time to buy that scanner
Geek
I've often fantasied about buying a scanner. I admit it, I just want to be able to scan various body parts and email the result around to scare people.
However I have tried to justfiy such a purchase by deciding that if I did buy a scanner, I would use it to digitise record important documents (bills, contracts, my signed copy of the TMK zine) for backup, search and quick retrieval. Of course when you scan a text document, you get an image file back which you cannot use for full text searching and they use a lot of disk space. So scanning everything (which is what I would want to do) isn't terribly useful or feasible.
I just came across DjVu, a document format designed for storing these sorts of documents. Excellent! It allows full text searching and uses much less space on disk compared to conventional image files. Evince may one day support the format, making reading DjVu files easy. I do wonder how the text is pulled out of the image - maybe I'll need some OCR software to handle that. Maybe I'll just have to buy a scanner now so I can check out how well Ubuntu just works with scanners and to test DjVu out.
Comments
tmk???? they made a zine! wow - that sounds amazing. you should definitely scan that in case the cops do a raid on your house and confiscate the paper copy.
Posted by: martine on March 30, 2005 01:34 PM
Yeah it was amazing! If only they weren't so slack that only one issue was published.
Oh well.
Posted by: Mike on March 31, 2005 10:06 AM
i don't think tmk are so much 'slack' as busy keeping on with the Revolution. You try putting together a zine when there's a julian burnside shrine to polish. i mean...i'd *imagine* that's what they would be busy doing.
Posted by: martine on March 31, 2005 02:47 PM
Speaking of Ubuntu and Just Working... I'm ashamed to say that my stated ambition to install Ubuntu as soon as I got my little Mac has fallen down.
It already Just Works. Worse, I actually *like* the new MacOS. Mac zealots out there are all going, "yeah, of *course* you do, and it's been around for several years now foo." But I'm not one of them. I'm a Linux kid and it's still the Way and the Light and all, but... fuck, it's Unix my mother (and more importantly, my girlfriend) can use.
It's a commercial OS. It doesn't suck. My world is upside-down.
All this palaver about getting Linux to a state where Just Anyone can use it is all very well (personally I think it's been in that state for years, people just need to stop waving their dicks at each other and get it out there, but I digress), but we're in danger of getting very badly upstaged by the last people you'd expect - Apple.
I love my new Mac, and am afraid.
Posted by: Joel on March 31, 2005 06:39 PM
don't worry joel. you'll soon find out how many ways the evil steve is screwing you. then you'll love AND hate your mac.
oh and mike there's a scsi scanner in my pile of computer parts if you have the port. there's a parallel one aswel you can have if it's owner doesn't want it when she comes back.
Posted by: luke on March 31, 2005 10:33 PM
Oh yeah, word to that.
I'm pretty sure that Steve is way more of an evil fucker than Bill is, he just never quite had the power to give his megalomania its full expressive scope. Largely because he's not as smart %)
Posted by: Joel on April 1, 2005 06:08 PM
Also.
DJVu: the sneaking suspicion that this dude played exactly the same goddamn set when you saw him at that one club night a year ago.
Posted by: Joel on April 5, 2005 06:29 PM
I actually have been using a Mac for the last year and a bit and I don't find anything really compelling to keep me there. If I do spring for a Powerbook (which I probably will) I'll keep a partition with OS X on it, but I'll still install Linux and use Gnome as my primary environment on it.
In general I can do less with Mac OS X than I can with Gnome and it is more annoying to do it. I wouldn't have said this a year ago, but I think Gnome now works better than MacOS X or Windows. At this point, it's only a lack of applications (mostly Office and games) that should be stopping people from really switching. Still, horses for courses.
Joel, ask Jeremy how hard it is for your average Joe to use Ubuntu. :) Actually, I'm going to install it on my Dad's new machine, too. I'll let you know how it works out.
Posted by: Mike on April 6, 2005 05:36 PM
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