Well, I finally found myself in need of a FAX machine. Or at least in need of FAX capabilities. Up until now I've been using the local Staples, but that gets really old really quick, and it feels a touch unprofessional on top of it.
This iBook can send faxes out, and receive them if I hook it up to the phone, which is good enough. (No point in yet another line into the house for a real FAX setup, and I think we've run out of slots on the punchdown block outside anyway :) The one thing I'm lacking is a way to get hardcopy into the machine to send out.
So, given that the cash flow is optimistically good, I trotted down to Best Buy, scoped out the scanners, and picked up a Microtek ScanMaker 4800. It's a nice scanner, USB, with a slide adapter, and mostly Mac compatible. I say mostly because it's all OS 9 stuff, which plays adequately but not great with OS X. I can't scan with OS X apps, but I can with Photoshop LE 5.0, so it'll do. (Yeah, I have to boot into OS 9 to use the OCR app, but until I start scanning the Dunsaney for Project Gutenberg, I don't know that it much matters)
Toys are good. Hopefully OS X drivers and such will come out for it soon. They're listed as Beta on microtek's website, but we all know how often some websites get updated...
Posted by Dan at October 4, 2002 10:50 PMI absolutely adore OS X. I have been a freeBSD freak for a while, running my website on Free or OpenBSD with php and mysql.
I totally know what you mean about the OS 9 stuff. It is truly a pain in the ass. I believe on the dual G4 at work I run OS X and then boot classic 9 to run a special designmerge quark plug-in.
Hope everything works perfect for you and more!
Posted by: davidj at October 4, 2002 11:59 PM