this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2024
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this rootless Python script rips Windows Recall's screenshots and SQLite database of OCRed text and allows you to search them.

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[โ€“] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 69 points 5 months ago (9 children)

Hilarious to me that it OCRs the text. The text is generated by the computer. It's almost like when Lt. Cmdr. Data wants to get information from the computer database, so he tells the computer to display it and just keeps increasing the speed


there are way more efficient means of getting information from A to B than displaying it, imaging it, and running it though image processing!

I totally get that this is what makes sense, and it's independent of the method/library used for generating text, but still...the computer "knows" what it's displaying (except for images of text), and yet it has to screenshot and read it back.

[โ€“] space@lemmy.dbzer0.com 24 points 5 months ago

Having worked on a product that actually did this, it's not as easy as it seems. There are many ways of drawing text on the screen.

GDI is the most common, which is part of the windows API. But some applications do their own rendering (including browsers).

Another difficulty, even if you could tap into every draw call, you would also need a way to determine what is visible on the screen and what is covered by something else.

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