bodger | Entries tagged with software

I log in to the work machine, and get a popup saying there's an update to Adobe Flash Player. The "Quit" button is enabled, and the "Install" button is greyed out. The text says to check the box saying I've read the license agreement to install. Okay, sure, I'll look over the license agreement. I click on the link but I don't just get the license agreement in another window. It lights off the web browser to this huge page of license agreements for every product Adobe has ever offered. I poke around until I find "Adobe Flash Player", and then I have to choose the right version. I'm getting annoyed by now. I go back to the install popup and see that it's offering version 10.1. So I got back to the web browser, find the link for the 10.1 agreement for flash player. I click on it. It's a huge PDF, more than 3MB! I'm used to single paragraph MICROS~1 office documents being in the megabytes, but PDF is supposed to be better behaved. Then it fails to download. You know what, Adobe? I don't need flash player. I'm tempted to go buy an iPhone just to spite you for this nonsense.

fizzygeek has been wanting me to scan some photographs for a while, but I haven't had room to set up the scanner for a while. But I finally cleaned off my desk and hauled out the old Umax PowerLook II. It's a SCSI scanner, so I also rounded up my firewire-SCSI adaptor and cabled it all up. I was able to see the firewire peripheral, but no SCSI peripherals. I dinked with it for a bit, then remembered that VueScan often deals with such issues with aplomb. Sure enough, it saw the scanner and did a nice preview of the empty scan bed. So I grabbed something to scan and started it again. But I could hear that the scanner was not happy. The distinctive chug-chug-chug of slippage. Sure enough, the resulting image was severely warped in both shape and colour (as the slippage also apparently made the scanner miss its calibration target).

Maybe it's time to buy a new scanner.

Then I saw a offer on Freecycle for an HP all-in-one. The owner had also gotten it via Freecycle, but neither she nor the previous owner had ever gotten it to work. I figured it was worth a try. So I hauled the beast home and plugged it in. It was jammed, so I cleared the wadded paper out of it. Then it commenced to complaining that the carriage was stuck. This turned out to be due to the ink cartridge lid being wedged up in the way, so I folded that down. Then it was unhappy because it had no ink. Sure enough, HP makes their all-in-ones require ink cartridges for scanning. Ink, you see, is the real profit center. However, I was loathe to buy even shady third-party refilled ink cartridges just to use a scanner.

Then I realized I hadn't tried VueScan. I fired it up, and it cheerfully ignored the printer's protests and scanned anyway! Hamrick, you see, doesn't give a toss about HP's obnoxious money-grubbing. I originally bought this software because I had a scanner that wasn't supported any more by the manufacturer. And I've used it for many years, with a variety of old weird hardware. And it just works. While I can't recommend HP/Compaq (my next laser printer will likely be a Xerox), I can heartily recommend Hamrick.

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Bodging my way through life

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Entries tagged with software

Wassup wif dis, Adobe?

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May 2018

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