Day: February 2, 2001

U.S. Representative Edolphus Towns (D-New York), is extremely concerned about guns. No, not the kind you use to defend yourself or to hunt with, but rather the toy kind. In fact Towns wants toy guns banned and earlier this month introduced a bill in the House of Representatives to do just that. HR 215 reads,

The Consumer Product Safety Commission shall promulgate a rule in accordance with section 9 of the Consumer Product Safety Act (15 U.S.C. 2058) to declare as a banned hazardous product under section 8 any toy which in size, shape, or overall appearance resembles a real handgun.

Towns is serious about the dangers of toy guns. Saying that too many children in New York have been killed by people who thought they were carrying real guns, Towns sponsors regularly toy gun exchanges where children receive “educational toys” in exchange for their toy guns. On his official House web site, Towns says, “I am hoping that we will be able to save the lives of our children by making certain that these kinds of dangerous toys are banned.”

You might think he’s worried about young children playing with toy guns, but unbelievalby Towns has a sore spot for hoodlums in New York who have used lookalike guns to commit robberies. In a press release announcing HR 215, Towns cited just such a case,

Appearing at a press conference today, Congressman Towns described the events that lead to the fatal shooting of 19-year old Tysheen Bourne and 17-year old Andre Fields. “On March 31, a group of teenagers approached two undercover police officers in an apparent robbery attempt using toy guns. Apparently, the guns were the types you can buy at the neighborhood Rite Aid with a realistic barrel but a fluorescent purple plastic handle.”

According to police, in order to make the guns appear more realistic, the teens wrapped the handle in duct tape. Congressman Towns said, “Regrettably, the toy guns appeared all too real, and the officers shot and killed two of the boys. This is not the first time that we have had youngsters killed in Brooklyn because they had a toy gun in their hands, but it should be the last.”

Presumably the world would be safer if such criminals were forced to buy real guns. I think Towns is missing the point that the reason Bourne and Fields are dead has more to do with their criminal intent than with toy guns.

The other day I wondered if the ugly RSS output coming from Adam Curry’s web site was a bug or a feature. Today Dave Winer confirmed on Scripting News that it’s a feature. Yuck.

I also have to add a couple of sections to my RSS 0.92 spec. The “bionic” RSS files we’re producing do not conform to the 0.91 spec because the items don’t have links and titles, just descriptions. However this will not break the compatibility statement for 0.92 (whew!) because it will still be true that every 0.91 file is also a valid 0.92 file. I also want to bust the draconian limit of 15 items per channel.

I can completely understand Winer adding additional elements to his RSS 0.92, but why go to the extreme of not including the link and title tags?

This seems like A Very Bad Idea(TM).

Over the past two or three years a number of companies have introduced relatively low prices film scanners geared toward the consumer market. Hewlett Packard really gave this market a push forward with their Photosmart film scanner (which, however, has a large number of drawbacks).

Since I’ve got a lot of photographs to scan — upwards of 10,000 or so — I wanted to find a film scanner that would give reasonably good output and cost less than $1,000. I initially looked at several models that were in the $700 range when I ran across some reviews of Acer’s Scanwit 2720S. After some investigation of the Acer’s specifications and talking with people who owned the more expensive models I was looking at, I decided to go with the Acer model.

Obviously if scan quality is the absolutely most important thing in the world, the Scanwit at roughly $400 for the scanner plus a SCSI card is definitely not for you. There are a number of film scanners in the $1,500 range that will blow the Scanwit out of the water. On the other hand, for the person who wants to get relatively fast, high quality scans at a bargain price the Scanwit is perfect.

For evaluating the quality of the scans, my primary interest was how well the scans would look going straight from the Scanwit to an 8″ x 10″ print. Even without adjusting the scans, they look great at that output size, although going much bigger than that would probably produce unacceptable prints.

The Scanwit scans at a maximum of 2700 DPI and 16-bit color, and I only scan at those settings. In fact, I use third party software which scans each image twice and then compares the two scans to produce a single best scan which then gets written to my hard drive. At the maximum settings, the Scanwit outputs files that are about 27 megabytes.

The Scanwit tends to produce colors that are a bit washed out and the contrast it produces look horrible, but those problems seem to exist with all consumer-level film scanners. After scanning a roll of film I use an photo editor to batch modify the resulting scans. Once everything’s been adjusted, the images more than meet my expectations.

The scanner is fast. No I haven’t attempted to measure it so I don’t know exactly how fast it is, largely because I’m always batch scanning in the background of some other application. I’d say it takes at most 15-20 minutes the Scanwit to scan a negative strip with four images (and remember I’m scanning each image twice). Fortunately I have no problem at all working on any number of things on my computer while it the scanning runs in the background, though obviously the system would choke if I tried to play Quake III or something.

The only real drawback, which seems ubiquitous with scanners these days, is that the scanning software that comes the unit is complete crap. It looks like the OS X team cut their teeth on designing the interface for the Scanwit before moving on to Apple. The software looks pretty, but I defy anyone to actually get any serious work done with it. You’ll have to use a third party scanning application to get the most out of the scanner.

Over the past few weeks I’ve scanned about 20 rolls of film using the Scanwit and am extremely satisfied with the unit.