Cool gadget #14

I've always been an anti-multifunction office device kind of person. If you got a good printer, it sucked at scanning or faxing. If you got a good fax, it sucked at printing or scanning. If you wanted to print a lot inexpensively, you used a monochrome laser printer. If you wanted to print color, you used an ink jet type printer. None of the multifunction devices seemed to be good enough to replace multiple dedicated devices.

In my home office, I've had a good monochrome laserjet printer (HP 4000TN), a good inkjet printer (HP 1200DN), excellent fax machine (Xerox something or other), a good copier (again a Xerox something or other) and a decent scanner.

Well, that has finally changed. The quality of all-in-one devices has gotten good enough that I now find them acceptable for most office tasks. Well, I guess I should clarify that I find the higher end devices satisfactory. The low end devices still are missing or have brain dead implementations of many of the core features that I require. The HP Color Laserjet CM2320fxi Multifunction Printer is one such all-in-one printer. The cost is a bit high for some home purchases (I paid a discounted $850), but the functionality gives me all the magic features I needed and does them all well enough that I can get rid of the existing multiple devices I have lying about which, together, accomplish some of the same tasks.

This device does the following tasks very well:

• Built-in network printing from any computer in the house.
• Black/white laser printing
• Color laser printing -- looks as good as anything I've gotten off inkjets
• Automatic duplex printing (printing both sides of the paper).
• Black/white copying (single or multi-page)
• Color copying (single or multi-page)
• Fax sending/receiving with auto document feed
• Automatic Scanning to email of multi-page documents (PDF)
• Print directly from camera memory cards

My only complaints are:

• it is somewhat more noisy than my old laserjet printer, though after a few weeks I've gotten used to it and don't notice it all that much
• it is tall (because of the scanner unit on top with space for paper outputs and with 2 input trays). So tall that I haven't hooked up the 2nd input tray or the top would hit the cabinets above. It would be nice if the scanner/control unit could be separated and placed to the side of the printer. Yeah that would look like two devices, but it would make it easier for my kids to see the top buttons.

Those are relatively minor nits. We are extremely happy with this printer and all of its features..

That said, I do continue to own a desktop flatbed photo scanner and a dedicated film scanner. I could probably do most of what I want to do with the flatbed scanner with the new device. However, there's a lot of convenience to having it on my desk easily reachable when scanning many prints and I can take it with me when I go to the parents house to scan old pictures there.

So while I have gotten rid of the fax machine, copier, laser printer and inkjet, I still have some specialized devices lying about. And, BTW, I sold the old devices for $100 and sent back the inkjet printer to HP for an upgrade rebate of another $100, so the net cost to me was just $650.

Tags : printer / HP / multifunction / CM2320fxi / all-in-one / gadget

Exercising on the road

I've spent the past week bouncing up and down the west coast between San Jose, CA and Portland, OR -- not spending even 48 hours in either location at any point.

This threw a wrench into my exercise program because not only did I have to find the time to exercise, I also had to figure out what to do with my sweaty clothes when I checked out each day.

At first glance, you might think that's easy -- just put the wet clothes in one of the plastic laundry bags and pack it. That is what I typically do when I'm checking out on my way home. However, since I wanted to use the clothes to exercise each day and I didn't feel like putting on wet clothes to go work out, I needed to dry them out.

When I'm staying at the same place, I can just let them air dry and that works well enough. However, since I had to change hotels 3 times this week, I needed something else to do. I could have used the iron to heat up and steam them out, but it just felt like something was wrong with ironing sweat into my clothes.

I ended up using the room blow dryer to just blow them dry. Worked fine. Clothes were dry each day and nothing appeared to be growing on them (plus the rest of my clothes stayed dry.

In case you're wondering, I did an hour on the stationary bike each day. Not too shabby for an old man, if I must say so myself.

Tags : travel / exercise

Digitizing slides

In the days of film cameras, one of the ways to take a lot of pictures cheaply was to use slide film rather than standard film. The film was around the same price, but when developing slides, you didn't get any prints, so rather than a $10 or $15 bill for the developing, the bill was just $3 or so (if I remember correctly -- in any case it was way cheaper). Others also would claim that the slide film was better for pictures & sharing since you could no project them to an audience (back in the days of 9 and 11 *inch* black and white TVs and *no* computers, there wasn't any other way to do it).

So, I have thousands of slides that I have taken over the years(several hundred from my honeymoon alone) and my mother-in-law brought over a bunch of slides that Angie's father had taken over the years (going back to the late 50s). I want to get all of these scanned into the computer so that we can share them and, if desired, print them.

Before I get into the nitty gritty, I want to lay out some ground rules that I have for scanning large batches of slides/negatives. These have grown out of my experience scanning film and your mileage may vary, but I think they are a good starting point for anybody thinking about a similar project. They include:

• I want the process as automated as possible so that I can do real work while the scanning is going on. Processes that require manual intervention every few minutes means that I have to dedicate larges amounts of spare time that I just don't have (like any of you do).
• I want "good enough" quality pictures to come out of the scan process so that I don't have to do any manual processing of the photos (other than rotating them). When I first started scanning negatives, I would do a raw scan at high resolution and then spend 15 to 20 minutes per photo to get them to a state where I liked them. This is clearly unacceptable for large amounts of photos.

  So my model is to get them good enough off the scanner so that I can enjoy/share/watch/etc. without any manual processing.

• I want to be able to easily figure out which slide/negative the photo came from after I'm done scanning in case there's a picture that I want to do more with (such as scanning at high resolution and lots of manual processing so we can print out an 8x10 or 16x20 photo). This means that I need to be able to figure out which negative from without having to resort to a manual search of thousands of slides.
• I want to preserve the film in case someone wants to work with it years from now.
• Speed is not the driving factor. Scanning thousands of slides/negatives will take time. What is key is that the work can be done while I'm doing other stuff. This leads to some choices on the scanning which actually make the scans take longer, but you get better quality scans and you get to keep working on the day job while you're doing the scanning.

These ground rules led to a number of choices I made in setting up this process. As I describe the process, I'll try to explain why and how I made these choices.

Choosing the scanner

The first issue to address is how am I going to scan slides themselves. There are two basic options for scanning slides:

• Using the slide adaptor that comes with most flatbed photo scanners (if you have a multi-function device (otherwise known as an all-in-one), you're probably out of luck as they don't seem to come with options for scanning slides). These adapters typically require that you place some number of slides (typically 3 or 4) into the adapter, remove the typical white background for document scanning and then scan the slides).

  I find this process painful for many reasons, the biggest one being that it's very time consuming and manual in nature. However, this isn't too bad if you don't have a bazillion slides to process.

• Using a film scanner designed to scan slides and negatives (film) rather than scanning documents/photos. These typically do a much better job on film that the flatbed scanners and they usually also have substantial automation capabilities.

It just so happens that I have both types of scanners and for me the clear choice was to use the film scanner. My film scanner is a Nikon Super Coolscan 4000 ED (it's about 5 years old and has been superseded by the newer 5000ED).

Organizing for scanning

If you're like most people, your slides have not stayed in their little boxes that you get back from the developer and frequently they are intermingled (in some cases within one of those slide projector trays, in other cases in the little slide shoe box where you threw all the slides).

One note about handling slides: Most slides are raw film stored within a cardboard or plastic mount which just holds the film without providing any protection to the film itself. You should use care when handling the slides to keep fingerprints, water, dust, etc. off the slides. I recommend using low-cost lint free gloves available at most photo shops when handling the slides.

You can choose to stay with the disorganization and just scan things, or you can put the slides back into their original sets. I chose to do the latter because figuring out what's on slides and telling stories about them frequently his helped by the nearby slides on the same strip of film. Getting the slides back into the set and then perusing them in order helps greatly.

To get them back into sets, you need to look at each slide. Most slides, even those printed many years ago, will have two pieces of information on each slide. A slide number in one of the corners and a processing month/year stamp. Sometimes this information is printed on the slide. Sometimes it's embossed in the cardboard mount. In many cases, the printing is hard to read and you have to use some sleuthing to figure out what set the slide belongs to and what slide number it is in that set. In the slide below you can fairly clearly see the slide number (34), but the processing date (May 89) is embossed on the cardboard and a bit harder to see.

Once I had them all grouped in sets & ordered by slide number I simply rubber banded them and put them into my to-be-done box and then started cranking.

Scanning the slides

Setting up the scanner

My 4000ED has an optional slide feeder (SF-200) which can feed up to 50 slides at a time for automated processing. This is ideal for my project. However, in many of the reviews of the product and in various support web sites, I found that there were many complaints about slides jamming in the machine -- which would really interfere with my automatic process requirement. I came close to just blindly upgrading to the latest version of the feeder (SF-210) thinking that it had to be better than the one I already had. However, from the reviews that didn't seem to be the case.

I should note that after looking at the wide variety of slides that I had in my collection (especially when I added in the older slides from my mother-in-law) it isn't so surprising that this is an issue. The slides vary greatly in materials (plastic, cardboard, even some metal) and they varied greatly in thickness.

All that said, I found one suggestion in an Amazon review that recommended tilting the scanner about 10 degrees and instead of using the spring-loaded slide pusher, place a C battery into the tray (it would roll down with the slides adding just a small amount of continuous, even, pressure). I gave that solution a whirl and across about 2K slides only had 6 or so jams -- two of which were caused by material defects in the slide mounting (the film had curved out of the mount and caught on the next slide causing the two to load simultaneously). Not bad.

To accomplish this I used two index card packs to raise the one side of the scanner and just placed the battery into the tray as you can see below:

Setting up the scanner software

Nikon Scan 4 is the software package that comes with the scanner. I modified the default settings to enable the following features:

• Enabled Digital ICE - which does a great job getting rid of dust and small scratches -- it's not perfect, but it does work pretty well.
• Enabled Digital ROC and Digital GEM post processing - these do a level of fade & color correction that makes many scans presentable that otherwise wouldn't be without a lot of manual processing.
• Enable multi-scanning 2x - each slide is scanned twice and the scanned data is averaged together -- this gets a better scanned picture on most slides.
• Set resolution to 2,000 pixels/inch (about 1/2 the full res quality of the scanner) at 100% scale. Just to keep the pictures down to a reasonable size on disk and to make some of the post processing more efficient. I can always come back later if I want a better quality scan on a particular slide.
• For each batch scan, I set the file name to a one up sequence starting with the year (so, for example, the slides I recently scanned had a base file name of si2009001 and a two digit sequential number of the slide within the slide set). When I processed the next batch, I would increase the base file name by one (e.g. si2009002). The net result is that I could tell which slide set and which slide within a slide set a digital file came from . For example, a digital file with the name si200904523.jpg came from slide 23 in the 45th slide set scanned in 2009.

Loading the slides

Emulsion side - Each slide has an emulsion side and a smooth side. The emulsion slide is the side that the image is recorded and it recorded backwards (to view the slide correctly you view through the slide from the non-emulsion side. This is important because most scanners will tell you that they want the emulsion side facing a particular way (either by directly mentioning the emulsion side, or by using pictures of a slide with an ABC on it (when ABC is backwards you are looking at the emulsion side). On most slides that have some kind of printing, the side that indicates "this side toward screen" or something like that is the emulsion side and the slide number and date stamp are typically on the viewing (non-emulsion) side.

Up vs down - the orientation of the slides (which edge is up) seems to be somewhat random with respect to the printing on the slides. In some cases they are both in sync (the slide correctly oriented when the number/time stamp are on the top. In other cases it's the opposite (the number/date stamp needs to be upside down on the bottom in order for the slide to be oriented correctly). I found I had to look at a few slides to figure out which way it worked with that set.

Landscape vs Portrait - while slides usually appear square, the film within the slide is not. When you're holding the camera horizontally (the normal position) the image will be recorded in a landscape mode (where the width of the image is longer than the height of the image). When you're holding the camera vertically (on its side) the image will be recorded in portrait mode (longer height, shorter width). This is important in slides because in most scanners you should not turn the slide to correctly orient the picture if it was taken in portrait mode. Just scan the picture in landscape mode and later, in software, rotate it 90 degrees to get it into portrait mode. The reason for this is that most scanners only scan the landscape portion of the slide and will miss some of the slide while recording some of the mount if you scan the slide in portrait mode.

Slide Numbers - most slide sets do not start with slide 1 (at least most of mine did not) and frequently that have slides missing (sometimes simply because the slide image was blank). I wanted the actual slide numbers to match the file names so I would start the file numbers with the first slide number and I would ensure that all slides were sequentially in order, filling in missing slides with slides from the end. When I had to do filling in, I would go back to the files after the set was scanned and manually renumber the fill-in slides to correctly represent their slide number.

Scanning the slides

I would simply load a set into the feeder (correctly oriented, emulsion side to the right when looking at the scanner) indicate in the software that I was feeding X slides and set the starting number at Y. Then I was off to do the real work while the scanner went along chugging through the slides in the feeder.

Slide Storage

In order to be able to quickly locate slides, as well as to provide for archival storage of the slides, I chose to use Print File Archival Slide Preserver sheets for the slides and placed a label on each sheet indicating the slide set (which was part of the digital file name) that the sheet contained:

You can get these at many photography supply stores. I purchased my at Archival USA.

Once I had the slides stored in the sheets, I placed the slide preserver sheets into Century Box Archival Storage Albums (that I also purchased from Archival USA). Another option would have been to buy the file hangers that Print File makes and simply hang the sheets in a file cabinet, but I preferred the storage box. Anyway, I placed the slide pages into the boxes and placed labels onto the boxes indicating which slide set ranges were in the box.

Miscellaneous Tidbits

Use the magnifying glass, Luke

I found having a magnifying glass quite useful in trying to determine the slide numbers and/or date stamps on slides as well as to try to determine the orientation of the slides on slides that had no markings. It was just plain useful. Get one and have it nearby when you're working on the slides.

Remounting Slides

In some cases, it might be worthwhile to remount slides. For example if the mount is damaged, too thick, or otherwise interferes with being able to scan the image. I had this with one particular set of slides that came from my mother-in-law. It seems that in the late 1950s in Europe, slides were mounted in metal mounts that sandwiched the film between two pieces of glass. When they got to me, they were in pretty sad shape:

So I ordered some slide mounts and peeled back the metal cover, separated out the film from the glass sandwich and mounted them into new slides which scanned much better than the originals had.

Summary

This process seems long and arduous, but in reality the most time consuming part (other than the remounting of that one metal set) was the organizing the slides step because many of the slides were mixed together, some had no writing on them whatsoever, many had slide numbers and date stamps that were almost unreadable (magnifying glass helped there sometimes).

Once the scanning got started, the process essentially amounted to about 5 to 7 minutes to swap slides and store the scanned slides every hour an a half or so (that's about how long it took to go through the average 30 or so slides per set with the settings I had used on the scanner software).

I'm very happy with most of the pictures and for those that I'm not happy with, the slide itself usually left a lot to be desired -- almost always because of low exposure on the film.

Tags : scanning / photograph / slide / 35MM / digital conversion / digitizing

Unsubscribing hell...

For some unfathomable reason I decided today to try to unsubscribe to some of the various spam messages I get from reputable companies. I would never try to unsubscribe to the umpteen million messages I get about body parts enlargement (some of which wouldn't look so hot on my if they were enlarged) or performance enhancement as the act of unsubscribing just confirms that they have a real person on the other end of the email line.

So, for reputable companies in the US, they are required by the CAN-SPAM act of 2003 to have an opt out method in each email. From the FTC's web site:

It requires that your email give recipients an opt-out method. You must provide a return email address or another Internet-based response mechanism that allows a recipient to ask you not to send future email messages to that email address, and you must honor the requests. You may create a "menu" of choices to allow a recipient to opt out of certain types of messages, but you must include the option to end any commercial messages from the sender.

Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your commercial email. When you receive an opt-out request, the law gives you 10 business days to stop sending email to the requestor's email address. You cannot help another entity send email to that address, or have another entity send email on your behalf to that address. Finally, it's illegal for you to sell or transfer the email addresses of people who choose not to receive your email, even in the form of a mailing list, unless you transfer the addresses so another entity can comply with the law.

So, I took a look at several of my emails... The emails from Lands End, Sears, 1-800-Flowers.com, American Express and Apple all had links and they all worked as one would expect. The either directly unsubscribed you or brought you to a page that gave you a few options (different kinds of emails, change email address, etc.) and one or two clicks and you were done.

Microsoft, on the other hand, was a true royal pain in the *ss. I received an email from them that included the unsubscribe link at the top:

And another at the bottom:

So one would think that it's all kosher. That clicking on the link would get you unsubscribed. However, that wasn't to be the case. What you got when you used that link was a page which said that I had to use my Windows Live ID to manage my settings and that if I didn't have one, I would have to create a Windows Live ID account in order to manage my subscriptions.

So you can't just unsubscribe. You have to create an account on some Microsoft server.

Being the persistent one, I went ahead and did so. That required that I provide an email address and also required out-of-band email validation (where they send you an email that has a link you have to click on to prove that you actually have that email address.

Did that and got logged into Windows Live. However, all the stuff about managing my subscription was gone and there were no clear links on the page that would get me there. So I went back to the email that started this and selected the unsubscribe link again.

This brought me to the "Profile Center" where there was a link for manage subscriptions. I thought I was getting close, but no, there was another roadblock that they threw up. There was no email address in there (they didn't take the one I entered for my Windows Live ID account). So I had to enter it again. And, of course, before I could manage it I had to go through the email validation again.

Then back to the profile page and back to managing subscriptions where I could finally unsubscribe. Now I'm stuck with a Windows Live ID account that I don't want but I don't see any easy way to get rid of it.

I think this rigmarole they have set up is in clear violation of the spirit and intent of the CAN SPAM laws and should be fixed. I should be able to unsubscribe easily without having to create an account. I should be able to unsubscribe with a minimal of effort.

Kudos to Apple, Sears, and all the rest who, IMHO, got it right. Daggers to Microsoft who clearly got it totally and inexcusably wrong.

Tags : spam / Microsoft / can-spam / Live ID / identity / email

Digitizing life

Like many people today, I have a large collection of analog media containing family memories. Much of it is my own, but a substantial portion belongs to either my or my wife's parents. This includes film negatives, slides, prints, video film, video tapes, etc.

The saddest part about this old stuff is that it deteriorates over time (even when aggressive archival storage methods are used). In addition, it's very hard to share and usually gets dispersed as various interested parties (i.e. siblings) request to take one of them (sometimes promising to make a copy and return the original -- and I'm sure some actually do that).

I have piles and piles of pretty much all of that other than video film. I have decided that it's about time to bring it all into the modern digital world and am digitizing all of it -- negatives from all the 35MM photos I took, prints from all of our kids class/sports photos or from those 4x6s that we don't have negatives for, thousands of slides (which, IMHO, were the old fashioned "digital" camera in that you just paid $3 to get the roll of film developed without any prints and then said you would print the photos you liked, but never got around to it :-)).

When I'm done, I expect to be able to share my entire digital collection with my family either directly or when I post the more interesting photos on Facebook :-). I also expect that when my kids grow up and leave the house, they will each be able to take a copy of our entire collection with them to be able to peruse whenever they like.

I'm going to write a series of blog entries describing what I've chosen to do for each type of media and how I proceeded. Hopefully some out there will find it useful in one way or another.

BTW - there are a number of services out there that will do this for you for a fee. I've chosen to do it all myself rather than use a service because I want to organize things as I convert and I want to have sensible conversions (if you used the video camera to record your kids birthday and your friends kids' school performance you don't want them on the same DVD -- at least I don't). I've also worked to automate the process as much as possible so I can do it while I'm doing other things.

Finally, I've accepted that this will take a long time and not be done overnight and I will methodically work through the piles (and they are large piles).

Wish me luck!

Tags : digitizing / scanning / film / 35mm / slides

Another change in United's Mileage Plus Program

I've written about some of the changes United made to the Mileage Plus program for 2009 (most of which I don't like), but I just noticed one that hasn't been documented much of anywhere that I have found. Kind of just snuck in there.

In the past, when you qualified for one of the premier levels, that status was good through the end of February the following year (so, my 2008 1K status was good through the end of Feb 2009). However, for my 2009 1K status my card is only good through the end of January 2010 -- a month shorter.

This is probably because with all the electronic record keeping, they think they don't need the extra month to get all the records in order to determine status.

This was not mentioned in the 2009 program changes page.

We'll see if my Global Services card (which I haven't received yet, half way through the month) has the same timeframe or if it gets the extra month when my card, hopefully, shows up.

Tags : United / ual / Mileage Plus

United comes clean on Global Services status

For years, United has been very secretive about how one becomes a Global Services member. My blog entry on Global Services is still the most popular page here, 2 years after it has been written -- accounting for more than 25% of my page hits. It's even the number one search result for "United Global Services" on Google (yeah, I'm proud :-) ).

When I logged into my united account today, I found the following published on the web site:

Ensure your Global Services status for 2009 Fly 50,000 miles on United® or United Express® in First (F, A, P), Business (C, D, Z), or full-fare United Economy® (Y or B) during 2008, and your Global ServicesSM membership will be renewed for the 2009 program year.

Track your progress by visiting united.com/gstracking.

Of course, it's kind of late for the 2009 program year at this point. But still it's now out in the open as to what you need to do to qualify. They even have a web page that you can go to to check your earnings status. Mine is still showing my 2008 earnings (since I know I have absolutely zero earnings in 2009).

Of course, I'm not convinced that this is the only way to get Global Services status. I think that their marketing and business relationship department will use GS stats as a reward for important business partners who bring them substantial corporate business, even if they, themselves, don't fly a lot. That's business as I would expect it to be.

Tags : ual / United Airlines / Global Services / travel / Mileage Plus