October 03, 2007
fish needs bicycle, film at 11
10/3/07
I had a nice rant about American wealth all designed for you readers when I got sidetracked by... yes, you got it, the UNC Basketball schedule for Outlook imported into iCal using iCalTextImport! It does require a lot of pruning and reshaping once you get it into your calendar, but now none of us have any excuse to miss the barnburner soon to be known as the Carolina-Iona game at 3pm on November 18 (among many others).
While we're on the subject of stuff that works, I'd like to single out several other things I've encountered this week. First, obviously, a shout-out to deck screws - and not just any deck screws, I'm talking about the ones that use "star bits", dipped in some protective enamel that makes them outlast the Solar System:
Screws at Home Despot are chained to the mediocrity of the Philips head, which strip bare when you're using a power drill. Some may sing the praises of the "square bit" screws, but I found those just as crappy. Nope, if you've got something in your house worth fixing, a star-bit deck screw is the only fastener worth fastening.
Another great piece of machinery? Good guess! In fact, it was the Brother MFC-240C!
We have several hundred important documents to scan, and this little guy has a sheet feeder... so you can stick entire legal papers into the top, scan them straight into Acrobat, and get instant 2 to 10-page PDF files in about fifteen seconds. Yes, that sounds boring, but have you ever tried to scan individual sheets by hand, them stick them together digitally? IT SUCKS.
We haven't had a printer that works at our house for a while, and this little guy prints 25 pages a minute, makes copies, gets faxes, and shaves your grundle - all for ninety bucks!
One last thing I like: Lewis Taylor. Have you guys heard him yet? He's magnificent. It's been a long time since I was psyched about a musician, and this dude can throw down like Curtis Mayfield, then suddenly turn into a chimera of Todd Rundgren, Queen, and Stevie Wonder. Ah, the joys of ROCK!
Update: check out this article about Lewis Taylor in a league with our own Greg Humphreys.
Posted by Ian Williams at October 3, 2007 11:29 PMForget "star bits" -- it's all about The Robertson Screw -- http://www.robertsonscrew.com/ -- Invented in Canada (15 minutes from where I grew up). King of the screws.
Does the scanner create PDFs where the text is recognized as text and can therefore be indexed? My scanner creates PDFs, but they are images. Inquiring minds want to know!
Dammit -- my grundle shaver only prints 10 pages a minute,,,
Greg T - yep, the printer comes with the OCR software, and you can also do it in Acrobat 8. I haven't tried it yet, but the technology is apparently WAY better than it used to be.
To Peter Rukavina (first comment, above):
"King of the screws" -- LOL!
Following up on yesterday's post . .
You can get actually get all of Ian's items at Wal-Mart. It is true. I went to walmart.com and found all 3 items. Ian, what did you pay for your Brother machine or for the Lewis Taylor CD? Walmart.com has them for $89.88 & $14.88 respectively.
well, you might miss the barnburner if you use Ian to tell you when the game is -- official schedule says Nov. 18 at 6 pm. work on that calendar function :)
[ed, note: yikes, I fixed it - good catch]]
Actually, you can't get anything near a good deck screw at Walmart. And I got the Lewis Taylor CD from a place in LA, and the printer at Staples (which ain't much better).
What a great article (the one linked abt Lewis Taylor & Hobex)!!! I encourage everyone to check it out.
Does it ever occur to you to ask WHY things are so much less expensive at Walmart? Do you think other people are *over*charging?
Just for a second - Bananas only grow in specific climates, they don't grow near where you live, unless you live in the tropics. But, in any case, those bananas need to get from the tree to your Walmart, and a certain number of people need to do a certain amount of work to make that happen.
When you get a banana for 20% of the price, do you think that all of those people are still getting paid?
If you don't care, then that's fine, it's not your job to take care of the world's workers. But if you find a product at a fraction of the price, but you have to buy it out of the back of a truck, you'd ask questions, right? Why wouldn't you ask the same of a well-lit store?
Check out the Uniscrew
http://www.uniscrew.com/It's a terraced internal hex that offers up to 18 points of rotation. One driver fits all. Pretty neat.