Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Programming for the Toshiba CT-9995 Remote

Wow, searching for codes for remote controls totally sucks. A search for Toshiba Remote Control Codes leads to an endless labyrinth of websites trying to sell you crap, or trying to phish for your email address just to do a search (which will of course turn up nothing, but they got yer address now).

It appears the proper way to look for Toshiba remote programming codes is NOT to look at the model of the remote. Look at the model of your TV instead. In this case, the CT-9995 goes with the Toshiba TV model CZ27T31. A search for this leads to the proper Toshiba website.

Here is a direct link to the CZ27T31 / CT-9995 manual, for FREE (gasp).
http://tacpservice.toshiba.com/ConsumerProductSupport/Manuals/TV/cz27t31.pdf

For all other Toshiba products with programmable remotes, start here to find the manual:
http://tacpservice.toshiba.com/ConsumerProductSupport/consumer_manuals.asp

Monday, May 24, 2010

Home document digitization project

Although I do like to keep the magazines I've purchased over the years, I see no point in keeping paper-based copies of magazines. And Google Books isn't moving fast enough with their scanning project, so I guess I'm going to have to do it myself.

I will need to buy a paper guillotine to cut the spines off of my books and magazines, and I'll need a color scanner with an automatic document feeder (ADF) so I'm not spending days and days just hand-feeding pages into a flatbed scanner.

However some magazines do not follow the A4 / 8.5 x 11 standard, and if I'm going to do this right I want to cover anything up to 11 x 17.

Whoah, did you say 11 x 17 ?? And an ADF??

Suddenly this hobby project becomes very expensive. There is no such thing as an inexpensive (under $500) 11 x 17 scanner with an ADF. In fact, there's no such scanner under $2000.

About the least expensive 11 x 17 color scanner with an ADF appears to be the Kodak i1405 at a mere $2499. Yeouch. So, just how valuable IS that old collection of Omni and Mondo 2000 magazines? Are they worth forking out 2.5 grand to digitize and discard?

Hmm, I think I'm going to have to do some more looking. Under $1000 I suppose I could handle but $2500 is still ridiculously high.

Though, I suppose I could always turn around and resell the scanner to recover some of the expense, after I'm done scanning five years worth of New Scientist magazine into my home computer.

Yes, yes look at me, my own blog!

I'm not really an attention hound like most kids on the web today. I'm not really looking for wide publicity or anything.

But there are various things that interest or annoy me, or that I'd like to talk about and there aren't enough forums or whatever for the topic. So fine, here we go, my own little chunk of the 'net.

Woo.