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I told you earlier that I had a job interview today in NYC for a job in the Bay Area. The interview went very well and there’s a very good chance I’ll have a job by the time I get out there. A few caviats: it’s only a part-time job for now. And (for better or worse) it’s a total telecommuting job. All I need is a phone, high speed internet and a computer. I won’t even have a desk in Cali.

After the money-people at the company give the thumbs-up, I’ll be employed.

When that happens, I’ll even tell you the name of the company. :-)

I got an Epson Perfection 2480 Photo scanner LE with a feeder tray, after asking a few folks online what they thought of it and not hearing any horror stories.

The plan is to scan all 2,000 or so of my family photos and taking them out west. That might sound like a terribly daunting task but in the time it’s taken for me to get this far in this blog entry, it’s already scanned 6 images and dropped them into place.

I’m not using sharpening or other features built into the Epson software. Some of the images scanned like this will need to be tweaked for brightness and contrast and such to bring out their best, but it’s best to get the images in the purest state posible and then muck with them. The software that came with it is pretty well designed; beginners can get pretty darn good images with simple, integrated tweaks like a descreening filter and unsharp mask at the flip of a single switch. And then nerds like me can turn all that stuff off so they can make it hard on themselves.

The scan quality I’m using for prints only looks a hair worse than 2,400 dpi uncompressed .tiff when the image is magnified roughly 10 times on my screen… IE a 4 inch print blown up to 40 inches. My images take up 4 MB instead of 65 though. I’m not adverse to 65MB images except that my image programs choke trying to display and edit them.

I’m not totally happy with using the built in auto-exposure because I think it messes with the histogram, lossing some data. Then again, it might be changing CCD sensitivity, which means I’m getting better data. But it seems to do a very good job and I’d otherwise have to spend a lot of time with each image getting it right (and frankly, I’m not so good at that kind of futzing)

I’m very happy with this scanner. :-)

Prints: Home Mode. The feeder can accept 10-15 images. Images take 1 minute apiece. I’m using 24 bit color, 1200 dpi, auto exposure with no other adjustments, save with compression 15 .jpg. Images are approx 4 MB. Some photos can’t go through the feeder because of its size or gunk on the picture.

Large Prints: If a print takes more than 1/3 of a page, I consider lowering the resolution to 720 dpi or 600 dpi because .jpg images more than 10 MB are quite cumbersome for photo programs.

Negatives: Home Mode, 24 bit color, 4800 dpi, auto exposure and no other adjustments. Save with compression 15 .jpg. Images are approx 3 MB. Mounting slides would go faster if I get my hands on several film holders.

Slides:(my folks have lots!) same settings as negatives.

6-13-05 575 photos done. Negatives go slower than prints… 3 minutes per image and it must be loaded every 3 images. But the final images are usually a bit smaller even though I’m capturing more data. If you’ve got the negative, use it!

6-14-05 660 photos done. I didn’t have much time today… and slides are an even bigger pain. You load 2 images at a time. A Swiffer duster does a very good job on dust specks.

6-15-05 900 photos done in 3 gigabytes. I’ll stich together the mosaics of large images later. Large images are an even bigger pain than slides. I’ve scanned every important picture in a frame in the house. I can’t take those with me!

6-16-05 Uh oh. After all this, I’m almost done with box #1 of 3. I’m going to ship them out to SF and finish this project later. But I’m very happy with the scanner

Sample images:
Continue reading ‘Scan every photo in sight’ »

There is no way to search the entries of a particular Blogspot blogger for particular text. Same for Livejournal. What the hey?

Technorati offers pretty good blog searching… better than Google.

Oh and my mother’s 33 day old EMachines computer just died. Like dead. The power supply probably got fried by an electrical storm a few nights ago. Funny though, nothing else in the house was effected. The warrantee people are sending me a new power supply fer free.

I just want a cordless phone that works. That’s all I want. Well ok, that’s not entirely true. I want a cordless phone that has:

• 2 cordless handsets
• good sound quality
• a call-answering/voicemail waiting indicator
• a reasonably simple interface
• caller ID

What I’ve found is a quagmire.

First off, our house is filled with crummy cordless phones. There is the one behind the bar that rings well enough but makes your callers sound like they are in a deep pit (it rubs the lotion on it’s skin). Upstairs, there is the analog 900 MHz phone. It sounds like shit too and it has crappy range. Then there is the Olympia OL-2410 we’ve been using; it sounds… not like “total crap” but just “poor” and the display recently went south.

What phone do I use? It’s the kind of phone that you can pummel an assailant with. It’s a corded Southwestern Bell Freedom Phone. It’s unapologeticly heavy, sounds great and feels good in your hand.

So, last week, the Olympia 2 handset phone system broke after 1 1/2 years of service. I called Staples and used the extended service plan I got to get an $80 credit. While I was waiting for the credit to arrive, I plugged in my old Uniden 900 MHz digital spread spectrum phone. This is a great phone. Great range, sounds like a corded phone, long battery life, enough heft in the handset to leave a welt on an assailant (especially since you can throw it across the room at him), a well designed answering machine… da da da…

The credit arrives so I go to Staples and pick up a Vtech 2.4 GHz phone. It was great except for it’s horrid range: less than 50 feet. Admittedly, compounding factors include that the range problem was between the 1st and second floors and we have 2 Wifi networks in the house. But shouldn’t these devices SHOULD be able to coexist in the same band?

I returned the phone.

I went back to Staples looking for a phone. After looking at all 30+ different phone models they had (think I’m exaggerating? Take a peek at Staples.com) I concluded that, unless I wanted to spend $220 on a phone, I wouldn’t get what I wanted. $220?!?!? $220?!?!?!? Two Trimline phones would cost $40 and work flawlessly for at least the next 20 years. And think how cordless phones have been around for 20 years now. Are you starting to smell a rat? I am.

So I forged my way over to Radio Shack. I was bedazzled by their selection as well. So many flavors of….. vanilla. With the help of a self-avowed over-achieving salesman, I picked out a $70 5.8 GHz phone. To be specific, it is a Maxus 5.8 Gigahertz Dual Handset, Radio Shack # 43-3585. I got it home and plugged one of the phones in. I didn’t dare take everything out of the box until I knew it worked because, I swear Radio Shack must employ master jigsaw puzzlers to pack their products. The corners of my mouth started to curl up as the dual-frequency hum of the dial-tone remained steady in my ear while I walked from room to room. Satisfied, I ripped the rest of the packaging open.

After everything was all set up, I opened the manual to figure out the intricacies of the Memories and such. It was there on page 13 that my heart died.

Conveniently, your cordless phone allows you to transfer outside calls from handset to handset simply by pressing DELETE/TRANS. Conversations will not be interrupted; only one handset at a time can talk with an outside caller. The second handset cannot go off hook to listen to conversations or make an outgoing call while the other handset is in use.

What?

You have got to be fucking kidding me.

Only one handset can be used at a time?! So why the frig did I buy a two handset phone? Is it a freaking backup for when the first explodes unexpectedly?

I threw everything in the box. The ecstatic guy at Radio Shack can repack it himself.

Tomorow I will go shopping for telephone system number 3.

Read my new entry on the subject

I’m half-watching some TV show while geeking. It’s called Design Invasion. They come into your house and…. you can guess the rest… blah blah…

Well, this 50-something woman, with her husband standing behind her just traded her grandmother’s Samifar (spelling? (it’s a large metal Jewish urn)) for “what was behind the door”. It turn out to be a big-screen TV. When she saw what she had won, she looked like she had just won the lottery.

To put this in perspective, she had told us in the previous scene that, of all the items in her living room, it was the thing that was most precious because it was the only substantial thing she had from her grandmother.

That turns my stomach.

Now they’re showing pictures of the before and after rooms. The room looks like….. like every other “after” I’ve ever seen.

I’m looking to backup my data. I’d love to hear comments from the peanut gallery
Here’s what I’ve got so far:

• From the many many reviews I’ve read, Maxtor One Touch external drives have serious reliability issues. Don’t use.
• LaCie external drives are likely a good bet. Seagate too.
• My safe should be able to protect an external hard drive during a fire.
• Truecrypt partition encryption might be very good. It’s open source.
• Drivecrypt might be very good. It’s closed source and costs $50-$150.
• Boxbackup is a fine online backup system. The server must run linux and internet transfer speeds can be a significant limitation (IE 10KB/sec = 25 GB/month backed up) that can be somewhat overcome with product like rsync.
• Devco has some good recomendations for on-the-fly-encryption.
• More good encryption recomendations.
• No-name drive enclosures and brand name hard drives can pair up well. I might just go with that.
• (3-8-07 update) another interesting product is Foldershare

What does this all mean? I have to go back to Staples and return the Maxtor One Touch I just bought. I stood there torn about getting the extended warrantee. I mean, if my backup drive dies with all my data on it, a $200 drive is a drop in the pond next to all my writings and family photos and such.

Friggin Staples ONLY carries Maxtor One Touch external drives (which have serious reliability issues) and “consumer” Maxtor drives, which also have reliability issues.

There are some serious marketing brain-farts here. All they have to do is sell the two drives in retail stores as “fast with a 1 year warrantee” and “slow with a 5 year warrantee”

update 6-8-05 I just bought via mail-order a Maxtor MaXLine Plus II 250G 7200RPM 8MB ATA-133 8MB Cache Hard Drive – 7Y250P0. It’s a “high reliability midline” internal drive. I’ll stick it in an enclosure I have lying around.I’ve played with Trucrypt and it looks excellent.

update 6-9-05 Wow, the new Maxstor MaXLine Plus II drive is incredibly quiet! I’m formatting it right now and if it weren’t for the flickery light and the progress indicator, I’d say that the only thing powered-on in the drive enclosure is the itty bitty fan. Yes, I made sure to get an enclosure with a fan. It’s a bit oversized too. Lots of room for air movement.

update 6-9-05 about an hour later I don’t understand why it takes so long to format a 250 gig drive. I mean, it’s only 2,000,000,000,000 binary elements.

I haven’t actively pursued any Bay Area jobs… on purpose. I want to go and “see what happens”… “let the cards fall where they may”…. da da da…

I am all abuzz happy-like. I just got a tentative job offer from a company that I think would be great to work for! I’ve got an interview in New York City on Friday for this Bay Area job.

More as things develop….

My sides are hurting. Really. Oh my god those are funny!

http://bash.org/?top

Thank TJIC for the pointer.

In celebration of me upping my web hosting plan with Spenix, I present to you two videos that make me smile very very much.

A British Volkswagen advertisement for “The new Golf GTI. The original, updated.” It features Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain… updated. (5.6 megabytes)

An advertisement for DC Shoes, “March Madness at the DC Training Facility” wherein the improbable is commonplace. (8.6 megabytes)

Hint: I usually prefer to right-click save-link-as and then play the video full-screen. The resolution isn’t as tight but I can’t stand trying to watch postage-stamp sized video when I’ve got a 19″ monitor in front of me.

And of course, downloads of these files are going to blow my additional 10 gig of transfers/month in no time…. but hey!