mckmk

This is great. It works well for some docx files I have that don't work well in LibreOffice or any other non MS word. I do also have one that splits across 2 pages that I got down to 1 in MS word.

Thank you for developing this AND thanks a ton for making it Open Source with the MIT license.

Imagine being able to sync that sql database with some sort of cloud storage(s3, google drive, one drive).

Or, even better imagine being able to load your own applications in into your cloud storage and run them in browser remotely.

I regularly use Nitro PRO for redaction. It's proprietary but I don't know of any OSS tools that focus on redaction. https://www.gonitro.com/pdf-pro

There is a lot of good advice in this thread and I strongly recommend trying that advice before trying what works for me.

BUT, I had trouble getting to sleep my whole life and for about the last 7 years I've been able to get to sleep in much more normal timeframe. After trying most of the other things in this thread (cutting caffeine definitely helped). Two things that have seemed to really work for me:

I have a 7" tablet on my bed and I put on the SAME EPISODE of the SAME tv show each night (currently Psych S4 E1 - though it does change occasionally). I keep the volume low enough to not really hear unless I'm trying to listen to it and the brightness at almost the lowest setting. This is contrary to most advice on the subject and I write it here not to recommend it as a first choice. It is however what seems to work for me when other things didn't. The goal with the content is something that the plot doesn't matter and that you know like the back of your hand so it won't keep you awake to find out what happens BUT it's enough stimulus to pull your attention from your anxieties.

I added a ton of pillows to my bed (11 total). I put 3 on top of my body like a weighted blanket and have pillows to hug on either side of me. I can change to several different sleeping positions without significant pillow re-arrangement.

Thank you cableshaft. I appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts.

FWIW I also think general protocols on long lived platforms and IPFS are great.

BUT, I really don't think the blockchain has a role to play solving any of the issues you laid out. The reason the game you mentioned was able to continued to be played was because Apple was providing the network. The minimum ETH write fee is almost always at least $1 and frequently cost $3.50. Would people still be interested in playing the game if each write cost that much? Same goes for your archiving plans. IPFS is great but it's not a guarantee that that data will be seeded forever. For that you'd need to write it to one of the chains you're confident will survive. ETH data costs somewhere in the thousands of dollars per MB range? I'm not sure it's a real solution to that. I'm not dismissing the issues of very long term code and data longevity. They are real issues but in my opinion still quite unsolved.

It seems like, whenever there is an issue with the representations of blockchain the answer is to ignore the blockchain. (Shoot, our smart contract was a little too limited for the service we want to offer “Hey everyone don’t use that NFT!”) Where as a traditional database the answer is to fix the database or code. I look at any process involving NFTs and have to wonder how they aren’t more easily and cheaply accomplished as digital records in a centralized database and have yet to see any examples where that is not the case. Concert tickets? Set aside the fact that minting an ETH NFT is probably the entire profit margin of a ticket seller, why not a REST API? Or a web interface? (FYI they already do this) If the people who are letting you into the show are the final say whether you get in – you’re already trusting them and they already have full authority. What are you gaining bringing blockchain into this?

This does not sound like good system design.

“NFTs create a frictionless easily exchangeable market for goods… BUT make sure you check with the people, project, company or government that has authority over this good as to whether this particular NFT is actually a useful representation of anything. Because, at any arbitrary point they can just decide to not honor any of these.”

Why not buy the good directly from this party? Then at least the government has authority and can enforce your right to the product or service or at least a refund?

Barring all that, they could just not recognize the owner and send police to physically remove someone who thinks they own it because the have the NFT. That's one reason why some people like bitcoin so much, the government can't (easily) take it from you by force (because there's no physical aspect to it) like they can a home or gold.

If this were to happen and the blockchain and the physical world diverge, how would potential house NFT buyers know whether the physical house purportedly linked hasn't been overridden by local government? If the answer is for local registries to publish a list; then that list is the only thing that matters. The entire blockchain component becomes completely superfluous and a centrally managed electronic exchange would be faster, easier and cheaper.

In this ‘house NFT within the court system’ paradigm, what happens if the court disagrees with the blockchain on who is the rightful ‘owner’ of the house NFT?

Google Cloud offers Identity Aware Proxy and AWS offers Cognito integration with their Application Load Balancers which can do this.

Just to throw in another solution for anyone looking. Abbyy FineReader has a comparison module that is excellent. https://pdf.abbyy.com/how-to/compare-documents/

I'm not 100% clear if you're looking for a pro crypto currency community that has thoughtful technical discussions OR a community that is more focused about being skeptical of crypto currency. I don't know of anywhere good for the former but if it's skepticism - https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/ is the only place I know of that is focused on criticism and mocking of crypto currency and the related community.

Yes, many of David Gerard's criticisms have been said before. But, the entire crypto currency industry is devoted to gaining adherents based on dubious reasoning.

What's a writer to do with what many of us view as the biggest financial bubble in modern history? Write one article then stop, and walk away as people invest their life savings?

Very interesting, thanks for the response!

I'm genuinely curious if You find it cheaper including transferring from your currency, to crypto-currency-x, blockchain fee, crypto-currency-x to argentinian peso than transferwise or any of it's competitors? I think they're like $5 and 1.5% to transfer. If you remitted money early this week it probably wiped out any of the savings from the whole year I would guess?

As opposed to crypto currency proponents who have nothing to sell you? I assume you make this same point on those posts too?

I use a modified GmailThis bookmarklet to send myself URLs frequently: https://github.com/DangerousPenguins/GTDPI

Just click the bookmarklet, optionally add any search terms and click send.

I had a similar need at a company I worked for. My solution was actually quite similar to the author's #1 with the major exception being that I used ODG for LibreOffice Draw which mostly solves the author's two main complaints here. Background images can be high quality and placing your text is as easy as clicking where you want to place your text box.

The only other major difference is that I didn't interact with UNO. Since Open Document Format files are zipped XML files I extracted the content.xml and did regular expressions for my variables then replaced them.

We did have to do signatures as well but that turns out to be not THAT much of a pain. If you insert an image on top of your form manually then look at the resulting file you can pretty much copy the part of the XML that refers to the inserted image, insert the signature image into the ODG zip and make sure the names line up and it will work.

It's worth noting that the practice of editing complex XML with regular expressions is not always advisable. In my experience it works fairly reliably with ODG because the format remains simple. But, with ODT it can result in corrupted files quite easily because additional XML can lie inbetween the text letters of your variables. Then you'll be on a mission to find and ignore all the text markup like XML bold markers and span tags and paragraph markers and style tags.... before you know it your simple unzip regex rezip becomes a whole library.

Sanoid seems like a great tool. It was at the top of my list when I was looking for this kind of solution.

I ended up going with zfs_autobackup - https://github.com/psy0rz/zfs_autobackup because it doesn't need anything set up on the computer to backup. Just a script on the backup server that does pull backups.

I'm not trying to hijack the thread but I've often appreciated links to similar software in threads like this.

Sure they could try to withhold some % of votes and vote themselves but hopefully that should be noticed.

I think with ring signatures obfuscating everything it might be tough or even impossible to detect.

I would certainly enjoy reading a research paper on the viability though!

> able to revoke and re-grant tokens at will This is false. Only the voter can do this.

Then I think I don't understand the system you're proposing. How does the user get back their ability to vote if they lose their private key in this scenario?

The initial seeding should also be public so the total amount of votes could be audited as well. It's possible to set it up so you can't ever create any new votes after the initial seed (this is possible in all current token schemes for example). I don't think this addresses the problem. In the US voter turn out is often 30-40% of registered voters. Total vote count would certianly not be a useful metric there.

I hate to be too pedantic about this but that's sort of the point. It doesn't sound like you're describing a blockchain anymore or at least getting any of the purported benefits of a blockchain. You have a central authority now setting up numerous separate instances, controling who gets the voting tokens, able to revoke and re-grant tokens at will, and in charge of setting and publishing the destination. The whole advantage of the blockchain is that there isn't a trusted 3rd party.

If you're already trusting the government you can do cryptographic hashing, a publicly readable database and build in a ton more transparency.

I don't know camgunz, don't you remember that time before the blockchain when computers couldn't talk to each other over the internet and cryptographic hashes didn't exist? Because it seems like a lot of the proposed use cases are people who didn't know that those existed and or the power of those.

So this is solvable.

I'm not so confident. The Monero output from those transactions is actually only knowable to the intended recipient so I don't really know how this would work best. Would there be a pre-determined address that we're all sending our vote transactions to? Would that key be public so it could be audited by everyone? It seems like in this scenario systematic abuse by the government would be trivial. Just grant a few % extra tokens to address you control and sign the transactions to vote your way and the'd be no auditability, no knowing which votes came from where. In many elections the polling is good enough and the margin narrow enough that it would be extremely easy to do and not look suspicious.

We distribute the votes so 1 vote = 1 BankID vote. It's also technically possible to allow users to change their vote if done before the deadline.

You're describing a system where the government has a list of IDs and associated Private Keys and therefore knows who everyone votes for. That IS NOT OK.

There is fundamentally no way to do voting on the blockchain that limits one person to one vote and still maintains a system that isn’t completely reliant on trusting a third party at every important level. To start, and this is really important. The end users MUST maintain their own private key and choose their own software that interacts with the blockchain directly. If they use some common website or mobile app then the blockchain is providing nothing. That site / mobile app is already in the middle of 100% of the data. BUT, how we verify people and distribute private keys without again trusting a middleman? And if we don’t distribute private keys and instead have people register online, what stops someone from registering 2 times, 10 times, 1000 times, 1 million times? If some party is saying who can and can’t register for private keys for this blockchain then they are… what? A trusted third party.

What if I lose my private key? Can I just no longer vote for the rest of my life? If I can somehow reclaim my vote that means there is somebody that’s actually controlling that blockchain and it’s no longer trustless and reliable if some party has that power. If I lose my private key and lose my right to vote then that’s a bad system.

What if somebody starts paying people for their private keys? It seems like it’s illegal and immoral to let the practice continue but there’s no way of stopping it. Those private keys are either irrevocable which stays true to the blockchain and not trusting of a middleman OR there is some party the ability to revoke those keys and in that case… THAT’S a trusted middleman.

What happens if a user claims the vote they cast isn’t what the public ledger shows their public key/address as having voted for? What if a lot claim that?

What does the blockchain really provide in these kinds of imagined uses? That a certain set of private keys DID sign a certain set of transactions - assuming a 51% attack isn’t affordable enough for some party wanting to sway the election. That’s it. No connection to reality. Any non awful implementation of it involves inserting trusted third parties at every part of the process. And this isn’t because we’re ‘early’ and we’ll somehow figure these out. They’re fundamental to blockchain design.