If you have an old flatbed scanner laying around or you've decided your scanner is a useless gadget, repurpose it weekend. The industrious tinkers at Make magazine have put up a tutorial on turning your scanner into a primitive camera. The results have a distinctly spooky appearance, almost reminiscent of vintage daguerreotype photographs. The project doesn't require taking apart the scanner or permanently altering it in anyway, so you can experiment freely without actually sacrificing your scanner to the tinkering gods. You'll need some inexpensive parts like black foamcore board, a magnifying glass and razor. For an overview of the process and a list of necessary parts check out the video below:

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Got a bunch of scanned documents in PDF format but lack for good text-converting OCR software? Google is now indexing their text conversions of PDFs, which means anyone with access to open web space can let their monstrous servers do all the heavy lifting. The Digital Inspiration blog recommends putting your PDF files in a folder and creating a page that links to all of them. If you're a bit concerned about dropping all that text into the public's search results and you own your space, you can use Google's Webmaster Tools to reign in what gets scanned and indexed on your site, although you should assume anything you put online can be found by those looking for it.

Good news for Mac users who want to go paperless on the road: Fujitsu's released the portable ScanSnap S300M, the similar model scanner we used to scan paperwork to PDF in one step, but for Mac.

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Even if you do all your banking online, there's still one ugly time of year when you've got to deal with a pile of financial paperwork, and that's tax time. If your accountant accepts forms via email, or you just want to save tax documents on your computer, you want a quick and easy way to do it. While most scanner workflows require several steps to digitise documents, the Fujitsu ScanSnap transforms paper into PDF with a single button press. No one wants to spend more time than they have to on receipts, 1099's and W-2's. Let's take a look at how to instantly capture tax-related and other important paperwork to your hard drive on April 15th and throughout the year with the ScanSnap.

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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.

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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.

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Just noticed a useful feature in previously mentioned document scanner service, Qipit: the ability to fax your document scans, effectively turning your camera (or cameraphone!) into an outgoing fax machine. After you register for an account at Qipit, you snap a photo of a document, and email it or upload it to the web site. Once Qipit does its thing, converting your document into a PDF, select the "Fax" button below it to send it off. Qipit supports multi-page documents too. Looks like an interesting alternative to FaxZero. How do you send and receive faxes over the web? Let us know in the comments.