Keys Corner

This is amazingly good value for money. I bought a Fujitsu Siemens SnapScan S510M this week.

The scanner is small, as you can see in the photo, where it is sitting next to the Mac Mini. When it’s not in use, it’s even smaller as the sheet feeder and the paper tray for the scanned documents both fold up flush with the body of the scanner. Folding it up switches it off, conversely unfolding it switches it back on.

It scans 18 pages / minute, double-sided at 300 pixels/inch, cost me 377 Euro and generates documents in JPEG or PDF format. It comes with Abbyy Fineprint, which means that you can perform OCR (optical character recognition) on the scanned documents as part of the scan workflow.

The really beautiful thing is that the software for the scanner automatically recognizes whether documents are in color or black and white and switches to the appropriate scanning mode automatically, and also recognizes whether paper is printed on one or both sides. Blank sides can be automatically deleted from the scanned document.

On my limited experience and experimenting of the last couple of days, I can only say that I wish I’d bought this a long time ago – it saves so much time compared to scanning manually (using a Canon Lide 80) or using a Brother multi-function scanner/printer/fax, which could only handle single-sided documents and was much slower than the ScanSnap.

If you don’t have a Mac, you can still enjoy the advantages of the ScanSnap – there is a model available without an “M” at the end of the name which is designed to work PCs. In fact, the PC model is somewhat cheaper, and can be upgraded free of charge to work with the Mac by following these steps.

We went for a walk down the hill this afternoon. The road was blocked and this was the scene on at the side of the road.

We treated ourselves to new mobile phones at Christmas:Sony Ericsson T68i, Palm Treo 650 and in the lower row, two Nokia E51 mobilesIn the top row the old ones: Ruth’s Sony Ericsson T68i and my Palm Treo 650; in the lower row, our new Nokia E51s.

It’s been cold here for the last week or so. Around -6°C to 0°C. And dry and sunny. A nice change, after having had torrential rain for 2 weeks before that.

The picture is of a local stream that we went past yesterday, when we went for a walk around the neighbourhood.

I bought a couple of 12V LED lamps to replace conventional halogen spots this week. I have tried this before, but the last time I experimented, the light output of the LED units was pretty pathetic. These new lamps throw 450 Lux and use 60 LEDs drawing 2.1W – the result is acceptable – about the same as a 10-15W halogen lamp I would guess, which is enough to be able to at least partially replace the 20W halogen lamps as they burn out in future.

Even if we add some extra units to get the same amount of light as now, we would be burning 10% of the electricity and getting over 20 times the lifetime of the halogen units (up to 50 000 hrs instead of 2000 hrs). The so-called “white” light is tends towards a light blue, so it will probably be an idea to mix in some warm-white or yellow units at the same time.

I happened to click on our “contact us” page today, which includes a Google Map showing where we live. I was surprised to see that the resolution of the satellite image has been noticeably reduced since I set up the page some months ago. I don’t have a before / after comparison, as I didn’t make a screen shot at the time, but the resolution is definitely lower. Now, I have heard of hi-res pictures being swapped out when GW Bush is visiting or when military installations are pictured, but as far as I’m aware GWB isn’t planning on visiting us, neither are there any military installations nearby – strange…

Over the weekend, having nothing else much to do since we finished the renovation, I reworked the CSS styles for Ruth’s sewing blog, Sew2Speak.

We got rid of the blue/grey background and lightened it up with a white one and since it’s a hobby-oriented blog we also gave it a look like a scrapbook. (The template is loosely based on the Iowa Winter Theme, but in the end I only ended up using the jpg’s for the background.) I also updated the gallery with a similar, but not identical look (the scrapbook idea doesn’t work there without a massive effort changing the standard style sheets).

We finished the renovation today, apart filling a couple of gaps around door-frames. I must say that I now think that an offer we saw before we started, to lay parquet for 17 Euro a square meter is very good value – and my knees and fingers (which got bashed hard by the hammer on several occasions), would agree if they could speak!

We’ve not posted any pictures as it is pouring with rain and the light is awful at the moment. We’ll put some up when the weather improves.

Update (2007-07-25): We’ve added several pictures of the finished rooms.

... or non-existent here now until we have finished decorating and laying parquet flooring in the office, which is where our computers are! Back in 1-2 weeks, depending on how we get on (have removed everything from the room now except the Macs and tables that they are on

This web site, has had quite a long gestation period: two and a half years since Richard – my brother in law – and I agreed to produce it for his architecture practice.

But I’m pleased to say that it is now live. It was produced using Joomla! and it presented a few challenges because Richard had very definite ideas about how it was to look. We’ve had to make a couple of small compromises regarding Microsoft Internet Explorer (for example, replacing the Google Map on the “map” page with a sketch that Richard did), but as far as I know, there should be no major boo-boos. If you visit it and notice anything odd, please let me know!