Die Ignoranz von Microsoft ihren Kunden gegenüber ist ungebrochen. Jemand da, den diese Nachricht überrascht? Nein? Dachte ich mir.
Ich bekam jedenfalls heute eine Powerpoint Präsentation von Microsoft per Mail. Also, sowohl die Präsentation als auch die Mail waren von Microsoft.
Haha. Or not. But: I got myself a new scanner yesterday. I went totally lowcost (a CanoScan LiDE 25) as I only need to scan stuff (mainly for the web) now and again. Besides, my last Mustek scanner (parallel port! ECP/EPP anyone?) was a gift from a friend back in … uhm … 1998 or 1999 or so … and it served me well till a few month ago.
Anyway, so I got this scanner yesterday, threw the CD away instantly, downloaded the tiny WIA driver and everything worked out of the box. (!!)
Today I figured I’d do a little “resolution test” and scan something really hi-res. Like … a banknote. I wasn’t completely naive about it and something about “scanning money” rang a bell — I vaguely remembered having read about countermeasures in consumer products but I had yet to see it. So I put a 20-Euro bill onto the glass, weighed it down with a book. Found the sticker on the box is lying: 600 dpi is not 2.400×1.200 dpi. So far — not surprising. Waited for the ~14MB to be squeezed over USB 1.1 (I said “lowcost”, did I not?). Fired up the graphics software and there it was:
Although being quite a bit on the early adopter side, I’ve never been knee-deep into video formats at all. I can tell a codec from a codex, been playing around with divx and sorts but that’s about it.
Today I was asked if I could “make this video be on that webpage“. WTF?! Simply embedding an .mpg was a no-go right away, I hate it when people do that, it looks crappy and at least on windows platforms it is never completely hassle-free.
Yet another Microsoft tool which doesn’t look all that bad at first sight! Windows Live Writer is a somewhat like a blog-enabled wordprocessing software. The interface is intuitive and I have yet to see an easier setup: Enter your blog’s URL, username and password (you may want to create a dedicated ‘author’ user just in case….) and off you go: Live writer will detect you’re using wordpress and find all necessary settings automagically.
Working with Live Writer reveals some major drawbacks right at the first post: while picture handling basically works OK’ish (e.g. pictures are resampled if you scale them — no feeble-minded scaling with height/width tags), the tool cannot left/right align pictures nor can you add hyperlinks to pictures (WTF?) and the picture upload doesn’t follow the (configurable) wordpress scheme (the pictures end up in strange ‘livewriter’ sub-sub-sub-folders.
You can however open and edit older posts from the blog and categories seem to be fully supported — but that’s about it.
So, if you don’t fancy the wordpress built-in ‘visual rich text editor’ you might want to give this tool a try, although I’d strongly advise against opening existing posts which are too complex or trying to blog with hyperlinked and/or aligned pictures in a post.
And as you probably need to do some final ‘finetuning’ online anyway I personally don’t really see the point in using this tool. Sorry, Redmond.