Dead Ink Vinyl

Doh. I picked up an Epson Perfection 4490 Photo scanner and was hoping to use VueScan to avoid installing Epson’s scanner software. Scanner software has been the source of many headaches for me in the past. Usually, the manufacture’s installer insists on putting much more than just the TWAIN driver on the computer.

Unfortunately, way down in the VueScan release notes, under “Mac OSX Release Notes” is this little clause: To use the Epson Perfection 3170, 4180 or 4490 with VueScan, you need to first install the Epson software for this scanner.

Grumble, grumble. I missed that earlier. So I went to Epson’s Web site and downloaded just the OSX driver. The driver’s installer is a bit strange — it creates a folder with another installer inside of it — but when I was done running that installer, it seems that Epson’s driver was present and no new unwanted applications were to be found cluttering my drive. Therefore, I’m not overly upset with the need to install an Epson driver. [Updated 01Dec@2203: In fact, the installer did drop two applications into /Applications: Epson Scan and Epson Scanner Monitor. If no major harm comes to my system from dropping them in the Trash, then I'm still okay with the whole thing.] VueScan detected the scanner the first time it was launched after the driver was installed.

I haven’t used VueScan at all yet, except for a quick proof-that-the-scanner-works scan, so I can’t give a review of its performance. I can say that its UI is very functional, but lacking aesthetic appeal I’ve come to expect from Mac applications. It’s like a UI I would design, rather than the UI a good Apple developer would design. I’ll probably have more to say later once I’ve used VueScan some more. Oh, and I’ll probably have some feedback about the scanner, too. Sometime. In the future.

I spent too much time today investigating ways to convert four pages of a PDF on letter-sized paper (8.5″x11″) to a PDF with two pages of tabloid-sized paper (11″x17″). The goal is to print the tabloid pages duplex and fold the sheet in the middle to make a booklet. After several unsuccessful Google Web searches, I switched to Google Groups. Groups contained a highly enlightening post that informed readers the printing term for laying out multiple smaller pages on one larger page is called imposition.

Searching for “osx imposition software” was quite fruitful. I eventually tried the demo of BookLightning by metaobject, which sells for $49. I drag-n-dropped my 4 page PDF onto the applications and it immediately produced a new PDF with my desired layout. If I hadn’t caught a snippet of instructions on metaobject’s Web site, I’d have found the application as confusing as others have on VersionTracker. The application gets two-thumbs up from me, but I’m still pondering if the orientation of the second page at 180 degrees from the first will cause headaches on the duplex printers I use.

I’ve purchased a new NSLU2 and installed Unslung 3.x. A couple of notes:

1. The instuctions are excellent. Follow them exactly and the operation is a cake walk.
2. Unslinging an NSLU2 (“slug”) requires a real hard drive — a flash drive does not work. Or, it does not work with the amount of tinkering I was willing to perform.
3. Install OpenSSH as described before the final reboot, while you are still logged in to telnet. Otherwise you have to unplug the drives reboot (again) to regain telnet access.
4. Mac OSX does not have arping installed by default (and it’s not a package on fink), so accessing RedBoot is a really frustrating matter of exact timing. (It does appear to be available through OpenDarwin’s Darwin Ports project.)

Installing a Java JVM was simple too, thanks to these instructions, but JamVM does not run Jetty out of the box, so I’ll investigate running Tomcat and Resin next. If necesary, I will then compile Kaffe on the slug and try all of the containers again.