SwizzleStick

On and off over the last 15 years or so.

Only recently have I become much more comfortable & able to resolve things without resorting to search, stackoverflow etc.

The turnover point was the day I finally learned vi & cron so I could fiddle with an old Buffalo NAS, that was long out of support, riddled with security holes, and offered only very limited tooling.

Was a great learning experience, but it didn’t pan out the way I wanted. So it runs Debian now, supports modern protocols, and continues to serve. Amazing what you can keep in service when you try.

Rock on :)

Confirmed issue, just gave it a test.

Adding the uBlock Origin extension to Tor Browser will resolve it and make the links proper again.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/

Working fine for me on Mullvad.

We shoulder-surfed a tech back in the 90s when he was getting us set up. Thus, the “HAHA FREE” dialup connection was born.

Gave years of service to our old beige box.

It’s convenience over security, something that creeps in anywhere there is popularity. For those who just want x or y to work without needing to spend their day in the terminal - they’re great.

You’d expect these kinds of script to be well tested against their targets and for the user to have/identify the correct target. Their sources should at least point out the security issue and advise to grab and inspect before straight up piping it though. Some I have seen do this.

Running them like this means you put 100% trust in the author, the source and your DNS. Not a big ask for some. Unthinkable for others.

I have settled on Mullvad, for their simplicity and payment methods.

I run a split environment. Main router is set up ‘normally’ with what other people in the house and visitors would expect.

Attached to that is a Pi running an OpenVPN client and a hostapd server that broadcasts a separate WiFi network. Iptables on the Pi are set to only ever allow Internet traffic through the VPN as a killswitch (except for OpenVPN, to prevent a chicken-egg situation), and any wifi clients connected via hostapd are routed through it.

A script occasionally changes the VPN endpoint to keep it interesting. This Pi also acts as a qbitorrent client that stores downloads to a local NAS.

It’s a best of both setup that has been stable for over 5 years now.

If your devices rely on a service that you do not control to work - then accept the fact that one day, suddenly, they will not work.

Has gone suprisingly well.

Tesseract failed in some places, making some of the sub-headings come out in what looks like Klingon. HF have varied their paper stock dimensions as well, which caused a few things to be clipped.

Acceptable output for manual corrections.

Preview:

Expect a DM soon-ish.

Good news, they went through the ADF without too much trouble. Images just need a little contrast adjustment.

The copier used also OCR’d the whole lot, so they’ll be searchable.

Welcome.

Didn’t realise just how many I had - a whole box file full and overflow from that.

I’ve had a nice morning so far sorting, de-duping and remembering the time I coated half the kitchen in sesame seeds…

Been meaning to do it for ages so cheers for the incentive!

Python, Tesseract, OpenAI and my 3 remaining brain cells have now combined to form a working script that will rename the scan file names to whatever it reads in a certain section of the card.

Doing them by hand would be a nightmare 😅

Now I am wondering the same.

And looking down the rabbithole of Tesseract OCR haha.

I’ve done less useful things with a Monday morning before. PDFs, and I will try to suss a way to set the file names programatically.

A handful may come with ‘pre-printed accidents’ but all will be legible :)

As long as the scanner can handle the slightly thicker paper stock they use, we should be golden.

If you don’t mind them auf Englisch, I’ve got a hoard of them and time with a duplex scanner.

I’ve had some decent results with this:

https://github.com/ngosang/trackerslist

Back in the day it just worked because you bought a card with a supported chip… or you had to do some ungodly things with ndiswrapper to get the Windows driver loaded.

I think back then I was using wicd as well.

It’s come a long way.

I just treat their letters as scrap paper or kindling. They are very carefully worded to give the illusion of power where there is practically none. Capita are masters in mismanagement, so I’m not surprised your declarations have been ignored in the past. Just don’t bother.

If you’re truly not doing anything required to have a licence, then they can’t prove you do. Licence dodgers are usually clever enough to not give it away too.

Don’t answer the door to them on the rare off chance they come prospectively calling. If you do, just close it on the scum without a word, and go about your day. No warrant = no entry.

Downsizing from an ex biz full fat tower server to a few Pis, a mini PC and a Synology NAS was the best decision ever here.

The new hardware was paid for quickly in the power savings alone. The setup is also much quieter.

You don’t think about power consumption a lot when working with someone else’s supply (unless it’s your actual job to), but it becomes very visible when you see a server gobbling up power on a meter at home.

You’re right about the impressiveness of working creatively within constraints. We got to the moon in '69 with a fraction of the computing power available to the average consumer today. Look at the history of the original Elite videogame for another great example of working creatively and efficiently within a rather small box.