of the PDF that needs bookmarks, and edit that hoping that I made no mistakes. A sample of the metadata looks like this:

BookmarkBegin  
BookmarkTitle: CHAPTER I: GENERAL PROVISIONS  
BookmarkLevel: 1  
BookmarkPageNumber: 9  
BookmarkBegin  
BookmarkTitle: Article 1: Subject matter and objectives  
BookmarkLevel: 2  
BookmarkPageNumber: 9  
BookmarkBegin  
BookmarkTitle: Article 2: Scope  
BookmarkLevel: 2  
BookmarkPageNumber: 9  
BookmarkBegin  
BookmarkTitle: Article 3: Definitions  
BookmarkLevel: 2  
BookmarkPageNumber: 10  
…  
PageMediaBegin  
PageMediaNumber: 1  
PageMediaRotation: 0  

Notice there is no “BookmarkEnd” lines in this, so the structure is not exactly intuitive. It’s prone to human error.

Is there a simpler tool for making minor additions? Evince is purely a viewer.

Okular has an “add bookmark” feature but it uses bookmark to mean something else. What other tools call bookmarks is called “Contents” in Okular. On the Contents sidebar you can right-click and “add bookmark” but that does not change the table of contents. Instead, that creates a reference/hook in another tab called “Bookmarks”. Okular’s nomenclature is more true to the intuitive meaning people expect, but it deviates from PDF norms. Anyway, Okular cannot handle the job.

WTF is this about? Is uMatrix visible to the server and triggering this?

Replace your bank accounts, change your SSN, change employers, and move address. All your data has been compromized. Specifically:

• social security numbers
• medical and mental health records
• bank and credit card information
• tax details
• work histories
• home addresses

Avoid opening new accounts at these banks:

https://git.disroot.org/cyberMonk/liberethos_paradigm/src/branch/master/usa_banks.md

12ft.io was a clever service that exploited the fact that paywalls allowed Google to crawl their articles. By licking the boots of Google’s crawler, paywalls pollute the search index with their exclusive/closed content. Enshitification culminates by cluttering our search results with paywalls.

12ft.io gave people direct access to Google’s caches, so we could read the text that feeds Google’s index.

☠ 12ft.io is apparently dead now. “404 page not found”. wtf. We just lost an important disenshification mechanism. The linked news hit ~½ a year ago, but seems to have taken some time to actually play out.

(update)

Call to action: someone plz make an onion replacement for 12ft.io.

smry.ai is said to be the best 12ft.io alternative. But I just tried it and simply got a text version of the paywall registration nag. Same with https://removepaywalls.com/

I stopped distributing Linux Mint to the low-tech users who I support roughly ~10 years ago when the project jailed their docs in tor-hostile Cloudflare websites (e.g. readthedocs.io, IIRC).

A recent general search for info on getting a piece of hardware working on linux led to forums.linuxmint.com (the query had no relevance to Mint specifically). This website uses #Sucuri for elitist tor-hostile gatekeeping. There is no action for me to take since I already quit supporting Mint, other than perhaps to ask others in my local linux support group to also drop Mint support because our users should not face a choice between software freedom and privacy. Certainly when I am asked to install Mint for someone, I will refuse and try to steer them to Debian, perhaps with Cinnamon.

Screenshot attached. Not sure how long linuxmint has been using Sucuri for crude IP reputation discrimination, but note that the Debian project that feeds the Mint project demonstrates respect for people’s privacy. Mint adds value in some ways, but at the same time worsens a good distro by jailing information.

This is not a “something is better than nothing” scenario. It’s actually destructive. When you host a discriminatory access-restricted forum, you create an attraction for useful info and simultaneously become an obstacle to the information that would otherwise find a better host. If forums.linuxmint.com did not exist, the discussion would still occur somewhere and it would have a chance at occurring in an open access venue.

I scanned an envelope which had a dot matrix 4-state barcode by the postal service. It did not appear on the /bilevel/ scan. So I tried very low thresholds (the point at which light gray is treated as either black or white). The threshold needed to retain the fluorescent(†) barcode is so low that black text on the same scan becomes too dirty for OCR to work.

The US postal service scans (all?) envelopes and thus has records of who is sending mail to who. (Do other countries do this?) Anyway, I wonder how we might counter the privacy intrusion. What if the return address on an envelope is printed in fluorescent orange… would the return address be suppressed from envelope scans? IIUC, they would have to scan in grayscale or color to capture it, which would take a lot more storage space. So they are probably doing bitonal scans. Yellow would work too but it’s much harder for an eye to see. This fluorescent orange is readable enough to a human eye but apparently tricky for a machine.

Of course the return address is optional, so the best privacy is to simply not supply a return address. But if return service is wanted, supplying a return address is inherently needed.

Another thought: suppose an address is dark blue text on a light blue background, or white text on a medium blue background. The scanning software would have to be quite advanced to choose a threshold that treats the text differently than the background, no? If the return address is fluorescent orange and the destination address has a background color, envelopes could perhaps be printed in a way that stifles the mass surveillance.

(†) I cannot concretely assert that it is fluorescent; just describing what it looks like.

Cliff’s notes: Team GOP prevailed, the people lost on netneutrality. The only thing you can do now is cancel your broadband… something very few people have the will power to do.

I suppose the reason they did not take it to the supreme court is Trump managed to stack that court in favor of the right-wing nutjobs. So if the case goes there, it will do the GOP’s bidding to favor big business over the people and enter an oppressive decision that is even harder to correct in the future.

(note this story was originally on Ars Technica but that site is enshitified so I found a less enshitified source to link – something more fedi posters should do)