Luke's Ubuntu and Linux Hacks

(We recommend you bookmark this blog. Trying to find helpful information in forums usually just ends in making you frustrated and angry. This blog does not speculate or guess. If we post it, we've tried it and it works. As with all our posts, if you don't care about the background info, you can head straight to the yellow highlighted sections for the problem and the fix.) I download and/or convert a lot of books from archive.org. A lot. Tons. Most of those books are in the public domain and are not restricted by DRM. They are downloadable, editable and readable in pdf, epub, etc. formats. Occasionally a book is still copyrighted Some of those copyrighted books are available to read for one hour at a time; those books cannot be downloaded. But other copyrighted books are available for 14 days and may be downloaded, but only as DRM-protected books.  Until recently, all those 14-day downloadable books were downloadable only as .ascm files, which meant they could be unlocked for r...

(We recommend you bookmark this blog. Trying to find helpful information in forums usually just ends in making you frustrated and angry. This blog does not speculate or guess. If we post it, we've tried it and it works. As with all our posts, if you don't care about the background info, you can head straight to the yellow highlighted sections for the problem and the fix.) Background Rarely am I jealous of "anything Windows," but one of those is the Windows Power Tool that takes a screenshot of an image file and allows you to OCR any text in the image. But while I covet an exact replica for Linux use, I have settled on NormCap as my favorite alternative. I tried some other Linux alternatives, but I won't waste time and space on details of why I did not like them.  My only beef with NormCap is that the Flathub version simply will not work on my Ubuntu 24.04 machine. I am far from being a programmer, but my guess is that it has something to do with a clash between t...

(We recommend you bookmark this blog. Trying to find helpful information in forums usually just ends in making you frustrated and angry. This blog does not speculate or guess. If we post it, we've tried it and it works. As with all our posts, if you don't care about the background info, you can head straight to the yellow highlighted sections for the problem and the fix.) RANT (or skip and go straight to HOW TO...below) I love Catfish, the search engine, and I use it extensively, especially when I need to search an attached USB drive (MyPassport) for content text, which cannot be done in Files (Nautilus) on an Ubuntu machine (despite the promises of the OS 24.04 release). When 24.04 was released, I decided to forego my umpteenth Upgrade and do the “full monty” fresh install. After the install, I was totally dismayed and very irritated to discover that virtually all the programs I run were now available only as snaps, not only in the initial install, but post-install in the Sof...