knowledge is a habit

Allright, I’m a packrat when it comes to papers. My friend Todd in Asheville owns a couple of businesses and is constantly chased by the paper tiger. He told me he started scanning all his stuff in so he has access to it on his laptop. I’m not sure what kind of scanner he uses but I picked up a Canon Lide 60 a couple of months ago and I love it.

I’m slowly going through 2 file cabinets worth of old papers, shredding what I don’t need to keep, and scanning what I do need to keep. Not only can the scanner save directly to PDF, but it can create multipage PDFs as well. After it scans a page it asks you if you’re done or if you want to scan another page.

Pros:

• Creates PDFs
• Completely powered from the USB port, no external power supply needed
• Uses LEDs for the lamp, no warming up, more rugged than a fluorescent tube

Cons:

• Came with a foot attachment to keep the scanner vertical (less desk space). Doesn’t work too well because its really hard to align documents and close the lid in this position, I just keep the scanner horizontal on top of my CPU
• Only does letter sized scans
• I sure hope the PDF ’standard’ lives for a while (this is a very long term risk, but can be a risk/hassle nonetheless)

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– Dave

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 20th, 2006 at 3:33 pm and is filed under Geekery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.