Yes, this works with most stickers, but there are some tough bastards that even resist that.

Do they plan to make Red Bull?

The reader should mount as a USB drive, you put files on it like epub, PDF, or HTML in your own directory structure, and you can browse this and read the files. Nothing else needed.

The compressing and renumbering seems to be more common with embedded Chinese fonts - Space-wise it makes a lot of sense. But yes, mark and copy text, paste it into word or writer, and you get gibberish. Can’t verify the search, though. And, of course, Google translate can’t do anything with it, either.

If you ever need to edit a PDF that way, just use Inkscape. It is way better than LO draw for that.

It is not a curse. It does exactly what it is intended to do: Create an archive of a document that is universally reproduceable.

It is a very well designed cul-de-sac for exactly this purpose. Using it for anything else is calling for trouble.

The problem lies in the PDFs themselves. In there are objects that represent lines of glyphs. If you are lucky. A conversion tool can guess which of those lines belong together and produce the text.

It cannot know any intentions behind it, though. Take a numbered list. The first line is two line objects: the number plus the . or the ), and the first line of text. The conversion tool can now guess. As the line blocks with the numbers are all left of the line blocks with text, this could be a numbered list. Or it could be a table with two columns. Nothing in the PDF is giving any hints.

And that is the easy part. This assumes that the document either uses default fonts, or keeps its embedded fonts untouched. If they use embedded fonts and a PDF optimizer that only embeds the used characters and renumbers them, any copy or conversion tool is bound to fail.

Same with protected PDFs where you simply cannot copy the text from the start.

And then there are PDFs that just consist of scanned pages. Here you would need an OCR software to get something readable out of them.

PDF is an archival, output format, the end of a process. Not something to work from.

Always preserve the original file. Keep it safe. If you change tools, make sure you have a conversion path into something editable. The PDF is for giving away, nothing else.

Do they offer the promised cheaper eggs, too?

Old laptops can be another good thing. Back in the times of Win98, when Microsoft issued stickers with license keys for Win and Office, I got hold of five laptops from a bankruptcy auction for about a dollar each because they didn’t work.

I took them apart for RAMs and harddisks (quite successfully, only one RAM was botchy), and then took the saw to the cases, cutting out the part with the license stickers on the back.

I sold them to a business for about five dollars a piece…

So Apple computers actually turn useful?

If you would not mind, before you dump them, hand them to me.

OK, with what would you replace the materials of LEGO bricks?

This is not a trick question, but one that LEGO has already spent millions on research on. They found an oil-free alternative to the soft plastic used for leaves and other plant parts, but are stuck on other types of plastic they use.

And then sue them to kingdom come.

Only the best of the best of the best.

His sole qualification is probably winning The Official Trump Bootlicking Contest.

OK, story time:

Our town twinning committee (Where a good friend is president and my wife is member of the management team) did this St Nick thing for ages. Two years ago, the original St Nick retired, and the quest was on to find a new one. The committees’ president even asked her husband if he would glue on a beard - and the reply was rather negative ;-)

I was blessfully unaware of those struggles, until one fateful day, when our families met about something completely unrelated, Monica exclaimed: “YOU have a beard!”. Well, I had one for decades by then, yes, thank you that you noticed…

And thus I was volunteered. It is a rather interesting job, actually. I don’t get paid, I get reimbursed the money for the fuel of my car, and the ferry and hotel is sponsored, but those are always quite tough days. On top of that comes loads of preparations like asking for donations, collecting those donations, buying sweets for the kids, packing up everything (I’ve got a big car, but it’s stuffed to the brim every time!), and the occasional “meet the press”.

I’m usually visiting elementary schools and kindergardens, spooling off a two-pronged spiel: The start is always “Who do you think I represent?” (I’m not St Nick, I act him, thus avoiding issues like “Santa Claus is/is not real”). I tell them about St Nick, that he was a real person, where and when he lived, what he did and what made him special, and his relation to Christmas and the gift-giving tradition. The second part is telling the kids that we are from another country, which they might have noticed from my foreign accent and the German carol my “Angels” and I sang when we came in. According to the kids, I’ve come from about everywhere in the world. I then tell them about town twinning, that it is a kind of friendship between cities, and that people knowing each other and who become friends is good for a peaceful world.

Last year I had two special visits: A christmas party from an organisation for (mostly mentally) disabled people. And wow, they had fun! And a visit to a childrens hospice, which was not easy, dealing with kids who will probably be dead when I visit next time…

One of the funniest moments was on my first trip. I was through with my spiel and asked if they had any questions. One little girl piped up: “Is that beard real?” I happily exclaimed “This is the question I was waiting for from the very beginning!”. I went to her, bent down, and told her to give it a try and pull. You should have seen that face. And she accepted that it is real without pulling ;-)

Until summer, I keep my beard trimmed to 30mm. Then I let it grow freely until December, where I get a professional trim before I put on my costume and mitra, take my staff, and start being St. Nicolas. This is not about having a long beard, it is about having a full beard instead.

Hmm, projecting again?

Now that would be an interesting plot twist in the American Presidential Shitshow…

I had to design a volume-limiting system for one of our devices that uses headphones. We know that the users turn the volume up to unhealthy levels - more often than not because their hearing is already damaged from listening for years or decades to systems that had no limitation. They are still able to turn the volume up with the (analog) amplifier, but we measure the signal, and if it exceeds the legal limit, we scale it down digitally.

Make it a good wine.

I used cdparanoia for ripping CDs. This worked especially well with CDs with issues like scratches or early attempts to make CDs “rip-proof”.