Archive
This is where I put all the old stuff that used to be on my home page.
Yesterday was another beautiful garage sale day. I ended up picking up a "like new" Astra 6400 Firewire Scanner for $10. I've been using my old Astra 2200 USB scanner for a long time, but I'm never very excited about using it because it's so slow. So, I figured I would give the "new" Astra a try. The first problem was that UMAX does not offer a free download of the necessary drivers for Windows XP. However, after snooping around, I found the free download at UMAX's UK/German support web site. It took a bit of trial and error to get the thing working, but once I did... rock and roll!
I had been sitting on a bunch of caricatures a student drew of me last year and I decided to try scanning them in. Each one is an 8.5x11 page which I scanned in with quality set to black and white photo (also known as grayscale) and 75 dpi (more than adequate for web browsing). You can see the results for yourself. I did tweak some of the images, but overall I am very happy with the results. And the speed? This mission flew by in no time. I think the whole process only took about 5 minutes.
I rigged up the scanner software so that a press of a button on the scanner would scan the image and send it to my favorite- Paint Shop Pro 6. After pressing the button, it took about 14 seconds to scan the 85x11 page, open Paint Shop Pro and display the document. Anyway, check out the results:
The Thinkatorium is a compendium of stuff I'm interested in. Hope you like it too!
I'm beginning to think that my del.icio.us bookmarks are the best way to share what I think is interesting on the net.
However, here's something you really should see.
These sites are especially cool also:
Web Master: Michael Weingarden
Former rocket scientist, builder of the better mousetrap, currently on a mission to save the world one math class at a time.