[aklug] Re: OLD MACHINES & linux

I'm blind so I really need a scanner and OCR software, right? Well,
about 15 years ago, when Windows XP first came out, I was taking a walk
with my wife on Christmas eve and we passed this little Lutheran Church.
They'd lost their lease and were just giving a bunch of stuff away. One
thing they were giving away was a scanner with a SCSI card. They had
upgraded their PC to XP and it wasn't supported.

I took the thing home, put the SCSI card in my linux box and it worked.
I am still using the thing today. I've upgraded to debian wheezy and it
still works. In fact, I am scanning in the D&D 5th edition players
handbook and getting great results. I haven't tried to put a GUI on the
thing but it runs sane and tesseract just fine if somewhat slowly. But I
can scan and OCR a page faster than I can proofread it anyway so it's
not a problem.

What a weird coincidence that was though. What are the odds of a blind
guy who happens to be into linux happening to walk by a church right
when they are giving away a scanner only a linux nerd could use? And on
Christmas Eve no less.

On 02/05/2015 03:13 AM, Greg Schmitz wrote:
>
> At home, all of the machines I am using are at least 10 years old. Using
> old machines saves me lots of money (thousands of dollars actually) and
> Linux is a big help because unlike MS or Apple products I'm not excluded
> because of software/hardware interactions (for the most part).
>
> Just wonder what other Linux users here think about pinching pennies?
>
> --greg schmitz
>
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Received on Thu Feb 5 05:07:32 2015