equipment that I'll actually use rather than a bunch of crap I don't
need.
But let me start from the beginning of my equipment happies.
First I bought a WD external 250GB hard drive that only had USB
connectivity. I got this at Staples because I wanted to back up
Shady sooner than later after witnessing my neighbours' hard drive
crash unexpectedly. With the photos and music and other such
goodstuffs on this thing, I do NOT want to lose it all. However, I
wanted a BOOTABLE external hard drive. What I did not realize is
that you must have Firewire to boot off it on a Mac.
In the meantime, I had also purchased a 250GB internal by WD for
Raven, and a new NIC for her as well. (Her onboard was
intermittently failing when Shady came along, so it was time for an
upgrade.)
Shortly after all this, Dale happened to be shopping for another
external drive for his iMac. He stumbled across a more suitable (and
cooler) version of the WD. It's got a cool blue pair of rings on the
front and DOES have firewire. So I had him buy me one, too. It
works beautifully. I found a program called SuperDuper! for $27
(have yet to buy it, but I will soon), and in 2 hours and 11 minutes,
I had a full backup of Shady. (I've got 90GB left, which means it
backed up about 160GB of data, in case you're interested.) I was
able to boot off it and it was like running off Shady himself except
it was wayyyyyyy slow. (To be expected for sure.)
So, today I returned the first external and went shopping for a
scanner/printer combo. My old scanner still works well, but I
couldn't get its software to work with Shady, so I had to open
Windows inside Parallels and run it through there. The kludge
worked, but it was exactly that. I'm lazy in my old age and
uninterested in being FORCED to do cool workarounds just to get a few
things scanned now and again. Plus, I didn't have a printer that
would work with Shady, either, and I hadn't bought one in years. It
was certainly time. A friend got a Brother all-in-one for about a
hundred bucks and it seemed to be good... besides, Shady should have
his own scanner/printer. Funny how spoiled he is. ;)
Well, we came home with an HP C3180. It cost me a little under $100
and so far is proving its worth. I'm not a fan of the little ink
cartridges and am displeased with being forced to have both black and
colour cartridges installed when I want to just use black, but I
admit, it's very nice. And the scanner can do over 19,000 x 19,000.
My other scanner maxed out at 1200 or something to that effect. I
had NO idea things had become so advanced. Not only that, but the
quality of a 200x200 colour scan is superior - I could have sworn a
scan of a little card was the card itself stuck to my screen. It was
jumping out at me more than my better photos do. A simple little card!!
The best feature of this thing, however, is the memory card area. It
takes everything I'll ever need for a long time: SD, MMC, MS, XD, MS/
DUO, CF. Currently I use primarily SD but I do have a few old Sony
cards laying around from Maverick, my 1.2MP camera. It can print
photos from all the cards and can even do those multi-pic things
photographers need on occasion. My use, however, will be file transfer.
This is where Shady's native programs come in so handy. It was
pretty easy to tell the scanner's software to push everything into
iPhoto for me, but I was pleasantly surprised when Image Capture came
up asking where I wanted to transfer my card's files. I noticed that
I even had the typical options I get for my camera and portable card
reader!! So I quickly selected "Download Some" and "DateandTime.app"
- the latter being a script I wrote via Automator. It first waits
for Image Capture to download the files, then renames them all
according to my naming conventions. Then it moves them to a new
folder and imports them into Last Roll in iPhoto.
It worked seamlessly, as if my camera were plugged in.
I love Apple, and despite some criticisms I've shared with typical HP
printers, I admit I'm pleased with this all-in-one. Oh, another cool
thing is that the new HP is grey and off-white, so it matches the
iMac pretty darned well.
Ah yeah, and I also got another UPS... :)
~nv
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