Monthly Archives: March 2011

Review: Handheld Scanner (PS-4100) – Personal, Portable, Practical

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I buy a lot of business items on eBay. Not only do I get a good price (often 50% of the ‘regular’ pricing, even at online places like TigerDirect), I can use PayPal, meaning my purchase price is protected.

Case in point: my new PS-4100 handheld scanner. Press the on button to turn it on, then scan, with one click to start, and one click to turn it off.

It offers 2 sizes (300 and 600dpi), as well as b/w or color. Frankly, the resulting images are so small (saved in JPEG format), you might as well leave the setting at 600dpi color, since a large page image is under 3meg – even for a small 2gig microSD card (which you do have to buy separately), that’s close to 700 scans before you need to transfer them to your computer. But you can safely use the smaller settings – in my test, even the 300dpi black and white did a very nice scan, perfect for textbooks.

Also, the scanning is simple. I was worried I might have to s-l-o-w-l-y drag the bar across the page to scan, but in fact it goes fast – very fast. It gives you a red light failure warning if you move too fast, but the fact is I had to work to move it that fast. If you smoothly draw it across the page in 3-4 seconds, you’ll never have a problem.

I’m looking forward to my next research trip to the library – just a slim bar and I’m good for a lot of scanning. At 25 cents a photocopy, it means a real savings – fast. And I can just plug it into my USB port and copy the files over from the scanner to my computer ready to use.

So give it a go – use this link to start searching for your own hand held scanner, and save big!

(‘skypix’ hand held personal scanner – same device as mine, but different branding)

Junk Mail – A Tree Dies For Your Sales

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We got a gift subscription awhile back to Reader’s Digest. And as a bonus, received a lot of extra spam to go with it.

Not the online email kind: the old fashioned, “junk mail” kind. Now we’ve started getting junk mail from companies we’ve never heard of, and that we can’t imagine contacting – ever.

So, with increasing loads of useless letters, we’re wondering, what do you do with the non-Internet version of spam, junk mail?

It’s not an idle question, since not only is it a mailbox filler of dubious use, but multiply that paper use by all the households on a mailing list (or for flyers, all the houses in the area), and I feel real pain thinking of all the trees that fell, just so I could get the latest drug store flyer (where ironically, there is a sale on toilet paper).

Fortunately, there is a way to solve this: there are services out there that will help you get off mailing list, reducing the physical junk mail you get, and at the same time, provide a green solution. Green? Yes; after all, less junk mail means a tree or two is saved (here’s an interesting advertising gimmick: they should have a counter, showing the estimated number of trees clients are saving by subscribing to their service).

There you have it. If you don’t like the flyers you get, you can turn them away, and reroute those trees somewhere else – or maybe, just maybe, leave them planted in the forest, eating up all that nasty carbon dioxide.

It’s a thought.