Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Science & Technology’ Category

If you’re like me, you’ll have a range of non-digital images lying around including prints, slides, VHS tapes, and DV tapes. The resolution of the various affordable scanners has now reached the point where it’s something you’ll only need to do once rather than needing to repeat it in a few years when the resolution gets higher. So in increasing order of difficulty, here’s how you do it…

Prints are by far the easiest to deal with. Most people will have one of those all in one printer/scanners and that’s the way to go. Depending on your computer setup, you may need to install some additional software, for example in my case the scanner software was part of the HP printer software and it was already installed. Two things you need to do are to firstly print a plain coloured page that you’ll use as the background to all your scans and secondly to set the resolution to the highest (300dpi will work fine as prints are generally not printed at a higher resolution than that).

What you do is place your photos on the scanner (face down), put the background sheet behind them, and then scan them and save as JPG images. This will produce an image with, in my case, a blue background behind them. That blue background is there so that it’s easier to select the image that you want. I use Gimp (which is free) for selecting the image from the background and tidying up the image e.g. livening up the colours from a faded colour print or to modernise a black and white print. This made a massive difference on some of my images. One important point is to save the original saved image rather than just those you’ve improved.

Slides and negatives will require you to purchase a slide scanner. There isn’t a massive choice in these at the moment as people have, by and large, gone digital. You can spend thousands on them but in reality for home scanning what you need is the KODAK RODFS70 Slide scanner at around £180 or a more up to date model of that if there’s such a thing by the time you’re reading this. There are cheaper (£50-ish) scanners, but they have much lower resolution and somewhat slower: the Kodak one weighs in at 22mp which is plenty for slides and you can scan a box of 36 slides in around 7 minutes. Worth noting is that some of the much more expensive scanners are a lot slower as they do a scan of your slide in the same way as the print scanners do i.e. it takes a minute or so per slide vs the seconds that the Kodak model takes (it takes a photo of your slide using a very small camera, hence the seconds rather than minutes). You need to buy an SD card to go along with the scanner and it doesn’t require a computer during the scanning process. Slides scanned using this come out brilliantly on large screen TVs. One thing to watch during the scanning is that the brightness range of the Kodak scanner is less than that of the slides so if you’re scanning something with a very bright detail on it then you’ll need to adjust the brightness on the scanner but I found that was only required on a few slides out of the thousands that I scanned.

Videos (VHS or Betamax) aren’t much more complicated than slides but, again, you will need some items of hardware. First is something to actually play your video with (preferably the original camcorder), and secondly a USB Video Capture device (about £10). If you’ve lost the original camcorder, you can buy one on ebay for around £50. Basically, you connect the leads on your USB capture device to the camcorder, fire up appropriate recording software on your computer, and press play. There’s a wide range of software that will do this, but the free VLC should work just fine.

Digital Video is something that should be simple as it’s digital already. At one time it was but the Firewire interface that’s required has been discontinued on all PCs from around 2012 i.e. a good while ago. You could use the same approach as for VHS tapes described above, but you’ll lose a lot of resolution and it seems a shame given that DV video is already digital. As above, you will need a camcorder to play the tape, which can be bought on ebay if needbe.

In the absence of a firewire port on your PC, what you need to do is either buy a Pinnacle USB Moviebox (the 500-USB or 700-USB) on ebay (I used the 510-USB) and use the Pinnacle Studio software (around £50, but if you’re as organised as I was, you could copy all your DVs in the free trial period) and you’ll also need the driver for your Moviebox which you can get from https://cdn.pinnaclesys.com/SupportFiles/Hardware_Installer/readmeHW10.htm (it works on Windows 11). Alternatively, you could buy a pre-2012 Mac with a Firewire port and that should be able to read directly from the DV i.e. you won’t need the Pinnacle software or Moviebox. As with the VHS options, you fire up the recording software and press play, the main difference being that the Pinnacle software can control the camcorder so you usually get a clean copy of the recording, though occasionally I found that the automatic cutoff missed bits so I had to do it manually.

All copied, so what’s next? Well, now that you’ve gone through all the work above, you don’t want to lose your digital copies so I’ve them copied onto a WD My Passport Ultra. Get the Ultra rather than the normal one as it is much faster: copying 1.5TB took over 11 hours on the normal vs around 5 hours on the Ultra as it uses USB-C.

If you’ve any questions, add them in the comments and I’ll try to answer them. I think you’ll find this is the only comprehensive guide to getting your images and videos into digital form, or at least I couldn’t find one (and I looked a LOT).

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

A long time ago my very first job was working on medical information systems and it’s interesting to see how far along such systems have moved since that time.

The world of electronic health records software these days is all about managing patient care effectively. No more mistakes through unreadable handwriting, fewer problems through prescribing medications that interfere with existing drugs that the patient may be taking and generally more efficient management of the practice. In general terms, a massive improvement in the quality of service that you offer your patients.

Having said that, it is scary to move from paper based systems onto entirely online ones and for that you need consultancy support during the period of changeover. You’ll never regret the move though!Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

One thing you don’t often think of for home use is a rackmount computer system.

However, that’s really what you should be looking at if you’re into something like serious gaming. Usually for gaming you’ll be sold the top end home computers but you can get a lot more for the money if you look at rackmount systems which basically start where the high end home PCs leave off so you’ve a lot more scope for heavy duty computing power.

Your only additional upfront cost is the rack itself but that’s something that doesn’t need to replace when you’re upgrading the components of your system.Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

A few years back, that would have been an easy question to answer as laptops were so expensive that most people only had their work one.

Prices have dived though and that’s even before you consider the additional categories like netbooks and the newer tablet computers. For that matter, would you consider an ebook reader as a very small notebook computer? I suspect that most of us wouldn’t although the Sony runs a version of Linux so technically speaking it is a very small computer.

With that price drop the baby computers have long since ventured into home use and a growing number of people use several of them. I find that I use the little Acer netbook that I bought basically as a toy much more than both my other computers put together. Whilst it may not be as fast as them, it certainly makes up for lack of speed though sheer portability.Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

The humble barcode scanner was always the poor relation of computer input devices historically.

It was there simply to read numbers and any processing was done behind the scenes by proper computers. Mostly it was used in industrial contexts though most people came across it in the supermarket where, of course, it is indispensible.

However, the usefulness of a simple printed code that can be read by an equally simple device has led to the widening of its use through the barcodes “printed” on computer screens that allow you to load software directly onto your Android phone.

These new barcode readers are mainly software that interprets the photograph taken by the camera in the phone so they’re considerably more sophisticated than the humble scanners that were formerly used in supermarkets.Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.