Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Guides’ 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.

Although you “know” that Amsterdam has loads of bicycles, you’ll never appreciate just how many are there ’til you see it for yourself. The photo here is just one spot from many cycle parks that are all over the city.

Because of this concentration on cycling, you’ll find that it’s very much a city to explore without your car and doesn’t have anything like the level of pollution that you would normally get in a city of this scale. That’s not to say that you can’t use your car, just that you don’t need to.

Just walking round the city and its many canals is very pleasant and you’ll come across untold numbers of attractions even if you just wander aimlessly. Don’t miss the Anne Frank museum though which is much, much smaller than I had imagined from the books. Although the queue is quite large it moves quickly so the wait usually isn’t that long.

As you’ll know Amsterdam is home to a red light district and, yes, the prostitutes really do use red lights in the windows to indicate that they’re available. It’s not nearly as much “in your face” as you might expect though and certainly during the day feels more like a tourist attraction than a “den of iniquity”.

We found that the best thing to do was to pick out an out of town hotel near the airport and get the train in and that’s what we’ll be doing next time we visit. The hotel we stayed at has an airport shuttle so that followed by a short train journey took us into the city centre very quickly and pleasantly.

This is part of our expanding Whole Earth Guide.

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

Wendy’s quite keen on Yorkshire though she’s not actually been there and knows it principally through the books of James Herriot.

Normally, the reality of a place is quite different to that which you read about in a book but that’s not the case for Yorkshire. Those rolling dales really are like that and many of the cute country towns that you see on the TV series haven’t changed a whole lot either.

For that matter, you can even go to the Skeldale House which these days houses the Herriot Museum and for that matter you can even stay in the Wheatsheaf Hotel that he stayed on his honeymoon. I’ve been told that we’re going to be staying there when we get around to going!

Yorkshire is one of those areas of England where you have a considerable choice of different activities to choose from too. If you tire of the dales, there’s York itself which just oozes history as do many of the medieval towns around the area. It’s easy to spend a week or even two going round it all.Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

Wendy’s been busy whilst I was away and we now have a whole bunch of new cities represented on Whole Earth Guide.

There’s several in the UK and Ireland, a first in Hungary, the bigger cities in Italy and a few in Switzerland too now.

As usual, we’re aiming these guides as specifically tourist guides primarily for short break holidays and we’re aiming to cover the top tourist cities in Europe before the summer season if we can manage to keep at it.Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

By far the most popular post on our Whole Earth Guide is the one detailing how to go about opening a bank account in America.

The reason is simple really: if you run an online business then sooner or later you generally find yourself in need of an American bank account. Unfortunately, the increased security measures in place post 9/11 mean that it’s not quite so easy to open one these days unless, of course, you’re living in America and therefore a considerable number of websites have grown up with the specific aim of selling you the required information.

Our site doesn’t charge for that information and therefore is increasingly popular as it provides exactly the same information that other sites charge anything from $5 to $250 to provide.

However, we’re sorely tempted to start charging for it too given some of the emails we’ve received demanding additional information and wanting to know why it isn’t on the site yet. What we’ll likely do is to charge for the hand-holding level of information or at least offer it for sale as the information on the above page is quite sufficient to allow anyone to open an account in America.Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.