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Vuescan: A review from a non-photographer’s perspective

Dave Farquhar Software , , , , , ,

Vuescan is a third-party scanning tool for most versions of Windows, OS X, and Linux. It supports hundreds of scanners, including those abandoned by manufacturers. It’s probably better than what came with your scanner. The pro edition probably costs as much as your scanner too, but comes with lifetime free updates, so you know you’ll be able to use your scanner for as long as it continues to operate, rather than rolling the dice on manufacturer-provided drivers working with your next upgrade. And you can run it on up to four computers at a time, which is nice.

Full disclosure: I bought this software myself. I was not provided a copy for review, nor am I receiving anything in exchange for writing this review. Now that’s out of the way, and you don’t to have to guess about my motives. Read more

Hide and unhide whitespace, headers and footers in Microsoft Word

Dave Farquhar Office, Software , ,

For now at least, I edit a lot of security documents as part of my job. Today, I saw something I hadn’t seen before: Word 2010 was hiding all of the headers, footers, and whitespace in the document. That made navigating the document a whole lot faster and easier, but it also meant I couldn’t verify that the headers and footers were correct. I figured out how to hide and unhide whitespace, headers and footers in Microsoft Word.

The solution was simple but non-obvious, and works in all versions of Word that I know of. Read more

Open a blg file in Windows

Dave Farquhar Servers and Networking, Windows , , ,
Open a blg file in Windows

In some versions of Windows, the usual method of viewing a file–double clicking on it–doesn’t work for BLG files. If you can’t view a BLG file just by double clicking on it, here’s the other way to open a BLG file in Windows.

This works in current versions of Windows and all the way back to Windows 2000.

Read more

A reminder: 30 Days to a More Accessible Web Site

Dave Farquhar Design , ,

In a conversation today, I referred to Mark Pilgrim’s excellent 30 Days to a More Accessible Web Site.
This is must-read material. I confess to being guilty of neglecting most of the things in this piece, even though I would have gained substantial benefit from some of it at a recent point in my life, when I wasn’t able to operate a mouse and could barely keyboard.

I implemented the “add titles to links” feature. It required me to hack some PHP and is certainly the most substantial thing I’ve implemented without Steve’s help. It’s not much but it’s nice, even for those who have no disabilities–now, when you mouse over a calendar entry, the title of the entry pops up, like a tooltip. And for those using speech readers, now my calendar starts to make some sense.

As a bonus, some of this stuff will make Google treat you better if you implement it.

Read it. Download a copy and save it to your hard drive. And start implementing it.