Review: Canon CanoScan LIDE 100
October 26th, 2009
I think we’re still in the dark age of scanning. You line up your document, do a butt-slow preview scan at low resolution, see if it’s lined up, re-align until it’s not, and repeat until you either get the piece of paper where you want it or else set your hair on fire out of frustration. I mean, imagine this: a scanner with a 5FPS camera in it that transmits live video of your document so you can align it on-the-fly without having to resort to those lousy preview scans. Boy that would be cool. Sad to say, I’ve never stumbled on such a device.
What I have stumbled on is the Canon CanoScan LIDE 100 scanner.1 It’s a very neat, very thin, and very cheap desktop scanner. You can get the dang thing for about 60 or 70 bucks, but when I found a $50 deal on Amazon
I can’t really say much about the included software because I tossed it out without even looking at it. My time in IT has taught me that scanner software that comes from the manufacturer is universally, 100% shoddy beyond belief. Why is this? I’m honestly confused.
I instead elected to use Mac OS X’s built-in Image Capture software, which I find to be not only perfectly sufficient for my purposes, but also quite pleasant to use (caveat: I’m talking about the Snow Leopard version. In Leopard and before, it’s kinda lousy too). The scan button on the front even opens Image Capture and starts a scan, just like it should! How cool is that?
I mostly use it for scanning receipts, documents, and things like that, because I am obsessed with disaster preparedness and I want records of everything I own in case the place blows up and my renter’s insurance company is being a dick. For that purpose, the scans it produces are perfectly nice-looking, and text is extremely sharp and crisp.
In terms of speed, I have to admit it’s not the fastest scanner in the world. From placing the document on the bed to having a file on disk, it’ll probably take you maybe 30-45 seconds to have a finished product. But that’s perfectly suitable for my relatively infrequent needs.
The one issue I’ve had is that sometimes Image Capture can’t find the scanner. I don’t know if this is Image Capture or the scanner’s fault, but momentarily unplugging it never fails to beat whichever is the guilty party into comprehension of the other. Works for me!
For a $50 scanner, it’s held up great, and produces good results. It makes a great addition to my home office and if you need an unobtrusive, low-duty scanner, this one is pretty nice.
Update: I forgot to mention that the scanner is also USB-powered, which means that it doesn’t have to be plugged into the wall, which saves power and reduces clutter. I find it sort of silly that I neglected to mention this, since it was one of the primary features that drew me to it! Oh well, better late then never.
- FCC notice: you’ll never know whether or not Canon has sent me free stuff, fuckers! Bite me. [↩]
Adorable Iguana Lizard
October 25th, 2009
I saw an adorable iguana lizard today. That is all.
Update: Turns out it’s a Southern Alligator Lizard. Cool!
Obama Justice Department: blacks are too stupid to know who to vote for unless the candidates can have a big “(D)” behind their names
October 21st, 2009
I am literally speechless. The racism in this decision is patently shocking to me. To claim that blacks will not know who to vote for unless Democrats are identified by party strikes me as being about as racist as saying that blacks needed slavery, because they wouldn’t be able to take care of themselves otherwise. The fact that this haberdashery comes from the Obama Justice Department is just bizarre.
Each man is a dud, each man is weak.
October 19th, 2009
Last Wednesday’s Daily Show featured Barbara Ehrenreich, a popular lefty journalist who writes almost exclusively about poverty and inequality. It’s a fascinating interview, and I encourage you to take a look. In a nutshell, she describes a cancer of the middle class, a mostly-unnoticed condition that appalls her. The culprit: positive thinking!
Really, watch the interview. It’s got Stewart at his best, and Ehrenreich at her most perplexing. Here it is if you haven’t seen it yet:
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Barbara Ehrenreich | ||||
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See, we don’t really have any real control over our lives, so we’d better just admit it and not try to delude ourselves with false cheer. Boy, how much more negative can you get?
Another fascinating, if ironic twist, is that the next day, Stewart interviews one Jennifer Burns regarding her book about Ayn Rand, whose philosophy is perhaps the most opposed to Ehrenreich’s as is possible: Ayn Rand essentially believed that humans were strong, powerful, possessed of an inner will that if tapped, would make them productive and powerful. Ehrenreich seems to believe that people are generally weak and impotent, running on rails already laid down for them, and that believing yourself to have any agency over your own life is delusional at best, and dangerous at worst.
This is not to say that I’m a Randian or anything, because I’ve known someone who held himself to her ideal, and he was emotionally stunted and generally miserable for it. But I have to say, if someone put a gun to my head and asked me to choose from among a philosophy that cast me as a powerful force with the will to mold the world in my image, or one that told me I was impotent, weak, and incapable of achieving anything, I’d go with the first. Then I’d use that power to beat the hoodlum unconscious with a loaf of stale bread. But I digress.
Stewart even asks her at one point whether the method really matters if the results are there, giving the example of a former alcoholic who swears off drink after finding religion. Ehrenreich’s response: “I never think delusion is okay.”
I’ve read some of Ehrenreich’s work, including Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
Now I understand why. She can’t hold people accountable for their actions because she believes them to be completely at the mercy of the hostile world around them. If people really are weak and impotent, as she clearly believes, then obviously, they can hardly be blamed when they inevitably fail to achieve their goals. This is why, for example, she takes the government to task for failing to raise the minimum wage to far higher levels; in such a world, a caring, benevolent government is one of the weak, impotent individual’s only resources.
But what of the 97.8% of the employed-hourly population who earn more than the minimum wage? Why are they earning more? If the world is so hostile and personal effort is mostly wasted, what has caused these people to earn more? These are questions that can’t be answered purely by looking through the lens of victimization or exploitation.
In the end, she sort of comes off as a bitter old lady whose pet peeve is excessive cheeriness, and generalizes her distaste for same onto the rest of the country. But there’s more there; in between the lines, she is laying out a very saddening personal philosophy and world view, and I believe she is poorer for it.
Muscle memory is an amazing thing
October 18th, 2009
Three days ago I decided to start carrying my usual assortment of belt gear on my left side instead of my right. It felt a little funny as soon as I put the belt on; my body had gotten so used to the two pouches’ presence on my right hip that I didn’t even notice them there, but they suddenly felt strange and heavy on my left. Throughout the day when I would want to go for something, or when someone would ask to borrow my flashlight or knife or screwdriver, I would find my hand going for where they used to be before “sure!” had even left my mouth. I’ve been wearing them on the right for about six years; it’s amazing how much unconscious muscle memory developed in that time built up that I’m going to have to actively overcome.
Love: ExpanDrive
October 17th, 2009
I just started using ExpanDrive and it has changed my life.
A goodly portion of my job involved SSHing into remote servers and editing text files. This limits me to command-line tools and doesn’t allow me to take advantage of any of the GUI workflow enhancements and productivity boosters I’ve built up over the years, including a heavily-customized TextMate and a knowledge of Mac editing shortcuts. That, and I’m really lousy in vi and emacs.
But ExpanDrive has changed my life. here’s how it works: you type in your SSH credentials, and instead of giving you a terminal window, it mounts the remote volume on your local machine just like a flash drive. Did you catch that? It mounts your remote home directory over SSH. Read: you can interact with your files using GUI tools over an SSH connection! This is nothing short of revolutionary for me, a long-time adherent of powerful GUI tools. Since I started using it last night, my productivity for one particularly annoying task to accomplish purely using a command line has probably doubled.
Under the hood it uses MacFUSE, which, as far as I’m concerned, it basically magic. All I care about is that it lets me mount remote volumes over SSH. I’m still in the 30-day trial period, so haven’t bought it yet, but honestly, whatever it costs, I’ll pay. It’s just that good.
If you spend any amount of time manipulating files over SSH, you owe it to yourself to use this application. No, really. Go download it right now.
Why it will never be the “year of desktop Linux”
October 16th, 2009
For years now, a great debate has raged on over whether or not Linux is “ready for the desktop,” with proponents vehemently asserting that it is, and detractors throwing chairs at them (okay, okay, so that was in response too Google, but it’s still pretty funny).
I’ve had some experience with Linux. I’ve dabbled in a couple distros, and due to my BSD UNIX experience through OS X, I know the internals well enough. Here’s my take:
Linux is not ready because it’s still uniquely Linux. That is to say, there are still 485 varieties of it, a lot of software still has to be compiled by the user, the command line is still ubiquitous, and there’s virtually no standardization.
But none of this is bad. In fact, it’s generally wonderful! You get the freedom to use the software you like, configure it how you prefer, and generally set up your system in the way most pleasing to you. It’s great!
…for geeks like me. Sad to say, these features that most appeal to people like me are the ones that most turn off average users, unfortunately. That’s because the average user:
- Focuses on the end goals rather than the process and the technical details
Bill Average isn’t interested in JPEG vs TIFF vs PNG debate. He doesn’t tidy his filesystem. He think “OGG Vorbis” sounds like a sith lord. He finds technical details boring and distracting.Why this is a problem for Linux:
Linux operates under the impression that its users care about these details, and presents them with dialogs that explain exactly what the package manager is doing, and files like “xorg.conf” that still have to be edited by hand to set preferences. - Wants portability of skills
Auntie Average isn’t interested in relearning her word processor or email client, let alone a text editor.Why this is a problem for Linux:
Linux’s approach is to copy what Microsoft has done. While this appeals to ms. Average because of its instant familiarity, it stagnates the Linux community; if it has to emulate Microsoft to attract new users, are those the kind of users it wants? WIll that result in software that it authentically “Linux?” - Wants standardization on existing commercial platforms and file formats
Jill Average wants to copy the songs in her iTunes library to her iPod, her documents to be read seamlessly, and her DVD movies to play. She is unaware of the minutiae of technical details that differentiate competing file formats from each other, and she doesn’t care about using “open” or “free” formats if it involves any effort at all or offers no immediate, obvious benefits.Why this is a problem for Linux:
Linux hates standardization on commercial anything, because it can threaten the free nature of Linux. Instead, the Linux community invents its own competing standards with identical features. This can be a problem in the long run because these copycat formats often trample on software patents owned by those whose formats were copied, making large companies hesitant to use Linux’s open versions. Essentially, the Linux community “eats its own dog food” at the expense of making it look unappetizing to the same schnauzers and bloodhounds down the street whose dog food it couldn’t afford to begin with. Alternatively, these closed formats can be illegally cracked, resulting in more legal murky waters.
Again, none of this is necessarily bad. But the features that make Linux Linux are things that at best don’t interest the general computing populace, and wt worst turn them off. But what’s wrong with being a niche operating system? I can think of at least one other OS maker that it works great for. Let’s let Linux be itself., and when people are ready for it, they’ll use it.
I would laugh, but it’s true
October 15th, 2009
Questioning, not blame
October 13th, 2009
Yesterday I read a pretty ridiculous article on the Huffington Post that described the health insurers’ reaction to the Baucus bill. The gist of it was that health insurers were mean old Scrooges who were threatening congress by holding America hostage with the promise of raising premiums if the bill passed. Those big meanies! Why can’t we just bop them on the head and send them to time out?
The reality, though, was sadly hidden behind layers and layers of populist anger. Unlike real journalism the article didn’t ask any of the relevant questions: why were the insurers saying this? What would be the bill’s impact on their business from a profit-driven as well as a moral perspective? Without analyzing the economics behind the story, you can’t really understand what’s going on. Here’e my take:
Ever wondered why there’s no real equivalent of the “pre-existing condition” for car insurance? That’s because it’s not very expensive to insure someone’s car, so insurers don’t have to be all that choosy about who they cover. If all of the sudden crashes became 500% more expensive to recover from, insurers might indeed become more selective in the face of higher expenses, denying potential customers for things like unsafe cars, poor driving records, or just plain bad luck.
Health insurers are the same. They don’t deny people coverage because they’re mean, they do it because they have to: health care costs have risen so high that if they want to remain in the business of providing health insurance, it is their only other option besides raising everybody’s premiums, which nobody wants.
So when the report was released and they health insurers announced that everyone’s premiums would go up if they were forced to cover pre-existing conditions, they were just stating a fact. In an environment of high and ever-rising costs, one method of containing them is to deny coverage to those most likely to be financial liabilities. Another is to spread the financial burden of doing so onto everyone, resulting in rising costs for those who are healthy. Neither of these options is especially pleasant. There must be a better way.
Well okay mr. smartypants, so what’s your brilliant solution?
First off, we have to distinguish between health care and health insurance. Health care is a whole bucket of things including checkups, flu shots, nutrition, exercise, medicine, therapy, things like that. Health insurance is just a way of paying for it.
Insurance companies operate in an environment heavily constrained by the cost of the underlying good or service that they are insuring for. The cost of health insurance is therefore forever chained to the cost of health care. If health care itself becomes more expensive, the insurance that pays for it must become more expensive too so it can keep up with the rising costs of paying its policyholders’ claims.
This is why I think it’s so silly to blame everything on the insurance companies. They just have to react to the price of the product they cover, and they didn’t choose for health care to be unbelievably expensive! They would all love for health care to be cheap, because it would mean more money for them, because they wouldn’t have to deny customers at risk of filing a whole lot of claims for health care. Alas, they have no control whatsoever over that; they have to deal with the present reality.
The reality is that health care itself is too expensive and only getting moreso. If the price of it falls, then everybody wins! So we have to ask ourselves: why is health care so damn expensive?
Why is anything expensive? Not enough of it to go around, and everybody wants some. Health care is no different. There has been an explosion of demand for health care in the last 40 or 50 years due to rising standards of comfort, advances in medical technology, and prices previously falling into the reach of people who had gotten little of it before. So basically everybody wants more and more health care.
Unfortunately, the supply of health care remains very constricted. There aren’t enough doctors, and it’s just plain difficult to succeed in the medical profession. That’s really what this is all about. If we had more doctors who were able to spend more of their time on treating patients, then the price of care would fall due to the influx of supply, innovation and competition, just like it does for practically every other industry.
But right now doctors are hounded six ways to sunday. They’re crushed by student loans, they get sued even when it isn’t their fault and can’t apologize without it being interpreted as an admission of guilt, they have to spend truckloads on liability insurance to stay in business after getting sued, they’re forced to accept Medicare payments even when those payments don’t cover the cost of the procedures, they have to please regulatory boards that often deny licenses for silly reasons, and they still have to make enough money to pay their employees and purchase the expensive new equipment that their customers demand on top of all this!
it’s anticlimactic, but I don’t have a magic cure-all the way politicians claim to.1 But I think that there’s a lot of obfuscation on this issue and that we have to focus on the core element: the cost of health care, and reasons why it has risen so dramatically.
Banning insurers from discriminating against pre-existing conditions sounds good because nobody likes the admittedly pretty vile practice, but doing so has financial consequences of its own for everybody else, including people who are already struggling to afford the cost and may be pushed over the edge. The bottom line is that if health care were cheaper, insurance companies wouldn’t have discriminate to begin with!
So rather than pointing fingers at boogymen and scapegoats, let’s ask tough questions. Why is the price so high? Why are more people not becoming doctors to fulfill the explosive demand? Why do doctors order so many unnecessary and expensive tests? Why can we not find clear and obvious prices for medical services like we can for others? Does insurance make sense for the health care expenses that are routine and predictable?
These questions are hard, but they’re the ones we have to be asking if we really want a world-class health care system instead of yet another 2,000-page bill that nobody reads, costs billions, and has only dubious real benefits and plenty of unintended consequences. As much as I’d like to believe we can band together and do it, I’m pessimistic. Hopefully we can salvage the resulting mess before it bankrupts the country.
- To be precise, only one party makes this claim. The other one just stamps its feet and pouts and yells about how bad the other one’s plans are. [↩]
Thought for the day
October 11th, 2009
