I eventually got the new scanner going late last week. It's an HP Scanjet 3970. Key features are the resolution of 2400dpi and the transparent materials adaptor for scanning slides and negatives.

The scanner's negative scanning abilities are disappointing. It seems really difficult to get the colours right, and the automatic colour balancing it tries to do seems really wacky. The quality is also far less than scanning prints, which I guess is to be expected.

On the other hand, I've been fairly impressed with both the speed and quality of scanning from prints. I've only scanned a few so far. Here is a photo of the sunset over Sydney Harbour. When scanning in the future, I need to watch out for dust, and try to get the photos straight in the scanner because the auto-straightening feature doesn't seem to work very well.

New mobile phone

My Nokia 8210 started showing signs of imminent death about a month ago, so I've been borrowing a mate's phone since then. My contract expired last weekend, so I picked up a new phone on Thursday. The choice was between the Nokia 6100 and the Nokia 6108. Both were available for $0 on the Optus $33 plan. Additionally, the 6100 was available on the Optus $25 and Telstra $25 plans. First of all I fired up OpenOffice and determined that the $33 plan was cheaper due primarily to the option of "30for10 weekend", which gives 10 minute calls to any phone for $0.30 on weekends. Not too shabby.

The 6108's main feature that differentiates it from the 6100 is the flip-open face with handwriting recognition. It comes with a stylus, and the number pad flips open to reveal a little touch-pad for writing on. It's a bit heavier than the 6100 (98g vs 78g) and seems to be aimed primarily at the Chinese market. The 6108 was only available on the Optus $33 plan.

I was sucked in by the gimmick of the handwriting recognition in the 6108. After several days of use, I'm still happy with my decision. It's nice to have a phone that's a bit different from everyone else (even if it is still a Nokia). The writing feature is quite poorly implemented and takes a bit of getting used to. There seems to be no way to train the phone to recognise my writing, so it's a matter of changing my writing so suit the phone. This seems especially true with the letters Y, l, t, and i. But even without this gimmick, the 6108 certainly has huge improvements in useability over the 8210.

Camping

We took the tent down to Dunsborough for the long weekend. Dunsborough is on Cape Naturaliste, 258km south of Perth. We didn't do much after our arrival on Saturday afternoon apart from setting everything up. I barbequed some steak, sausages, onion, potato, and mushroom for dinner. Beef and peppercorn sausages are very nice, but very fatty.

On Sunday we went out to the Cape Naturaliste lighthouse and walked around it for a bit. We went to Ngilgi Cave, which is impressive in both size and quality. Then we went to a couple of arty places before hitting the wineries. I bought a Fermoy Estate 2003 Semillon, Woody Nook 2003 Chenin Blanc, Moss Brothers 2003 Chardonnay Semillon, and Deep Woods 2003 Semillon Sauvignon Blanc. We finished the day with a swim at Meelup. The water was really clear, it was fun standing still and watching the curious little fish try to nibble on my toes.

When we woke up on Monday morning it was raining quite heavily, which is highly unusual for March. Apparently it was from cloud that spun off the tropical cyclone that's playing nasty-buggers in the north-west. The tent did well to keep us dry, and we managed to get everything packed up without getting very wet. Then we drove home. There was lots of traffic on the way up, particularly on the stretch between Bunbury and Mandurah.

Java training

Today I started a four day Java training course in the city. I enjoy being in the city, it it means I can get the train to work (11 minutes) rather than the usual 25 minute drive. We don't start until 9am every day, so I can sleep in, and today we finished at 3:40pm. Not bad!

The content so far has been very basic. Today we learned how to declare variables and write for loops. Hopefully things pick up by the end of the week. I'm not sure why we're doing a Java course at all, since none of the people they've sent on the course use Java at work. My theory is that they found it too difficult to find a C++ (which I would really like to go on) and they think this is the next best thing.

More computer instability

The Pentium 133, named mojo, has not been happy recently. Last night it crashed twice (previously unheard of) and then refused to boot properly. Sometimes it seems to get half way through booting Linux and then reboots itself. Other times it won't boot at all, and stops immediately before running LILO.

I tried replacing everything I could in the machine, and it seems to have been the CPU. I've never seen a CPU fail like that before. However, it's now running quite happily with a Pentium 200 MMX underclocked to 166MHz.