Archives of #Ss

Using ZeroFree to shrink a VirtualBox Linux Image

My development Ubuntu image inside VirtualBox was using too much space to store empty but non-zero disk blocks on its virtual drive. This sucked space from my laptop’s SSD (which is already not big enough!). Shrinking it by zeroing the blocks took a little bit of effort. Inside VirtualBox if I boot my Ubuntu 11.04 […]

Extracting keyword text from screencasts with OCR

Last week I played with the Optical Character Recognition system tesseract applied to video data. The goal – extract keywords from the video frames so Google has useful text to index. I chose to work with ShowMeDo‘s screencasts as many show programming in action – there’s great keyword information in these videos that can be […]