🧩 Enhancing PixelMelt’s Kindle Web Deobfuscator
A precise and technically insightful piece — great for developers curious about web obfuscation and OCR-based reverse engineering, with thoughtful attention to the ethical implications of DRM-related research.
This post details improvements to PixelMelt’s Kindle web deobfuscation tool, designed to extract readable text from Amazon’s obfuscated Kindle content. Enhancements include a region-agnostic downloader, full-page SVG reconstruction to improve OCR performance, and the integration of Tesseract for text extraction. The author also discusses limitations such as OCR errors, missing visuals, and non-reflowable text output. Due to licensing issues, the modifications cannot be released, but the approach is shown to be effective despite its imperfections.
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🌆 How Abandoned Land Fuels Urban Heat in Houston
An insightful intersection of urban analytics and environmental justice—illustrating how data-driven city planning can cool cities and close social inequity gaps.
A Texas A&M study led by Dr. Dingding Ren shows that abandoned buildings and paved lots can raise neighborhood temperatures by up to 20°F. Using drone and satellite data, researchers found that low-income areas suffer the most from this heat intensification. Vegetated lots and green spaces, however, significantly reduce local temperatures. The authors recommend converting unused land into green infrastructure to improve both climate resilience and public health.
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🦆 Show HN: Duck-UI – Browser-Based SQL IDE for DuckDB
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