Sunday, January 8, 2012

Better Late Than Never, or, Happy 2012!

My New Year's greetings, had they been offered in a timely manner as originally intended, would have looked like this photo: festive, exuberant, seasonally appropriate. Instead, they are a little more like this:

Out of season, and a bit droopy. Sad. Nevertheless - and although you wouldn't know it to look at this blog - I have been keeping you all up to date. Albeit mentally. But you are not telepathic, as I just realized, so here is the long-awaited holiday report:


P.S. After crowing about seamlessness and all of that, I was given a good kick in the you-know-what by OSX Lion, which apparently will no longer support the software and drivers I need to run my ancient Canon scanner. Goodbye scanned typecasts! Using a tripod and his fancy digital camera, J took photos of my typecast and saved the day, and I will need to figure out how to deal with this new hiccup going forward, taking photos of the pages that are fairly decent.

I don't mind getting rid of the scanner - it was bulky and cumbersome anyway - but I hope I can keep up the image quality of the typed pages with a digital camera. We'll have to see. In the meantime, I have learned a valuable lesson: not to type on every possible inch of the page, as I have tended to do, leaving me very little space to allow for cropping afterwards.

16 comments:

  1. New Year greetings, Adwoa!

    Happy to read you again after your typosphere break (as if I didn't take one myself, lol). What a great Christmas/New Year's vacation you had. And Milan, wow. Your post made me miss living in the Netherlands when it was all too easy to take a train to visit "the neighbors."

    Here's to an enriching 2012!

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  2. Hohoho, here comes the new typosphere year! Good to hear both of you are all set up on the technical side, ready to bring the typosphere to new quality levels. I am looking forward to details on the Milan typewriter museum. Greetings from one of your closest neighbours!

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  3. Isn't computer technology wonderful? Happy you made it through the Holiday and all your digital trials. At least your hard drive did not fail as mine did as I started an old XP machine to do a ghost and install Linux.
    However you are now in the same boat with Mark; no scanner. The digital photos look fine so no need to spend your hard earned money on a scanner. A very happy and prosperous New Year to you and J!

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  4. I think this amazing typecast and the stunning photo of your cards (even a single one is breathtaking!) was worth the wait. :)
    By the way, did my card reach you?

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  5. Wishing you all the best for the rest of 2012! Thanks for the great update. Many adventures, including the electronic kind.

    And here I am limping along on a MacBook purchased in 2006!! No relief in sight.

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  6. I really enjoyed the card, thank you! Don't forget to celebrate ITAM this year.

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  7. Thanks for the kind wishes, all!

    @notagain: I'm glad to be back! Indeed, popping across borders rather easily is one of the advantages to living here...

    @Georg: Yes, hopefully the new technology will assist the old and result in a fine display of retro tech on the blog! It is a work in progress.

    @Bill: I spent so much time poring over typewriters the past couple of years that I apparently forgot that computers have been taking great leaps forward during that time as well; it is exciting to go back and take a look at all of it! Exciting and expensive... :-)

    @Florian: Yes, I received your lovely postcard, thank you so much! Gorgeous sunset and beautiful shot.

    @Cameron: I hope to make it far longer with this new one, perhaps even challenge your record - although J is right up there with you, with his 2006 Dell that he plans to use until it disintegrates. Nothing wrong with that, I just get restless...

    @notagain: Glad to hear it! Looking forward to ITAM too... what are our plans for the month?

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  8. I went a few months without a scanner on my Mac (Tiger) and finally found a cheap Epson Stylus NX130 all-in-one printer. $30, IIRC. Don't need the printer, just the scanner, which works great. Don't underestimate finding a cheap all-in-one device, even if you only use the scanner.

    ITAM is right around the corner. I have a couple surprises and will be writing a lot of letters!

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  9. It sounds like your holidays, and your time away from the Typosphere, were wonderful and well spent. I am glad to not be the only one with a late post-Christmas post! The trees by the curb are truly a sad sight. We've seen a few in suburbia as well as some cast off artificial trees. Those are really pathetic.

    Your hand made Christmas cards are amazing!

    Enjoy your new laptop and iPhone. I'll echo the comment on cheap all-in-one printers. The scanners are not the quality level I would want for archiving old photos or negatives, but they do a great job for general purposes including creation of new stationary.

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  10. What's awesomest about those cards is the typewriter specificity. Usually when somebody draws a typewriter, they draw a typewriter. You, on the other hand, ink out a Specific Typewriter, and that makes all the difference, especially to observant typospherians.

    Happy new year to you as well.

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  11. @Deek: Yes, Tiger would have worked beautifully with this scanner - I last used it on Snow Leopard. Alas, with a swift stroke Lion will no longer support the Canon application I used, so... The cost of another scanner is not what bothers me (I got this one for free) so much as the space it will take up; we are a little cramped around here as you recall, and I have just rediscovered another shelf and would like to keep it that way. We'll try it with the camera for a while and see how it goes... goodness knows we have all sorts of fancy photographic gear around here. The advantage of cameras is also that they are cable-free, thanks to SD cards! Fewer wires to trip over.

    @Dwayne: I thought the whole point of artificial trees was to reuse them! Although I suppose after enough Christmases even they get a bit tired.

    @Duffy Moon: Aww, thank you :-)

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  12. @Adwoa: I recently stumbled across the LG LSM-100 scanner mouse, but if I remember correctly, it doesn't work with Mac neither with Ubuntu.

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  13. Ahh, I see. Yeah, I ended up having some fun with using my camera to "scan". After a few months, I gave up, because it was taking me too much set up work to get a good image.

    But, I was kind of particular about it. I wanted the whole image focused, no bokeh and I wanted the brightness at the top of the image to be the same as the bottom (I can see a difference in yours). After that much time, I just started to get annoyed at not getting my scans "perfect" with my camera.

    I'll we watching for how long you can hold out, as you are quite the perfectionist:)

    And, I am trying to decide what is more beautiful, the picture of that church (which I can't stop looking at) or our myriad of typewriter drawings?

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  14. Happy New Year, dear Adwoa! Once again an amazing post :)

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  15. I just noticed I called Matt by the incorrect name in my comment (Mark).

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  16. @Florian: Yes, we found out the hard way that the scanner mouse doesn't work with Mac or Ubuntu. For some reason I didn't read the reviews so carefully. If we had known you were interested we'd have sent it to you! Ended up selling it on ricardo for a loss :(

    @Deek: Didn't even last a week :( Thanks to your dire warnings (and anyone who knows words like bokeh is an authority in my book) and another less-than-perfect experience this evening trying to scan another typecast... well, there's a new scanner with my name written on it arriving any day now. A lot more compact than the last one, so at least that is something.

    @Fernando: Thanks and same to you!

    @Bill: I was wondering who Mark was...

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