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 always, if you don't want to be bored by the Scenario, simply jump to the Instructions portion below. Scenario: I download a ton of public domain books and other publications that I use for research and republication. Though I try to be disciplined and meticulous in categorizing the downloads into numerous folders and sub-folders, with more than 10,000 files I find myself doing a lot of searches for certain words or phrases in certain files within certain folders. Here's an illustrative example. I have a single word I am looking for because it has been, for 75 years, a hot topic in general public discourse (let's say, so as not to offend anyone, the word is :"blooper.") Then I want to export or copy and paste the search results (list of files...