Geek Practitioners Blog

I hooked our new scanner/printer/copier/fax up today. It was delightful to be able to locate the fact that installation files were available for Windows Vista and download them from the company painlessly. The CD said everything through XP, so I was mildly concerned, but they’re working through their product line and released this one way back in March.

Apart from the fact that we have kids and limited space, it was pretty smooth. I hooked it to the Vista machine because that was where the device would fit in the room. I still haven’t setup the fax part, or programmed the date, but I’ve done so on similar machines for other people and it should be no big deal.

I made a color photocopy of Sadie’s drawing that included an apparent intentional stegasaurus in one corner, and Deb didn’t realize I was showing her the copy when I took the two of them to her with the copy on top.

This should be handy. I can start scanning in old photos I don’t want to lose, for instance. I can make printouts, even if low quality, of pictures of the kids to give the relative heathens who aren’t online.

I also have projects in mind like scanning in old handouts and training materials some of us created for VB support way back when.

This commentary reminds me of something I noticed long ago, sometime in the past five years; the sheer number of little lights scattered about in formerly dark rooms.

While I am sometime annoyed when a room is too bright at night, my usual thought is to imagine what a time traveler from the past - not even the very distant past - would make of all that.

If a computer is on, it has at least one power indicator LED, if not internal lighting showing through. Power strips, routers, cable modems, chargers, phones, keyboards, optical mice, monitors… all with one or more indicator or functional lights. That’s not counting LED clock displays on clocks, microwaves, VCRs, DVD players, and so forth.

Is it really so annoying, though? Not usually; not from my perspective. Sometimes the light we really want, for phone displays and such, aren’t as smart, bright, or long-term as would be useful. I’ve never gotten that worked up about it, though. What do you think?

I may edit this to flesh out the details later, like maybe camera model and exploit details. I’ve been encountering the strangest thing with pictures taken by a digital camera. Some of them, and it always seems to be the last ones on the memory stick in the particular batch, if they are e-mailed as-is get flagged by the web host’s mail scanning program as being infected with the recently uncovered JPEG exploit. Now, I know they aren’t affected by the exploit. The problem with the scans is that a slight internal defect in the JPEG file can mimic the way the exploit reads when the file is examined. This means the camera itself, or the storage medium it uses, is creating malformed JPEG files. Not good. It’s gotten old, not being able to e-mail the original graphics without the risk of having them purged.