As I already wrote, I started scanning my collection of film negatives. I’m now at the point, where I just wrote the next batch of scanned pictures on the the second DVD. I started scanning around the end of last year, so during this more or less 3 months I’ve scanned in total 30 films, most of the films with 24 exposures. This makes in total a little more than 800 pictures.

Since I upgraded the PC where I’m doing the scanning to an Athlon XP 2600+ and a motherboard with USB 2.0 the scan time for one negative went down from 3 to 2 minutes. During the process I import the pictures into Imatch, a picture management application, which is a very, very nice and quick picture database application. Normally I’m only working under Linux and I tried a couple of applications, which perform similar functions, but I couldn’t really warm myself to any of them. In particular I found all of them lacking to quickly categorize a large number of pictures. So, after I started using evaluation version I quickly found, that this really was an application, I wanted to purchase.

The Minolta Dual Scan IV also works pretty flawlessly. However I found, that it is a little sensible during the initialization phase. You should always keep the door closed, when the scanner is not operating. Switch on the scanner (with closed door), then start the scanner software and let it do it’s initialization. Sometimes during the beginning I needed to pull the power plug to really “cold” boot the scanner, before the software could successfully initialize the scanner, because I had forgotten to close the door. Update: The scanning software appears to have trouble with the “Virtual Desktop Manager” from the Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP. When scanning is in progress and you switch the current desktop, the software aborts.

So, if I continue with this scanning rate, it will take more than a year to scan all negatives. The nice thing is, you got chance to look at all the old pictures and see the children growing up again.

Mein Freund und Trauzeuge Axel hat sich jetzt mit einem kleinen Geschenk belohnt, in Anbetracht der Tatsache, das die Zahl 50 immer näher rückt und man ja schließlich auch noch etwas vom Leben haben will.

I just finished the installation of Gallery, a photo gallery written in PHP und put the first three galleries online. This is the link to go. The installation was a bit of a hassle, since I needed to contact the web hoster to deactivate the PHP safe_mode parameter. Otherwise Gallery wouldn’t run. And this costed an additional fee.

Ich habe gerade die Installation von Gallery, einer Fotogallerie geschrieben in PHP abgeschlossen und die ersten drei Gallerien abgestellt. Hier ist der Link. Die Installation war dann doch etwas aufwendiger, da ich den Webhoster kontaktieren musste, um die PHP safe_mode Variable deaktivieren zu lassen. Und dies hat dann auch noch eine Gebührt gekostet.

I read it here first: JAlbum 5.2, my favourite Web-Photoalbum generator is out. Apart from the Web I’m using JAlbum to generate browsable views of the photos and scans I backup onto CDs or DVDs.

Since JAlbums primary purpose is the generation of static albums, it’s not really useful if you want to invite some feedback about your photos. So for the Web I’m probably going to switch to Gallery, which also looks very nice.

Somehow my firefox profile got hosed. While normal browsing appeared to be working properly, the creation of popup windows didn’t work, either from a bookmarklet or from a HTML page. I checked all the possible settings from the preferences and any extensions, but I couldn’t get it going again. And firefox processes stayed around and wouldn’t terminate after firefox was quit. Everything only worked again once I had created a new profile and reinstalled all of my standard extensions. Luckily this worked without any major problems. In particular I needed to copy some files from the old profile to keep my passwords, cookies and form data.

The Tabbrowser Preferences 1.2.2 however appears to not work any more. This probably has something to do with the new preferences dialog, which was introduced with 1.0.2. And finding the Mozex 1.07a extension, which is modified from the original to allow the installation into recent firefox version, took a bit of searching. Otherwise everything is now working again.

I’d been writing, that our TV set is apparently dying. We brought the device to a dealer for repair and as of today we have official proof, that the tube is indeed defect. And this tube was replaced in September 2003 and is not yet 2 years old. It’s obvious, that our next TV set won’t be from Philips.