I remember installing a fresh PC with win98. During installation, I disabled some windows bloatware (Imagine! You actually could do this!), and ended up with an unresponsive, non-windows app blocking the system. I killed that app and removed it from the system. Keep in mind that at this point, no network connection was set up, nor did I install any driver or program yet, this was straight from the windows install medium.

After reboot, the app was back, and again blocking the system.

Wiping the harddisk and starting installation over did not help either.

Turned out this was some bloatware installed by the BIOS whenever it detected at boot that there was a) a Windows installation that was b) “missing” their “register your PC with us” app. This needed some Windows bloatware to work, and thus failed on this machine.

This was the only time I angrily screamed at a hotline worker.

First of all, he should drop Python for anything resource intensive as such a simulation. And then think about how to optimize the algorithm.

As a kid, I found a box of dried prunes. They were so soft and tasty, I ate the complete box.

Definitely not on my list of repeats.

Well, don’t visit the US. This is just one of the many reasons to avoid that place.

“For our profits, it is reasonable not to waste money on AC.” – Your boss

Well, this would be more calling the cops on the DoorDash driver.

Yes, this works with most stickers, but there are some tough bastards that even resist that.

The compressing and renumbering seems to be more common with embedded Chinese fonts - Space-wise it makes a lot of sense. But yes, mark and copy text, paste it into word or writer, and you get gibberish. Can’t verify the search, though. And, of course, Google translate can’t do anything with it, either.

If you ever need to edit a PDF that way, just use Inkscape. It is way better than LO draw for that.

It is not a curse. It does exactly what it is intended to do: Create an archive of a document that is universally reproduceable.

It is a very well designed cul-de-sac for exactly this purpose. Using it for anything else is calling for trouble.

The problem lies in the PDFs themselves. In there are objects that represent lines of glyphs. If you are lucky. A conversion tool can guess which of those lines belong together and produce the text.

It cannot know any intentions behind it, though. Take a numbered list. The first line is two line objects: the number plus the . or the ), and the first line of text. The conversion tool can now guess. As the line blocks with the numbers are all left of the line blocks with text, this could be a numbered list. Or it could be a table with two columns. Nothing in the PDF is giving any hints.

And that is the easy part. This assumes that the document either uses default fonts, or keeps its embedded fonts untouched. If they use embedded fonts and a PDF optimizer that only embeds the used characters and renumbers them, any copy or conversion tool is bound to fail.

Same with protected PDFs where you simply cannot copy the text from the start.

And then there are PDFs that just consist of scanned pages. Here you would need an OCR software to get something readable out of them.

PDF is an archival, output format, the end of a process. Not something to work from.

Always preserve the original file. Keep it safe. If you change tools, make sure you have a conversion path into something editable. The PDF is for giving away, nothing else.

And then sue them to kingdom come.

I had to design a volume-limiting system for one of our devices that uses headphones. We know that the users turn the volume up to unhealthy levels - more often than not because their hearing is already damaged from listening for years or decades to systems that had no limitation. They are still able to turn the volume up with the (analog) amplifier, but we measure the signal, and if it exceeds the legal limit, we scale it down digitally.

They had no Linux driver back then at all, but there were some rudimentary from the community that printed Ok. They just did not support special printing modes, which i wanted to add.

I contacted both technical support for commercial systems and later their booth on a big technical trade fair (CeBit Hannover), and got basically the same opinion both times. The first was definitely no “Sales Rep”, and the people at the booth were a manager and an engineer.

But I agree, their opinion is stupid.

Canon is on my personal blacklist for decades. I bought a printer from them, not just a normal A4/legal, but a professional, wide one that uses rolls of paper, etc. I was unhappy with the state of the driver under Linux, so I called and asked for a programming documentation to write my own printer driver. Their opinion on Linux/open source was that “open source is theft of intellectual property”.

I got a login on an IBM system. I logged in and moved to the change password mask. Changed my password to something filling out the 12 character new password field. Logged out, and got the login mask again. With an eight character password field.

Thank goodness this is illegal in my country.

Ceterum censeo Russiam esse delendam…

Have you ever seen how long it takes for a tree to grow?