I keep a super-sized Mustek A3 1200 USB scanner around for big scanning jobs. Its antiquated driver works fine in Windows XP, but when I want to use it on my Macbook, I had to virtualize Windows just to scan (Mustek’s drivers are ancient). Tonight I discovered that while the TWAIN driver for Photoshop CS4 doesn’t see the scanner when run as a native Intel application, if I check the “Open using Rosetta” box in Photoshop’s properties then run the application, the A3 1200 USB is sitting there happily in my Import/Export list. Life is happiness indeed. No stitching together partial-page scans for me!

Of couse, now I wonder if I could have been doing this all along, and I merely stumbled upon it while configuring CS4.

Once upon a time, I put a tiny Windows machine inside an Apple III’s case. See this page for details.

At long last, I’ve hacked open a few mice and made a matching one-button mouse with the innards of a Logitech optical USB mouse. Sure, it can only left-click, but that’s part of the charm!

By the way, I switched the Logitech mouse to a blue diode in 2002 just to see if I could. It wasn’t part of the project this time. Yes, the accuracy suffers a little. This is part of why I chose to cannibalize it for the Compy III project.

Last weekend, I convinced my uncle to help me make a small set of Tetris-style shelves. The plans can be found at Instructables. Between my uncle and me we made the following modifications:

• Used biscuits on all the corners in addition to glue and nails. This makes the corners more stable and is particularly helpful on the unsupported concave corners of the L, S, and T pieces.
• Used 10″ clear (no knots) pine planks instead of the 8″ used by the author. I did this because I wanted to also store books and records that are deeper than the DVD/Game cases the author planned to store.

After sanding, we finished with Watco Danish Oil (Natural flavor). The can lied, though, and it was more than 8 hours until they were ready to use. It was closer to 36 before the surfaces stopped being oily and I was comfortable putting books on them.

I’m tremendously excited to have these finished, and I’m very grateful to my uncle for all his work on the project. Perhaps next year I’ll add a few more pieces to the collection!

There’s a strange building under construction at my bus stop downtown. It’s in the parking lot of an empty storefront, and it has no foundation. The contractors call it a movie set, and said “they” are going to “crash cars into it”. I’ll update if I learn more.

We have an undergrad intern at my company this summer working on some illustrations for one of our projects. She’s using Illustrator CS3 with an older USB Wacom Intuos tablet (ours) on a MacBook (hers). She installed the driver from Wacom’s website, and for the most part the tablet worked fine. However, when she tried to create a pressure-sensitive Caligraphic Brush, she found all the pressure-related options grayed out in the configuration dialog.

A quick review of Google results revealed a collection of useless leads. Forums tended to have people ask the question, only to have it go unsolved. I’m bothering to blog about this in the hope that someone else will find it, and my solution will work for them.

In the Wacom Pref Pane in System Preferences, it lists all installed tablets at the top of the page. Below that, it lists available “Tools” for the selected tablet. I noticed that our intern’s driver had two of the same 6×8 Intuos installed, and while one of them had a pen listed in Tools, the other only listed the function buttons. We hit the [ - ] button to remove the penless tablet, leaving only the copy with the pen. After a restart, Illustrator recognized the pen’s presence, and the grayed out options were restored.

If you’re having this problem and that doesn’t help, good luck in your search for an answer. Expect to find a lot of “reinstall the driver/Illustrator.”