broke my scanner

The other week I mentioned about how F1 is on its summer break.

A particular hope I had is/was that I would be able to use this increase in spare time to get a bit of scanning done. As an added 'bonus' I actually dropped a couple of TV shows that hadn't really turned out to be as interesting as I'd hoped.

These were "The Hour" which I'd thought was going to be about the founding of a TV show back in the 50s at the BBC, but seemed to be intent on becoming a conspiracy thriller. This might have been okay, but didn't really appeal, to be frank.

The other was The Killing, which was also okay, but didn't really grab me. It was a murder mystery thing, but was taking the approach of having the one murder that was heavily investigated across the whole length of the show. This would probably be okay, but I have so say it did seem to be trying overly hard to throw lots of red herrings at you. Also, the surrounding elements felt a bit tired to me - political campaign and cop obsessed with their job over their life... yawn.

Anyway, I dutifully sat down to do a bit of scanning last week... and promptly broke my scanner :/.

Id' actually broken it a while back - basically, I'd put a crack in the hinge that you use to lift up the lid for the scanner. The lid had been listing badly as a result for ages, and I guess it chose that day to finally make its way all the way through and break off.

The bit that had broken off was itself not too bad a problem, but, and this is a bit difficult to explain, with it missing it made the whole process of scanning really difficult.

Basically, I was having to slot the lid back into place every time I put the lid down, which was difficult to get right. Also, it made the pages prone to slipping around once I'd put it on, meaning I was missing bits of the pages and having to re-adjust.

You may think why not scan without it, well I tried that too. The real problem is you need some way of evenly applying pressure to the page so it all sits totally flat on the bed of the scanner. If it doesn't you get bits out of focus and distortion effects. The scanner lid generally has a nice, flat, padded surface designed for the job.

Eventually I tried to break the other bit of the hinge off so I could use it and this worked better, but I also ordered a new scanner as it's still not very efficient.

This was particularly annoying, given the point I made the other day about how efficient I was at the weekend - I could have gotten loads down, but it was only possible to do a little bit.