I have two flatbed scanners (assuming you don’t count the defunct all-in-one printer) and several computers. I wonder if it would go faster if I used both?
I guess I’d have to do different sets of photo’s because the scanners give slightly different results.
Edit: Yes, this is what Twitter is for, so shoot me. And I think I won’t double up, it’s sometimes confusing enough with only one scanner on the go.
I’m now scanning random photo’s that never made it into albums and have been sitting in little envelopes or packets for several years. They’re all mixed up, random people, random places, random times. We’ve got loads of envelopes/packets like these, and they don’t usually have many photo’s in them.
This is good, since it makes me feel like I’m making a lot of progress. Scanning an album with 300 photo’s takes so long it’s soul destroying, where-as scanning 20 pictures from an envelope and being able to put it into the ‘done’ box is much more morale boosting.
Hadn’t seen this anywhere until today,
… announced by Robert Llewellyn for Grant Naylor Productions this week at the UKTV seasonal press launch, the project is a short series of brand new specials to celebrate the 21st birthday of Red Dwarf.
Doug Naylor will be masterminding the four half-hour instalments, and the regular cast will all be reprising their iconic roles. They are being made by GNP for UKTV’s free-to-air channel, Dave – our new best friends!
Full details here. But basically, it’s 2 x half hour real new episodes with the original cast, 1 x half hour behind the scenes thing and 1 x half hour ‘clips’ show. Check the article for full info.
Scanning gives me lots of spare time, takes 20 seconds to preview a scan for three photo’s, then 30 seconds to select the three photo areas and then about 4 minutes for it to scan those pictures. I tend to scan about 15 or so, and then save them one at a time as PNG’s. So I have plenty of time while it scans to read the web.
Which means I run out of things to read in Google Reader really quickly.
Which means I’ll probably blog a lot during today while I’m waiting for the scanner to finish a run of three photo’s. Simes has just posted some amazing photo’s he took this morning with his sexy new camera, I’m jealous. Click the image to see the whole set.
As we drove to work on Thursday we passed the canal and really wished we had our camera. There was around a foot of mist rising from the water, it looked incredible. It’s no wonder people believed in spirits and another world when you see some of the things water vapour and light can do.
We’ve started keeping the camera within reach in the house since the cats have a tendancy to get into silly positions and then fall asleep. If we go too far for the camera we wake them up, so within reach means we can preserve their crazyness for ever.
I’m back to the scanning, already posted the results of doing some holiday snaps from the 80’s. I also did a bunch of random photo’s hanging around and another set from a CenterParcs holiday in 2002ish. Today I’m doing CentreParcs from 2000 (which has all-together too many photo’s of ducks, ducklings and swans) and we’ll see what else I get done.
I finally settled on a directory structure for storing them all, one of the challenges I have with this kind of thing is I have to find a structure I’m happy with. Categorising or structuring data tends to bring out my mild-OCDness. So I’m going for one directory per year, with one sub-directory per photo set depending on what they were. If we’re not sure what year they’re from we’ll just sort them by decade (which is usually pretty easy to work out, especially for the pre-1990 ones).
The whole process is really slow going, but I think it’ll be worth it in the long run. There are more and more options for using, viewing and enjoying photographs on digital media so it’ll be nice to have all of our photo’s scanned in. To that end, I’m doing even the ones I used to ignore (badly lit, out of focus, etc.) without prejudice.
The top level directory for photo’s I’ve finished scanning, or digital photo’s we already had, is up to 7GB and 2046 files. There’s easily 5 times more than that to scan in, if not more. I must have 3-400 photo’s from my university years at the very least.
Here’s a quick shot from our back garden in Nottingham in January 2000 (click for full size).
Took these photo’s on a narrowboat holiday in 1988 sometime in the mid-to-late 80’s. I think we started near Leek and went through Stoke on Trent and down to Stratford, but we may have gone north to Manchester, I can’t remember. And yeh, I took a pretty shoddy photo even in those days, I didn’t get any better either.
Narrow Boat Trip – School Holiday
And no, I’m not in any of the photographs, sorry.
Edit: The more I think about this the more I think it must have been earlier than 88? The photo’s are still in their original packet, which is clearly marked 1988. But I wonder how long I had the film before getting it developed. I left school in 1989 after two years in the sixth form, which would mean I started sixth form in September 1987. I’m 99% sure I went on this holiday long before sixth form, which would mean either early ’87 or even maybe ’86 but I can’t explain why the date on the photo packet is so out unless it’s from a different set of photo’s?
… and of course, playing D&D even once just makes me want to start writing adventures and running my own games again.
I have a hankering to run some Call of Cthulhu, although I was never sure I could do it justice.
We ran through a couple of encounters last night in our new roleplaying campaign. First time we’ve used the 4th edition rules in anger, so all of us were a little slow and spent time referring to stuff in the rulebook.
I have to say, I was surprised it ran as smoothly as it did, the positional issues didn’t affect us as much as I feared, and provided a decent tactical element. The use of powers instead of basic attacks is the real difference, and it certainly gave my character (straight forward fighter) more options during the fight, without having to rely on feats. For example, my fighter has two ‘at will’ powers which are essentially regular attacks. One (Cleave) allows him to hit a second target for a small amount of damage if he hits the first target, and the second causes minor damage to a single target even if the swing misses. So depending on how many targets are adjacent to him, he gets to pick which makes more sense.
Also, we had a Warlord in the group, who has a power which provides additional damage to basic attacks so during one combat round I used a base attack to benefit from that.
All-in-all the combat seems ok, we’ll see how it ramps up. At the moment, I still feel bereft without haste, multiple attacks, dual wield and stat increasing spells (Bull’s Strength!) which were such a strong feature of 3rd edition, but I’m sure we’ll get used to them not being there.
The two major things I learned yesterday about 4th edition,
Oh, and being able to Shift in combat makes much more sense, it may only allow you to move 1-square at a time, but at least you can shift through the enemy without incurring opportunity attacks if you need to.
Clerks, Clerks II, Chasing Amy and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back arrived this morning, Dogma and Mallrats were posted yesterday so I expect those Tuesday next week.
Will let you know how they work out.
Made it through to Friday, pretty tired today generally. Lovely weather outside, bright sunshine, crisp. Bubbles is out there somewhere baking herself in what are probably the last few days of warm enough sunshine. She’s got conjunctivitis the poor bugger. We’ve got some ointment to put on twice a day, she’s been pretty good about it despite the whinging.
Watched Fright Night last night after recording it on Sky+. Classic movie, how on earth did we find those special effects ((special in the loose sense)) scary? Not even sure why it’s an 18, I guess some of the more fleshy scenes are the cause of that. Evan watching stuff like that the experienced is improved with the surround sound, we’re still really pleased with it.
I got sick of paying for a Sky Movies subscription and not watching anything. It’s because we don’t sit in front of the TV these days unless we’re doing so to watch something we recorded, so I went through the entire week ahead and set 4 movies to record (Clerks II, Fright Night, Deja Vu, American Gangster) and I’m going to try and do that every few days and record anything I’ve not seen or not seen for a while. Pan’s Labyrinth was on a week or so ago too, so recorded that and not watched it yet, and Hairspray was on Sky Anytime so I’ve ‘recorded’ that for Grete.
Still pleased with the 5.7% HbA1c result. Found this nice little chart in case you wanted to know more about the test,
|
HbA1c
|
Normal/abnormal
|
Average blood glucose
|
| 4-6.5% | Normal for those without diabetes | 3-8mmol/L |
| 6.5-7.5% | Target range for those with diabetes | 8-10mmol/L |
| 8-9.5% | High | 11-14mmol/L |
| Greater than 9.5% | Very high | 15 and above |
I bought a Marathon bar ((yes, yes I know, but I like living in the 80’s)) on Wednesday to eat after I got the results, either as a celebration or a commiseration depending on how the results went. Celebration was a good option. I never ate a lot of chocolate or sweet stuff before being diagnosed, but I did enjoy a Snickers bar every now and then. Almost amusingly, they don’t have a totally terrible effect on my blood sugar because of the high fat content, but as you can imagine I’ve had about three since I was diagnosed.
Roleplaying tonight, 4th edition D&D, first time we’ve played (rolled characters up last week), so should be interesting. Always takes a while to get ‘into’ any campaign, never mind one with a new ruleset so I’m expecting tonight to be pretty slow.
My good friend Simes blogged about some TV he’s been watching. It certainly feels like the TV schedule has picked up, mostly stuffed with American TV. The Fringe pilot was cool, the Burn Notice pilot was also interesting and we’ll be watching that to see where it goes. We’ve got quite a wait for the new series of Criminal Minds sadly, but Bones is back on and is as good as ever (I think).
And I’ll leave you with this,
And I think Pirates would kick both their asses.