Joyful Teufel

Author: Tom Pearce

  • MTG Brew – Glazed Hams

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    Tom Pearce
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    Since the new year, I’ve been playing Pauper MTG at my FLGS. I’m not a fan of netdecking; I don’t think it’s a moral failure, but half of the fun of the game is trying to design, tweak, and tune a deck yourself, and getting a pre-tuned deck from the internet takes away from that.…

  • A Useful Bash Command Prompt

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    Tom Pearce
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    The default bash command prompt is an untapped space for information provision. I prefer something that gives some important information; user, host, current directory, and current git branch. This was generated courtesy of Bash Prompt Generator.

  • MTG – Identifying Card Sets

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    Tom Pearce
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    It can be surprisingly difficult to identify MTG card sets. Lets start with a useful resource; The MTG Fandom Wiki (loathe as I am to recommend a Fandom wiki) maintains a list of sets with expansion date, code, and symbols. This will be helpful in identifying the set for most cards. The first step is…

  • MTG OCR – Identifying the Card in the Space

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    Tom Pearce
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    One of the potential refinements to the OCR process is to adjust and crop the image to only display the card. This should help focus Tesseract on looking at only the text on the card, and not at any of the background elements. My first step towards this, kindly suggested by Chris Turton at a…

  • MTG OCR – MTG-Specific Challenges

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    Tom Pearce
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    There are some specific challenges to processing MTG cards, and at this point, it’s probably worth talking about them. The first challenge is that every card has a priorietary font, and a number of proprietary symbols. Take, for example, this card; Lightning Bolt, from Game Night: Free-for-All, printed in 2022 The font used on MTG…

  • MTG OCR – Some Refinements

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    Tom Pearce
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    At this point, the project rested for a few months; other things piqued my interests, and I had to focus on other areas of life. However, a few months later, around Christmas 2023, I had some time to pick it up again. I found an old picture frame in a charity shop, which I cannibalised…

  • MTG OCR – Initial Attempts at Reading Text

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    Tom Pearce
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    Now that my jank-ass setup was able to take pictures of the cards, I was able to point some OCR code at them. In order to make the OCR happen, I decided to use an existing open-source OCR engine; while this project is a good excuse to learn about a lot of things, re-inventing the…

  • MTG OCR – Initial Hardware

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    Tom Pearce
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    The first problem I decided to solve with regards to the OCR project was getting pictures of the cards. If this was to work as an automated process, it’s going to have to have some kind of structure to be built around, and some kind of lightweight computer which can take a picture and process…

  • MTG OCR – Introduction

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    Tom Pearce
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    Using OCR to identify and manage Magic: the Gathering cards is not a new idea. There are many, many applications of it throughout time and space. However, for me, it is a good excuse to learn some python, learn some image editing, learn some OCR, basically just learn a bunch. OCR, Optical Character Recognition in…

  • The Start of an Uncertain Commitment

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    Tom Pearce
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    I’ve never been very good at starting posts like this unprompted.