[aklug] Re: OLD MACHINES & linux

Like it John, good one.

> On Feb 5, 2015, at 5:06 AM, John Heim <john@johnheim.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> 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
>>
>> ---------
>> To unsubscribe, send email to <aklug-request@aklug.org>
>> with 'unsubscribe' in the message body.
> ---------
> To unsubscribe, send email to <aklug-request@aklug.org>
> with 'unsubscribe' in the message body.
>
---------
To unsubscribe, send email to <aklug-request@aklug.org>
with 'unsubscribe' in the message body.
Received on Thu Feb 5 06:20:27 2015