Daily Archives:March 29th, 2007

Whizzta?

The core of Microsoft Vista is, by most accounts, a pretty solid operating system, though I can’t speak from any personal experience. In fact, I’ve scarcely had any experience of XP, having abandoned Windows for the Mac about 6 years ago; something I’ve never had cause to regret.

I thought Peter Gutman’s excellent report on how the operating system has been crippled to accommodate the whims of Hollywood was a good reason to maintain my distance. Now it appears that it may not be that good even at copying, renaming or deleting files

Paper post

Scan of filofax page Scan of filofax page

It’s nearly a year since I started wondering about this as a way of combining my paper and electronic worlds. Then I came across the Fujitsu ScanSnap scanners, but certain recent events made me consider one more seriously, and after reading enthusiastic reviews by several owners I decided it was worth trying.

The default modus operandi is that you put one or more sheets of whatever size in the hopper, press the Scan button, and you get a timestamped PDF file in the directory of your choice. Very handy. See Fujitsu’s little demo video to get the idea.

Now, I realise it’s a bit unsportsmanlike to push my advantage when you’re probably already reeling from the staggering coolness of it all, but, yes, there’s more. This scanner isn’t the only gadget I’ve acquired recently that deals in PDFs. So I can take what comes from the scanner and copy it straight onto my Sony PRS.

PRS500

PRS500

I should have chosen a more subtle paper colour for my example, to make it more readable on a monochrome screen, or done some image processing on it. This was just a simple copy of the PDF.

Anyway, I could now carry the contents of many notebooks with me, if I wanted, in something rather smaller than a single one! Of course, I’d have to introduce my old Moleskines to Madame La Guillotine before I could feed them through the scanner, but it’s worth considering…

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser