This is a so-called ‘film scanner’ or ‘slide scanner’. It lets you scan 35mm
\nfilm negatives or slide positives into the computer. The resulting output
\nis eye-popping (especially considering the scary shape the slides were in).
\n![\"riki,](\"http:\/\/adam.wolfwater.com\/19-slide0072.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
The three things that make the DiMAGE cool are – 2) OS X. The mac’s operating system is the most useful desktop OS If you’re looking to just “experiment” with a Mac, you can pick a good fruity-colored G3 iMac up off eBay for a couple of hundred bucks. It’s also rumored<\/a> that Apple is going to release a sub-$500 mac within the next couple of months.<\/p>\n 3) KDE’s kio_slaves. One thing that the linux desktop does get right is KDE<\/a> is one of the top two graphical ‘desktop environments’ for linux. KDE’s Fish<\/a> makes This is known as “network transparency”, and KDE does it better than any 4) Skype. Meredith mentioned this one before, but it really -is- useful. 5) OpenOffice.org<\/a>. OpenOffice is a legit MS Office replacement, provided It can read & write MS Office files, and does a pretty good job of maintaining the proper formatting. Occasionally you’ll see formatting glitches when opening MS Word files, but unless you are collaboratively writing the Great American Novel with someone using Word, it works more than well enough.<\/p>\n The word processing piece of OpenOffice also incorporates the notion of “styles”, so you can define different text styles very much like a CSS stylesheet. It makes making mass changes to a document incredibly easy. We use OOo to write our documentation at our firm, and it really makes formatting tasks much simpler than Word.<\/p>\n I’ve been playing with the 2.0 pre-release of OOo<\/a>, and it looks like the developers decided to come out with their own Access clone So, those are 5 things that I like. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Meredith asked me to write about 5 things i think work pretty well. And i do as i’m told. So here they are. 1) Konica\/Minolta DiMAGE Scan Dual IV This…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meredith.wolfwater.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meredith.wolfwater.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meredith.wolfwater.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meredith.wolfwater.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meredith.wolfwater.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/meredith.wolfwater.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meredith.wolfwater.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meredith.wolfwater.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meredith.wolfwater.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n* low price. it’s like $250, which is an order of magnitude lower than
\ncomparable scanners just a couple of years ago.
\n* batch scanning. Using the right software (vuescan<\/a> from hamrick is my
\nfavorite), you can do automated batch scanning — stick 4 slides in, wait,
\nwhen they pop out, stick another 4 in, etc… no need to babysit the
\ncomputer. That’s important when you’ve got 3,000 slides to scan.
\n* DigitalICE. It’s got hardware correction built in, which takes out the
\nslide’s imperfections. It can also restore faded colors.<\/p>\n
\ncurrently available. The most important trait is that it just
\n“disappears” when you’re using the computer. That is, you’re not
\nconstantly worrying about it, unlike Windows. No need for virus
\nscanners, “zone alarm”, worrying about spyware, patches-of-the-minute,
\netc. It is thoughtfully architected at its lowest levels, and the user
\nexperience is unparalleled. It’s what linux on the desktop should be, but
\nisn’t (yet). Ye Olde Mac G3’s are also great, cheap file & print servers.
\n They are more than fast enough, robust, easy to configure, and use very
\nlittle electricity when the screen is off.<\/p>\n
\nthe kio_slave system in KDE, and the “fish” slave in particular. <\/p>\n
\nfiles anywhere on the network appear like they are on your local hard
\ndrive. Lets say you’re working on your web site, creating files on your
\nlocal machine. Normally, you’d need to upload them, using something like
\nsecure FTP or scp. This extra step is a pain in the tail. With fish,
\nwhen you open up an “open file” dialog box, you don’t just get to look at
\nfiles on your own hard drive — you can see files on other -servers-,
\nanywhere that you have a login. So, when the file dialog opens for me, i
\ncan open the file “afarkas@myserver.com\/myfile.html”. Fish will load that
\nfile as if it came from my hard drive. So when i hit the save icon while
\ni’m working, it automatically uploads it to the server.<\/p>\n
\nother environment. My guess is that OSX will have something similar soon,
\nsince apple loves to cherrypick the best of the KDE program (the mac’s Safari
\nbrowser is just KDE’s konqueror with several enhancements.)<\/p>\n
\nYeah, it’s properietary VOIP, but it “just works” unlike so many other
\nVOIP apps. Turn it on and start talking.<\/p>\n
\nyou’re not doing anything really scary with Excel, or need a replacement
\nfor Access.<\/p>\n
\nthat can interface with real databases (postgresql, etc) too. The 2.0 release
\nisn’t expected for many months, but 1.1.4 which is available for download
\n<\/a>at the OpenOffice.org site, works just fine. It can even output files to
\nPDF, which is something that I don’t think even MS Office can do for free.<\/p>\n