René Rebe

You got a Fujitsu fi-series scanner, such as a fi-5120, fi-6130, fi-6140, older, or never and like to use it on an Apple Mac(intosh)? Search no more!

ExactScan now comes with built-in drivers to supper a whole range of Fujitsu fi-series scanners, no matter if they are a couple of years old - or brand new!

Simply plug in the Fujitsu fi-scanner USB cable to a free USB port of your Mac, download and lunch ExactScan and the feature rich document capture application will list the scanner and batch scan at high speed on your Mac! Using ExactScan Pro you can even scan with OCR to searchable PDF, use the digital imprinter, and rely on many more automatic detection, such as automatic detection of colors and text orientation.

The possibilities are endless.

Some time ago I got a black NEC display which comes with four video inputs: VGA, 2 DVI and even DisplayPort as well as USB hub with two upstream ports. As I found no setting available on the monitor to change the USB upstream port to use, I usually just changed the USB cable when I had another computer for some testing on my desk.

However, today, I found out that there is a NEC MultiProfiler setup utility which allows to permanently assign dedicated USB ports per video input. This way I finally got a full KVM switch inside the monitor, assigning the first USB port to the DisplayPort, and the second USB port to all the other video inputs, used for temporary testing of various stuff.

Oh, cool: one can hack, and restore old SDK (and GCC) support in Xcode 4!

And also install Xcode 3 on Mac OS X 10.7, Lion.

I have not yet checked how well that works, though.

Updated: hack-installed Xcode 3.2.6 appears to (mostly) work on Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion), e.g. Xcode itself and the Interface Builder do work, Dashcode, however, fails to lunch due to some missing Framework symbol (_dispatch_get_concurrent_queue expected in /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib).

Update 2: As the link went dark, here is an archived full quote:

In looking through the isDevToolsCompatible function again, I noticed that it would return true if the COMMAND_LINE_INSTALL environment variable was set no matter what version Mac OS X you are running.

It’s now possible to greatly simplify the installation process:

• Mount the Xcode 3.2.6 DMG
• Open Terminal
• Enter the commands:

  export COMMAND_LINE_INSTALL=1 open "/Volumes/Xcode and iOS SDK/Xcode and iOS SDK.mpkg"

The open command will launch the installer app and allow you to install Xcode

Since the beginning of this year I use the “Flinkster” car sharing of the German Railway company (Deutsche Bahn, DB Rent). So far this worked out pretty well, and the pilot run of all-electric vehicles in the region Berlin / Potsdam is a welcome bonus. If one happens to have to fuel, the cars come with a DKV petrol card, so one does not have to directly pay the gas, which is already accounted for by a per kilometer (think mile) charge.

So far this was not a problem, until yesterday. I did not even had to gas up. But as there was a gas station on the way, I thought it is nice for the next customer not to need to detour just to find a station in the middle of Berlin. Although it was a “big” Aral station I better asked if they take the DKV card, and was surprised to find they do not. Puzzled and thinking whether I ever refilled a Flinkster car at Aral, I continued my way, and there was a Shell station just on the next corner anyway. As I knew Shell worked earlier this year I just filled up the car, and was likewise surprised to find that this Shell station did not take DKV cards either, … Ieeek!

The employee told me every leaseholder of each individual station can decide whether they take those DKV cards, or not! And usually only the very big ones do, … While I find this pretty irritating, and annoying, the lesson learned is that one really has to check on each and every gas station if a DKV sign is in sight, and if in doubt: better ask. Thinking that the market dominating oligopolies accept the DKV or other petrol cards is unfortunately not enough, …

As I already fueled I had to pay myself, and and sent in the receipt to the car sharer. Hopefully paying back works out as smooth as they promise, …

We finally got another App for iOS. Actually I had this speedometer around with me for two years or so already for my own use. However, ad-hoc provisioned App certificates expire faster than you can watch after them, so often when I wanted to run it for my own use the provisioning profile was already expired. So I finally polished it for global distribution for all of you, and here are some free promo codes, enjoy:

LH3EKYM7JPXW
YLY7AW3PPJNE
HRAARNM7PMRX
WTNH3FF77E3N
YJLRA9JHLK7P
L49JW3NFHRX4
4JN3MWJMYE4E
7Y34J349PFLE
YMKYM9REKMR9
YKYT49RXKX9L
LM9YP4WEX6FR
NXL7MXNF7PPK
WHRJJXWTRXXK
93E63TFKPYF3
RE7H4APMLXH9
XTALKFX6PMN3

Just gave it a quick spin at a local store. quite nice so far, know and worked with QNX since the mid 1990s. But how the heck to you get out of an App, e.g. back to the home screen? Tried all kind of gestures, touched everywhere - nothing intuitiv worked :-(

Update: Aha - touch sensitive bezel: swipe on the border, …

ioreg -lw0 | grep EDID | sed s/.*=\ .// | xxd -p -r | strings -6

B… = AU Optronics
LT… = Samsung
LP… = LG / Philips
N… = ChiMei

Update: Can be used to check if a Retina MacBook Pro contains an LG display, apparently at times showing image retention / ghosting effects when the same pixel pattern is shown for some time, such as Safari website text, Apple Mail, or Xcode source code or word processing and similar high contrast patterns, …

BREAKING, WARNING:

This year the Filmpark Babelsberg hosted a Star Trek exhibition, that was advertised to run until the 31st of October. Since my last and only visit to the Babelsberg studios was in 1995 we decided to use the sunny yesterday to finally visit the exhibition. Unfortunately, and to our biggest disappointment we had to find the exhibition cancelled way before the official end.

And this despite we even looked up the opening hours on their website in the morning. I can absolute not understand how a major organization can fail to publish breaking developments such as canceling the show on their website, or local news(paper). Yet, they can even print a plate as shown above!

I can imagine they like to still get the some extra visitors that arrive just for the Star Trek exhibition to find the event cancelled and yet visit the park nonetheless, though, …

Left disappointed at the entrance, we decided to rather leave for an ice cream in the sun at the nearby lake Griebnitz.

So for some time now I’m searching for the perfect ultraportable (laptop). Tables do not really cut it, even got an iPad to test things, but productivity wise they are not too great to get things done. As I need to get things done, I require some kind of grown up notebook. All the latest Apple machines are not too pleasing either, either cold (on power-up) and too hot during use hard edged aluminum case, and glossy window glass mirror displays, … not to mention the ridiculously huge and space wasting MacBook Air screen bezel, …

The Lenovo X220 is not all that perfect either, same lagging Intel graphics (among others no OpenCL, …) and additionally I just noticed a setback in their display configuration:

The former X200/X201 spotted a 12.1″ 1280×800 display, and it’s ultra-portable cousin X200s/X201s even featured a: 12.1″ 1440×900 (PDF) - now with the “all new” X220 even the Premium HD display only features a mere: 12.5″ 1366×768 pixels, … (PDF)!

This is not only a lower dpi resolution (pixels per inch), it also cuts away enough vertical pixels to make it seriously less useful for professionals with remote screen sessions, and virtual machines. More than the last millennium’s 786 vertical pixels (remember when 1024×768 became standard?) really are a blessing when you want to have your operating-system’s menu bar, and window deco around your windows and generally avoid scrolling in your VNC, RTP, X11 session or virtual machines.

Doing some research on this topic I also spotted that the X220 IPS screen appear to have some ghosting issues, …

Dear manufactures: I do not need a professional computer (display) optimized for consuming cheap Hollywood (or Bollywood) movies. If the mankind is supposed to live on some more centuries, we certainly also have to get some work done, not just hang on to consume other’s stupid videos all days. And even for consuming a decent movie every now and then, I’d get myself a decent TV for that. And with 16:9 LCD TV’s I noticed most high quality movies, on BluRay and such, are not even 16:9, but more like 21:9, …

So, can we please get professional grade, matte, 16:10 display, with at least 800 vertical pixels back to get some serious work done?