Our long awaited (like three years in the making) salary revision finally took place this month. While it turns out that last year's promotion knocked off most of the earlier disparity (which means the upward adjustment was comparatively minute), it provided a convenient excuse to invest in a tool that I wasn't quite sure would see maximum use for the buck, but was something I wanted to push myself into tackling a long avoided chore.
The Fujitsu Scansnap 1500 is a colossal $729.
That's about the same price as my Canon MP780 all-in-one printer that I bought about 4+ years ago. While the big monster brick does guzzle ink, it has printed tons of cardstock models for my papercraft hobby, colored signs and other such side affairs for work, the fax function has been put to use for both parents and myself during those rare times when you need to fax documents or receive faxes, and yes, it has a flatbed scanner/ADF which has scanned quite a couple objects, including computer game boxes, and served as a slightly slower photocopier from time to time.
I had thought that by investing in such a workhorse, I would not need to buy separate machines for all those functions.
Well, I did resist the temptation for a long time, but the march of technology is inexorable. The truth is that there is a design flaw in the Canon MP780. The ADF on top of the flatbed scanner is HEAVY. This means that scanning involves a fair bit of weight-lifting effort prying up the cover, placing the item in question on the scanner, lowering the ADF-laden cover down carefully in order not to break it with a careless drop, leaning back over to the computer to find the correct program and hit the scan button or hitting the default scan button on the printer, waiting for the scan to take place over a moderate amount of time, using the mouse to highlight the part of the image that isn't background, selecting the correct options and format to save the file (usually a jpg) into a folder somewhere... and then repeating it all again for another item.
I assume the ADF would be able to handle multiple pages decently, but I've never really seriously tested it. One has all sorts of odd shaped pieces of paper that would be a pain to pry out of the printer should a paper jam take place. This leeriness has proved a severe impediment to any attempt at cleaning and organising my room, since the last go around yielding a small pile of stacked paper (say 3 inches high) placed next to the printer labeled "To Scan" that has unfortunately remained there until one year later (always around Chinese New Year time, hmm...)
My packrat-edness refuses to throw them away sight unseen without any record of their passing. But my digital self has a very comfortable compromise going - if they are digitized so that I can flip through them on a monitor and thus also easily backed up, the hardcopies themselves would be gladly offloaded.
The problem was in the digitization.
I ran into the Scansnap name while browsing through Uncluttering websites in a game attempt at procrastinating on really packing up. The big brother of the Scansnap series, the 1500, can scan 40 pages a minute. Duplex. At a push of a button. In color.
My jaw dropped. Waitaminute, back up... some mental arithmetic later... whoa, that's a page scanned every 1.5 seconds. On both sides. If I can hit 40 seconds a PAGE on my Canon all-in-one, I'd be on fire with speed already...
I'll fast forward through the days of deliberation, the agonization of whether I should spend extra money, the myriad research and reviews seeking justification and rationalization, and the phone calls attempting to even locate the scanner in Singapore. (I asked my Dad to check out the prices when he went to Sim Lim on another errand, and he reported back that they hadn't heard of "Scansnap" at all. Wtf?) I ended up calling the scanner dept of Fujitsu here and getting the name of a shop on the fifth floor of Sim Lim that carried it - that, and Challenger at Funan.
It took some patience to install the drivers before plugging it in - as warned by multiple stickers on the scanner to do so. (Guess it's not quite plug n' play.) But I have to say that once it was up and running, I don't regret a single cent.
It's a small black and silver thing, about the size of a hefty shoebox when folded up, and unfolds elegantly to support the pieces of paper you feed into it. Smoothly rolling plastic guides serve to hold papers of differing widths as they slide in and out. One simple blue button, which is also lit by an LED when it is powered, tells it to start scanning.
And by the gods, is it FAST.
It is also pretty damned smart for a scanner. The program it comes with automatically saves in PDF. It supposedly OCRs and makes it a searchable PDF too. If the paper is slightly tilted, it can compensate for that and retilt it. It detects the size of the stuff you feed in - no more manual selections to crop on screen. There's another program linked that can edit the PDFs should it have been rotated the wrong way and so on. It also allows organisation by keywords and folder structures, etc.
It makes scanning fun.
I've gone through piles of "to-be-scanned" paper faster than I ever imagined while watching TV and letting it feed into the scanner connected to my laptop.
(I do hope it will carry over and sync with relative ease when I eventually install the programs on my desktop PC though. Worse come to the worse, I can back up the pdfs, but manually sorting them would be ugly.)
Who knows, I might actually have a clean(er) room when CNY rolls around this year.
As part of my room cleaning weekend binge, I uncovered my old laptop. This was the sturdy workhorse that took me through college, and whose hard disk backup only exists on an external hard disk backup now. It was covered in dust, and out of morbid curiosity, I brushed it clean, plugged it in and turned it on to see if it would go.
The battery charging light came on (though it probably would go flat in seconds once disconnected). It gamely revved up.
Oooh, it's on, I thought. After all that dusty maltreatment, it's still alive.
Then, beep, went Nimuhar. (Yes, I named my laptop in those days.)
Uh oh. Sitting on the slightly dim screen, taunting me, was the CMOS password.
Shit.
Obviously in those days of cross-country airport flight and dorm rooms and roommates, my paranoia felt a CMOS password was justified, and why the hell should I write the password down when I type it in every day to access my laptop?
Except it's been 6+ years since I had any cause to type in said password. Amusingly, the passphrase I used came to mind. The problem was the numbers mixed into the passphrase. I couldn't remember the numbers, nor the position I chose to insert them into the passphrase. Crap.
Trying 9 different variations and locking myself out 3 times as a result, it was time to Google for help. It really wasn't that helpful. Apparently some manufacturers have a sekrit backdoor password, but Twinhead wasn't listed among the common manufacturers. Websites recommended to check your manual for help (I checked, it never covered this eventuality) or bring it in for maintenance support. There was something about maybe removing the CMOS battery or removing certain pieces of solder with precision in order to briefly remove a chip on the motherboard and replacing, in order to reset the BIOS.
Dayum. I really didn't count myself a hardware expert by any means so all this talk of chips and solder unnerved me.
Then there was another website that casually mentioned, well, the real info is actually in the notebook's hard disk. So nothing stops a determined person from bypassing the BIOS password altogether by removing the hard disk and plugging it into another computer.
Oooh. In truth, this was what I was after. I'd already satisfied my curiosity that the laptop was still functional. But I wasn't going to get rid of it until after I reformatted (or maybe simply removed) the hard disk with all my personal info.
Sitting down at the table with a box of screwdrivers, I tilted it up and down every which way looking for possible hard disk openings. It really was very heavy. My new laptop is wider and still a little lighter in comparison (though most would call it a brick still).
Nope, this was the CDrom drive. Nope, this was the memory compartment. (I opened it for fun to look at the memory. Unlabeled, so I dunno how much was in there.) Nope, this was probably the battery. There was a slit along the side that was probably the hard disk, but it looked very tightly set in, so I left that for later. One more compartment was intriguing the hell out of me.
It had one of those "if you remove this, you void your warranty" stickers sealing up the opening. Well, the year circled on the sticker was 1999. I figured the warranty was already void some time back.
If you aren't allowed to take your own ancient stuff apart for the sake of finding out how-stuff-works, whose should you use? What the heck. It was mine. I didn't have anything invested in it. If I spoiled it, it already had a destiny in the trash anyhow - it's so old I don't even think charities want it. So I sliced the sticker, and inserted a screwdriver tip to pry out the panel.
Behind it was some black chip labeled with some letters and numbers, and a very snug circular battery of the type you'd normally see in calculators and such.
Hmm...thought I. Could this be the CMOS battery the websites were talking about? Heck, what did I have to lose? I really couldn't remember my password. I already had a backup of the hard disk some time back (not complete, but presumably all the stuff I felt it was important to keep).
I gingerly pried it out. Counted off to five. And stuck it back in. Replaced everything. Flipped the laptop over. Plugged it back in. Turned it on.
Beep, went Nimuhar. CMOS error. Reset to default. Press F2 to access BIOS, press some other key to continue, blah blah blah.
Whoa. Reset to default? Was this it? Was it as simple as that? I checked the BIOS, and sure enough, both the user and supervisor passwords were clear and empty.
Nimmy was up and running. It took considerably longer to boot up, run into a bunch of outdated errors and reset daylight savings time, rebooted, checkdisked, etc while I marveled at the dim yellowness of the aged screen and the nostalgic reminders of permanently-etched sweat marks on the keyboard. This was the baby that saw me through the Realms of Despair, click-clacking away on its keys. It was running on Windows 98. Whoa. Talk about old. The entire hard disk was only about 6 gigabytes total. (Which gave me the idea to re-backup some point in the future before I decide if I can let it go.)
But I have to say, I'm a little bit taken aback and amazed all at once that it turned out so easy to bypass a BIOS password after all. No wonder laptop thieves and so on have no qualms or problems. So much for paranoia.
The only tool needed was a screwdriver, and a little ingenuity.
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