If Wired Magazine is to be believed, I am obsolete. Or, rather, much of my equipment is. Charlie Sorrel lists “five useless gadgets you should toss in the trash right now.” The list includes printers, scanners, built-in optical drives, fax machines and land line phones. How many of you have some or all of these gadgets lying around your home or office? Do you use them? Regularly? Mr. Sorrel has a reason why each of these items is unnecessary. While that is all well and good for Mr. Sorrel, can anyone help me with my dilemma and explain how you can fax a paper document without either a scanner or a fax machine?
Nov
8
2008
I don’t think Mr. Sorrel has thought this stuff through very well. I notice he exempts “offices” from the folks who should ditch their printer – wise that since we who work for a living do still need to print stuff. And so does my mom – on her home machine.
As for using your cameraphone as a scanner…I submit Mr. Sorrel probably hasn’t really done much of that. When I have a 10 page document I need to scan and send to somebody I’ll be darned if I’m going to take the time to lay it all out, take 10 separate JPEGS of the document with a camera phone, hope they all come out o.k. retake two of them because the salt shaker showed up in the picture (because I had to lay the pages out on my dining room table), get all those JPEGS onto a computer, collate them…awww forget it. I’ll just put them in the 50-sheet document feeder on my HP all-in-one and let it scan them directly to PDF in a matter of a minute or two.
Finally I guess you don’t need an optical drive if you get all your software from BitTorrent. But for those of us who still sometimes get software on media…
-B-