Apr 28 2011

Epson Perfection V30 scanner inside a VM

I had forgotten about my scanner that I bought a while back for scanning old family photos. Since scanner support in Linux (via the SANE backend) is not all that great, and considering I often wanted to manipulate the photos in Photoshop, I rarely even hooked it up to my main computer. Now that I use VirtualBox for a Windows XP VM, and use Photoshop inside of that environment, I thought it might be worth a shot to attempt installing the scanner inside the VM. The scanner was surprisingly easy to set up under VirtualBox 4.0.6. I simply hooked it up to the host machine, started the VM, went to Devices –> USB Devices –> Epson V30/V300 [0100], and checked it in order to enable USB passthrough. The scanner was readily recognised. For this particular scanner model, I had to install three separate drivers in order to allow for all of the scanning functions (TWAIN import in Photoshop [standard scanning], direct scanning from the buttons on the scanner itself [the event manager driver], and the copy utility).

I like it when things “just work.” 🙂

Apr 26 2011

Thunderbird and external notification sounds

So, I decided that I don’t want to listen to the default system sound whenever I receive a new email. In Thunderbird, there is a field in “General Preferences” for one to specify a particular sound file to be played when new mail arrives. Easy enough. I chose the file I wanted it to play (went and found a .wav file that was tolerable, as it seems to prefer .wavs), and hit “Play.” Nothin’. Searching around the tubes, I found that PulseAudio was required for this feature. Certainly not, right? Turns out that that is only one option for playing a custom sound on message arrival. A more suitable, much lighter, alternative is to install the enlightened sound daemon (esd). In Gentoo, this is done with:

emerge -av media-sound/esound

That’s all it takes. The esd is also required for many other applications sound playback functionality, so you may already have it installed. 🙂

Apr 25 2011

Modifier location is important

Ugh. Today, on Merriam Webster’s Word of the Day, there was a misplaced modifier in one of the example sentences. Considering MW is supposed to be one of the authorities on grammatical correctness, I was quite disappointed. Here’s the sentence, with the word of the day being vitrine:

“A weathered wooden child’s chair is stacked atop its twin, with two bright pink plastic bowls stacked on the top seat. In an adjacent vitrine sits a miniature version of this assemblage, the tiny pieces placed in the center of a bright orange square of velvet.”
— From an art exhibit review by Jessica Baran in the Riverfront Times (St. Louis, MO), 24 February 2011

In this sentence, “weathered” and “wooden” seem to be modifying “child” instead of the “chair,” but that meaning is clearly not the intent. I don’t think that the child is made of wood or that (s)he is weathered. Instead, the sentence should read something like “A child’s weathered wooden chair…” but I digress.