Public Domain

The Need: you cannot judge an AI job without a price tag When I start a new AI job, I always ask the same question first: what will this cost? A job can look cheap on paper and then run for hours. Or it can look scary and cost a few cents. This week I used one DeepSeek balance for four different jobs on my family book library. I wrote down the balance after each one. This post is that list, plus what I would do differently. ...

The Need: a book you can read on a phone I had translated six old commentary volumes into Korean with an API. The first thing I made from one of them was a print-style PDF, and then a page-image viewer: 301 JPG files, 48 MB, one image per page. It looked fine on a tablet. On a phone held upright, the letters were tiny. Pinch-zooming a page image is not reading. ...

The Need: a book you want to search, but it is only paper I have a 19th-century commentary on the five books of Moses. It has six volumes. I wanted all of it inside my own search tool, so I could ask a question in Korean and get the commentary back as one of the sources. The usual way is to scan the pages and turn them into text. That worked badly for me, and the way it worked badly led to the cheaper answer. ...

The Need: a big pile of old books, as plain text, on your own disk Maybe you want a private source of classic books for your own projects. Maybe you just don’t want your reading to depend on someone else’s website. Either way, the same question comes up: how big is it, and will it fit on my NAS? For one public-domain library, the answer was 28.1 GiB for 78,990 plain-text files. That fits on a home NAS with room to spare. This post shows the numbers, the commands, and the checks I ran afterwards. ...