You can enable Androids screen reader from the Linux command line
with the following command:
adb shell settings put secure enabled_accessibility_services com.google.android.marvin.talkback/com.google.android.marvin.talkback.TalkBackService
Unfortunately you had to enable USB
Debugging on your Android device before. Furthermore you must
install the Android
Debug Bridge on your PC. Otherwise the command above will not
work.
Recently I bought a Fujitsu
SP-1120 to replace my rather slow and old flatbed scanner. The
Fujitsu is an an automatic document feeder (ADF) with duplex support.
It’s faster, scans front and back pages in one go and produces a much
better image quality for ocr.
This article describes the installation under Debian Linux and
provides a simple scan-to-pdf shell script.
I had to analyse some network requests while I was working on an
Android app project. That turned out to be surprisingly easy, using mitmproxy. This article covers the
proxy installation and usage by wget and within the source
code of an Android app.
My server runs an MPD instance
for music playback. The following script for Mac announces the currently
playing song after every song change. It uses Mac OS build in TTS and
tries to guess the song title language.
I’m a great fan of the TV series Game of Thrones and the books it’s
based on. In cooperation with Jens Bornschein from the TU Dresden I’ve
created tactile maps of Westeros and Essos and made them available for
download . Be aware, you need a braille printer or similar device to
produce tactile maps.
This article describes how to disable the laptop screen on Lenovo
Thinkpads. This saves a lot of power and enhances your privacy. Root
privileges required. Tested with a Thinkpad T450 on Debian Stretch.
This Android app vibrates the current time when the display is locked
and the power button is double-clicked. This might need some practice to
work reliably because if you double-click too fast the system only
recognises a single click and the screen turns on instead.
The app is free software. You can find the links to the play store, a
f-droid repository and the source code below. The latest version was
released on December 16th, 2025.