A little place of calm

Today i scanned several of my university lecture notes into PDF format. The ScanSnap document scanner makes this a very fast and easy process, and it includes text recognition. This feels good: i can save physical space by throwing away my notes, but still have them usefully available to me, in searchable format! yay!

Now that i've scanned these, i want to be sure that i don't lose them. I've never been much of a person for backups, to be honest. My idea of a backup is something i do just before i upgrade Linux! But i've started to think i'd like to get into at least semi-regular backing up.

With that in mind, i came across this article: What's Your Backup Strategy? by Jeff Atwood. The proposed solution works on Linux! Funny, i always assumed rsync was a ruby library: turns out it's a straightforward command line tool.

sudo rsync -vaxE --delete --ignore-errors /home/aimee /media/FREECOM\ HDD/

That was enough to get me a first backup onto an external hard drive. Now it's just a case of running that periodically to keep it up to date.

I'm not particularly interested in having a cron job because my computer isn't always on, and the external drive isn't always plugged in. So i just made myself a simple executable file to sit on the desktop and remind me to click it and synchronise the backup every so often.

#!/bin/bash
 
source=/home/aimee
target=/media/FREECOM\ HDD/
 
echo Backing up $source to $target
read -p "Press enter to begin."
sudo rsync -vaxE --delete --ignore-errors "$source" "$target"
read -p "Press enter to close."

See, i said it was simple! But a simple solution is better than no backup solution at all, right? :) Now that i've started with something i can tweak it as i find necessary.

By the way, i love the quote of Jeff's in that article: The universe tends toward maximum irony. Don't push it.

I am quite sure that nobody cares about this except for me, unless they happen to have a similar scanner to mine. I've had to do this process about 5 times now on different installs. I can guarantee that it works for Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu and Mint. I thought i'd share it because i'll probably need it again and someone else might find it helpful.

First you need xsane to be able to scan things at all.

sudo apt-get install xsane

Plug in your scanner by USB. Attempt to scan by typing scanimage. It won't work, but you need to see the error message.

scanimage
[gt68xx] Couldn't open firmware file (`/usr/share/sane/gt68xx/PS1Dfw.usb'): No such file or directory
scanimage: open of device gt68xx:libusb:004:002 failed: Invalid argument

See that PS1Dfw.usb? You need to get that file from http://meier-geinitz.de/sane/gt68xx-backend/ but be aware that your computer might ask for a different file such as ps1fw.usb or ps1fw.usb. Whichever it is, find it on the page and click it to download.

Assuming it's gone into your Downloads folder, move it to the right place.

sudo mv ~/Downloads/PS1Dfw.usb /usr/share/sane/gt68xx

Now try the scanimage command again. With any luck your scanner will burst into life and a whole load of crazy gobbledegook will splurge into your terminal window. This is the picture your scanner is seeing, trying to be displayed as text! Don't be afraid to Ctrl-C to stop it once you see it working. Or you can just wait for it to finish.

You can also do this to ensure that your scanner is configured correctly:

scanimage -L
device `gt68xx:libusb:004:002' is a Mustek Bearpaw 1200 CU Plus flatbed scanner

Now to actually scan something! Open up The Gimp and click File -> Create -> XSane -> gt68xx:libusb:004:002

It comes up with this super ugly XSane interface, where you can make a preview, choose the scan area, fiddle with the colour settings and DPI settings, and scan an image.

When it's done, it'll come back to The Gimp ready for you to edit the scanned image.

Protip: If you lose one or more of the XSane windows, you can get them back again by going to the Window menu of XSane and ticking on the ones you need.

When using a package manager it is helpful to know how to search for available packages. You can search for part of the package name, so that mysql- returns both mysql-server and mysql-client …

On Debian-based systems:

sudo apt-cache search mysql-

On Fedora-based systems:

sudo yum list "*mysql-*"

On Mac with MacPorts:

port search mysql-

I just found this and thought i'd share.

How to export a web page into PDF

It's a bit sneaky, but i say the fault is with Adobe for making their service too obviously hackable!

If it helps anyone, i made a bookmarklet. Just drag it to your bookmarks toolbar and it'll be ready to click anytime you want to make a PDF.

Make PDF

I am making no guarantees as to how long this will work. If i worked for Adobe i'd like to make this feature a little bit more secure, heh!