Category: Consumerism

A couple of months ago: Has anyone tried a book scanning service for Kondoization or pre-move preparation?

I’ve got the first batch of results from 1DollarScan now and the scanned pages are in paper recycling Heaven. This is a review of their cheapest possible service: $1/100 pages and no OCR, no enhancement, and no naming of the files. Mailing books to San Jose via USPS Media Mail costs roughly $1 per book. Once the scans come back, you start with a page like this:

I downloaded them, opened each up to see what it was, and then renamed the file using Windows File Explorer. I then let my state-of-the-art PC (circa 2015) do a batch OCR via Adobe Acrobat Pro (a few clicks and then 4 hours of runtime for 28 books). Maybe due to watermarking, the files are epic in size, 70-100 MB for a regular book-type book and 200-300 MB for the technical manuals and cookbooks. A couple of the books hit 400 MB, but were reduced in size somewhat after the OCR process. (If you want to preserve the original quality from 1dollarscan, use the “Searchable Image (Exact)” setting for OCR in Acrobat; that leaves the scans unmolested and just builds the OCR database in a separate data structure behind it.) The Acrobat Pro Preflight tool says that the images within the PDFs are “300 ppi”.

How do the scans look? Here’s a book on bicycle maintenance that I thought would be tricky:

A cheaply printed book with 40 years of acid destroying the pages (how to slice a banana without peeling using needle and thread):

A book where the color is not from the acid:

A Wall Street Journal book on estate planning (timely topic now that the Democrats say they are working to change all of the rules!) in which color is used as a sidenote background:

(If your child lives in Massachusetts, a family court predator can easily take all of the trust assets via child support (over the 23-year period during which child support is ordered, not all in one lump). A parent creating a trust in Nevada or South Dakota cannot necessarily undo the child’s mistake of being exposed to the family courts in other states. Your child can simply be put in prison by the judge (“contempt of court”) unless the amount ordered is paid, either by the child or by the trust and therefore it may not matter, from a practical point of view, what the trust documents say.)

Perhaps the toughest challenge of all, some handwritten bound journals from the late 1980s. Some notes on a finite-state machine implemented in Programmable Array Logic (PALs). I think this is for reading the bits from and syncing the clock to a digital audio output of a CD player.

There wasn’t much they could do about my handwriting, but the scans are sharp and zooming in from the PDF should be just as good for deciphering as having the physical page (not that I have the physical page anymore).

So far, I would say that this service delivered everything promised.

More:

• 1DollarScan.com

I stopped by Goodwin’s High End, an audio store that has been going reasonably strong since 1977. Coronapanic has been great for business. Governors helpfully locked people into their homes where they had little else to do other than seek maximum sound quality. “We have customers in all 50 states now,” said Alan Goodwin.

What’s state of the art in turntables these days? A $120,000 Basis:

What if you want to listen to digital? You download, maybe from hdtracks.com, to a local specialized server and connect that to a microwave-sized D/A converter:

Streaming is generally best for browsing rather than critical listening, but if you must stream, Tidal and Qobuz are reasonable options.

Electrostatic speakers are no longer in. It is all about dynamic speakers, individually priced only slightly more than a new car.

An aviation friend runs a sizable business installing backup generators here in the Northeast. Media coverage of the outage that afflicted Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, has driven demand to an all-time high. That high demand combined with coronapanic-related restrictions at the Generac factory have resulted in a 36-week lead time when he places an order for a whole-house standby generator. “We also have to get permits and install and, like every other business,” he said, “we can’t compete with $600 per week from the government so we can’t hire anybody. I tell people that if they order now we’ll install their generator in a year.”

About 15 years ago a polo-oriented friend was showing a teenage polo champion from Argentina around Cambridge. I invited them for a gathering that would today likely be illegal and the rich teenager happened by shelves holding 2000 mostly classical LP records. She asked “What are these?” I explained that they were “LP records”. She followed up with “What are those?”

I am thinking that our children would not be excited to inherit these, although classical music has been terribly served by the streaming services. The “classical” radio stations play tracks at random from CDs classified as “classical.” So you’ll hear the third track from a string quartet followed by the first track from a three-movement piano sonata followed by the fourth track from a symphony. There are some annoying American NPR classical stations (constant interruptions with chatter even when they’re not fundraising). The European stations are better, but the sound quality is not ideal.

What to do with these? It does not seem that it will make sense to bring them with us when we move from Massachusetts to Florida (August). There are probably 200 jazz, rock, and pop albums mixed in that could conceivably have collector value, but I don’t have time to sort through them.