I’m scanning my sisters wedding negatives with a Nikon Coolscan 4000 ED she bought off of eBay. Its has been a slow and tedious job. It was taking me 5 mins per frame, and the quality was really un-impresive I started to think it was the scanning software; “Nikon Scan 4″ for  it wasn’t built for OSX and its not very robust…. after searching for tips online I found a thread on Photo.net that pointed me to:

http://www.vad1.com/photo/dirty-scanner/
http://www.pearsonimaging.com/articles/howto/ls5000cleaning.html 

So I took the scanner appart and found the mirror was completly obscured by a thich layer of dust, I couldnt even see a reflection!!!. After cleaning it and putting the scanner back together the scanning time dropped to about half (2.5m per frame) and the resulting images were crisp and much clearer.

***TIP*** when placing the mirror back make sure that the reflective side it up. What I mean is that the mirror is reflective on both sides, one side has glass protecting the reflective “mirror” the other side is just a mirror with not glass covering. Put the reflective side up or else you’ll find double-image effects on your scans.

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*** Update
I recently bought a DS209 which is half the size of  the 407, it holds two drives and its way faster. It also powers itself on/off on a schedule in my case 12:00am – 7:00am its off.
I read at 33/MBs and write at 44/MBs over my network!!! thats faster than my USB2.0 drives
*** Update

So I used to have a Windows 2003 Server in my basement that  took care of my shared drives and backups using robocopy. I then had a “LaCie Ethernet Bigdisk” which really gave me problems and it crashed twice. I also tried Apple’s Airport Extreme and that proved frustrating due to Apple disabling basic features so people will buy OSX server instead…. so I researched every affordable NAS solution and decided to go with:

Its the Synology CS407e and its the most amazing little NAS box around. It holds four SATA drives and supports RAID 0-6. It can serve as a webserver, photo station, FTP server, IP camera server, MP3 station, etc…

I have two 1TR drives setup as RAID 1 and two 500GB also setup as RAID 1 which basically mirrors both drives so if one fails the other still has all your data and it can rebuild a replacement drive. It can also back itself up via rsync or a USB drive (Which I do monthly and keep offsite).

So I was transferring everything from my Win2003 Server and my LaCie bigdisk when I get an email:

Dear user,

Volume 2 on CubeStation is in degraded mode. Please identify the cause of degradation and take corrective action.

To obtain further assistance, please contact Synology Online Support: http://www.synology.com.

Sincerely,
Synology Cube Station

Followed by:

Dear user,

Internal disk 3 on CubeStation has crashed; please replace it.

Sincerely,
Synology Cube Station

How cool is that? I had setup the notifications and it caught one of my old 500GB drives failing. It also beeped and flashed some status lights until I logged in and acknowledged the problems.

The web interface is really polished and fast, its truly worth the $365 (from tigerdirect.com). I’m also happy that this thing doesnt use nearly as much power as my old Windows server.

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Quick way to get Push over gmail to the iPhone is:

Create a free yahoo account and foward your email over to it… You can then set gmail email schedule to “Manual” and yahoo to push (which it already done by default).

You’ll hear the notice/vibration once you get email, you can also respond from Yahoo just remember to switch to your Gmail account when responding.

Its annoying… I know…. but its a free option until Gmail activates Push…

Peace!

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