scanner hacks

“Photograph” Small Items With Your Scanner

9:00AM Gina Trapani | When you’re selling a small item online and you need a plain, closeup photo, blogger Mason says you can avoid flash washout or screen reflections using a flatbed scanner instead of a digital camera: Cell phones, mp3 players, discs, pretty much anything with a basic dimension can be scanned on your flatbed scanner…. To the right is a sample of a phone that was scanned. Not bad eh? What the…..is that me in my tighty whiteys reflected in the screen!?!? Oh nope, wait, it was done using my flatbed scanner. Seems like a good way to get a blank background in a photo with no setup. How do you get good photos of the stuff you’re selling online? Let us know in the comments. Scanner/Camera?? [the neverx blog] More »

Use PDFCreator to Shrink Scanned Documents

12:30AM Kevin Purdy | The Confessions of a Freeware Junkie blog points out a second-hand hack that can save document scanners quite a bit of space next time they find themselves with gigantic PDF files. The author, having been handed a gigantic colour PDF file to send along and failing to get much out of a compression utility, simply “printed” the PDF to, well, PDF again using Lifehacker commenter favourite PDFCreator, and, viola—a 13 MB file became 3 MB. A bit of colour definition was lost, but the document was still highly legible. Have any of your own tricks for preventing PDFs that take up entire thumb drives? Feel free to share ‘em in the comments. PDFCreator [via Confessions of a Freeware Junkie] More »