The Shrimp

The Shrimp

The Shrimp circuit is an Arduino Uno substitute with a component cost of around one tenth the price of official Arduino boards. You can hand-make the circuit on breadboard or stripboard, learning about the components as you go, and remix the circuit freely for your needs.




http://shrimping.it/blog/shrimp/

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Options

This information on OCR is reblogged from computers.tutsplus a really useful source of tutorials on all things computer...

Google Drive OCR

Google Drive makes it painless to go paperless. Its collaborative documents, spreadsheets, and presentations already help curtail paper usage, but its OCR feature helps curb the paper mess even more so.  

OCR, or Optical Character Recognition, is the most important tech to help you go paperless. Scanned documents on their own are only glorified pictures of your documents, but let your computer recognize the text and they instantly become a ton more useful. 

http://computers.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-ocr-documents-for-free-in-google-drive--cms-20460

Abbyy Fine Reader On-Line 

Perhaps one of the most well-known OCR developers is ABBYY, which produces many different paperless management programs. In this tutorial, I'll show you how you can use their web app FineReader and its OCR technology to convert PDFs, scans, and other image files into editable text.

http://computers.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-ocr-documents-online-with-abbyy-finereader--cms-20785

Raspberry Pi B+ SD Card Format Problem - Solved

I had considerable difficulty getting the 8G Micro SD card required for my recently acquired Raspberry Pi to format. I was using the recommended SD Formatter utility via a micro SD card adapter using the Card reader slot on my monitor and the slot on my PC front panel. In both cases I received the error message "SD Formatter disc not supported". I eventually the penny dropped, I tried using an external SD card reader, worked straight off, problem solved.

The question is why?

Link to Raspberry Pi - Getting Started

Disable Google Auto-Backup

I recently reinstalled Picasa and in doing so inadvertently turned on Google Auto-Backup. As I have rather a large number of images on my HD I quickly ran out of space in my Google Account. As this includes storage of emails for Google Mail that proved rather irritating. 

I searched for a way to turn Auto-Backup off but clearly Google don't want you to turn it off so the advice is hard to find. Lots of red herrings with links to "How to turn of Google Auto-Backup " only to discover when you open the link the info tells you how to turn it ON but not OFF!!!

Eventually I found the advice I was looking for  at this location link

Here are the instructions:-

Google+ AutoBackup? can be disabled, Uninstalled, or set to only back up certain folders. 

AutoBackup gets installed automatically when you install or update to the latest version of Picasa. 

To Adjust Google+ Auto Backup settings: 

Look for the AutoBackup icon in the system tray on the bottom right. It is pinwheel with 4 blades in the Google colors. It may be hidden, if so click on the up-arrow to the left of the system tray to show the hidden icons.

It is bottom left in the image

Click on the pinwheel an select Settings...

Make sure it is signed in to your Google account associated with Picasa
Make sure the folders you want to backup are listed and selected, or unselect all of them if you don't wish to use autobackup at the moment.
You can also Pause AutoBackup if it is slowing something down too much. 

To Uninstall Google+ Auto Backup:
If you don't want to use Google+ AutoBackup at all, uninstall it as follows:
Go to the Windows Control Panel.
Select Programs or Uninstall Programs.
Find and select Google+ Auto Backup in the list of installed programs.
Uninstall it.