when to stop kicking that horse

Published by jEN on February 28th, 2008

My last post announced a project I’m working on— the quirky illustrated book of poetry aimed at the young and young at heart (to sound cliché about it). This means I need access to a scanner. We have a lovely all-in-one machine stationed in Neil’s office but it’s inconvenient for me to use. We have two single-purpose flatbed UMAX scanners that have been collecting dust on a shelf in the water heater cupboard. How to resurrect one of them…

I’m a smart cookie when it comes to getting shit to talk to other shit. I go into a rabid hyper-focus for driver/cables/device/network issues. Most of the time I can make the seemingly impossible work, and sometimes I dig around in the opensource community to get these things done. I spent the better part of this evening getting the compiled installers downloaded and installed and the scanners spluttering along, teasing me with potential. Then I installed VueScan— which is a commercial application with a long and positive track record for coaxing the zombie scanners of yesteryear into modern workstation compliance. Fortunately, Neil had purchased a professional license years ago and no longer used it. VueScan just works. I don’t have to worry about SANE or TWAIN or backend packages that are nearly impossible to track down. That’s the only thing about opensource that can drive me crazy— the scavenger hunt that some projects require to get what you need working.

Sometimes, the cost of chasing your tail and wasting your hours is better spent on a commercial application. At least in this case, we managed to dig out the license on an old archive on an unused computer. Now it’s just a shame I can’t get those couple of hours back…

Technorati Tags: geek, VueScan, regularjen