I have added a (long) page to the site explaining how to use the Canon WFT-E1 (or WFT-E1A or WFT-E2, E3, E4, or E5) wireless transmitter to push images from your Canon DSLR to a computer running Mac OS X 10.5.
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We recently received some photos from a family event that were – gasp – made using analog film. You should have seen the look on the face of the dozen or so children when they crowded around the SLR expecting to see a preview on the LCD only to discover that there was no LCD on the back of this camera. Talk about culture shock. 😉
Anyways, the quality of the prints was appaling, as where the scanned images on the CD that came from the processing lab. The negative, however, looked fine to my no-longer-used-to-look-at-negatives eyes. I decided to revitalize an old film scanner I still have in a box. It is a rebadged Pacific Imaging PrimeFilm 1800u scanner, which will turn a negative into a 4 Mpxl file with 16 bits per color channel.
I like using VueScan with flatbed scanners. It is a low-cost, high-power solution and Ed Hamrick does a fantastic job of supporting almost every scanner under the sun. My experience so far has been that you plug in the scanner, start VueScan, and start scanning.
With the PF1800u it turns out to be a little bit more complicated than that:
- Download the latest driver from Pacific Imaging, an application called CyberViewX_SF. Localized non-english variants are available.
- Install the driver at the default location (/Applications).
- Find VueScan on your hard drive and Get Info in the Finder. You can do this by using the context menu (right-click or control-click), hitting CMD-I, or File > Get Info in the menu.
- Make sure “Open using Rosetta” is ticked (see below).
- Connect the scanner to your computer and power it on.
- Start VueScan.
“Open using Rosetta” in the Finder “Get Info” panel.
You can skip steps 3 & 4 if you are using a PowerPC Mac. CyberViewX_SF is a PowerPC application, so Intel Macs need to be told to run PowerPC code because though VueScan is a native Intel application. I wish Pacific Imaging would update their driver!
I had some difficulties because CyberViewX_SF is not in the default install location on my system. In this case, VueScan can not find the driver it needs and complains.
If you – like I – want to put your applications in a non-default place, you can create a soft (or hard) link to it to make VueScan happy:
$ sudo ln -s /Applications/Graphics/CyberViewX_SF /Applications/CyberViewX_SF
where “/Applications/Graphics/” is the location of the CyberViewX_SF folder. That’s it!
Thanks to Ed Hamrick for the great support!
Update: Since Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion), Apple has dropped support for PowerPC code. You can no longer install Rosetta, so your scanner is just a paperweight if you switch to 10.7 or later.
I had an interesting experience with Mac OS X (10.5.6 for the record) today: I use a KVM switch to connect a single keyboard, monitor, and mouse to a number of computers. I swapped my Microsoft Comfort Curve Keyboard 2000 for a Unicomp Customizer 105 (which rocks, by the way!) and started typing away. To my dismay, the ^° key was recognized as <> – and vice versa.
The keyboard layout was still correctly set to a German layout but Mac OS X thought that the KVM switch was the actual keyboard (it certainly identifies itself as a HID). So it looks like Mac OS X can not see that the keyboard type has changed and the wonderfully simple process that works when connection a keyboard directly fails to even get started.
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Amazon just offered a really good deal on the Asus EeePC 900A, which is very much like the original 701 (which I purchased for my trip to India last year) in outward appearance, but offeres a bigger screen with higher resolution and a much faster CPU. The internal SSD [solid state drive] grows to 8 GB, but it uses MLC instead of SLC, which makes is slower than the 701.
Anyways, I will not review the 900A in this post, maybe that will come later. Instead, I provide a detailed account of how I replaced the less than stellar Xandros Linux with the more than decent Xubuntu.
Caution: By following these instructions you will completely erase any data that may have been stored on your EeePC, including the Xandros Linux it came with, and any and all files you have created. Make a backup before you proceed!
General Disclaimer: I describe what worked for me. Your mileage can – and will – vary considerably. Consider this a travel report, not a guided tour. Know what you are doing, don’t play with matches, and do not run with scissors! You have been warned. 🙂
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