NEX-3 and NEX-5 coming in July, and an interchangeable lens camcorder in the fall (Sneak Peek: New Sony Camcorder in Development).
I'm not sure what the camcorder will offer over and above the NEX cameras, but to a person living in the bright environs of northern New Mexico that optional optical viewfinder on the digicams is really appealing. SDHC/SDXC memory card support and automatic HDR look nice, too.
When I scan receipts and invoices with my Canon LIDE 600F, OS X's Spotlight somehow, magically, is able to find them based on their text content. But I'm just scanning the documents, not running OCR software on them.
For example, this morning I scanned the receipt for my new MacBook, so I could send it in for a shipping rebate. Just for grins I then did a Spotlight search for "MacBook". There it was, near the top of the list.
mdls showed that "MacBook" didn't appear anywhere in the file's metadata. And the filename, "File0001.PDF", certainly didn't match. Yet somehow mdfind identified it as a match.
Searching for the string "MacBook" in the PDF turned up nothing. (Granted, I used 'strings -a' to extract the strings, and that command is ASCII only.)
Google, and David Creemer, provided the answer. Creemer also showed that the text in "CanoScanned" documents is selectable in Preview.app.
What's going on? It seems that the CanoScan Toolbox application is automatically performing OCR when it finishes scanning documents. For more info see zachary.com : Easy and cheap PDF Document Management (with OCR) on Mac OS X.
Synergy kudos to Canon and Apple!
Can it be that our Westinghouse service saga is finally at an end?
Yesterday Westinghouse finally sent us a replacement for our defective LVM37w3.
The new unit is probably a refurb. The serial number is definitely different from that of the one we sent in for repair, and it displays a different message when a new video source is detected.
For the record, it took 55 days for Westinghouse to repair/replace our broken monitor. With that kind of turn-around time, I'd have to advise any prospective buyer to go with a different brand.
Last year we bought a Westinghouse LVM37w3. It's a great monitor, and it does a great job of displaying output from a Sony HD camcorder.
Well, it used to. Early this spring it started flaking out. After it had been on for awhile the backlight would suddenly go out, leaving us with audio and a pitch-black screen. To get the picture back we had to cycle the thing off and on again.
After reading a few anecdotes online, which claimed that others had cured this problem by resetting to factory defaults, we gave it a try. The change was noticeable. Now, as soon as the monitor was powered up, the backlight would go out.
Luckily the monitor was still, barely, under warranty. We called Westinghouse tech support (1-866 -287-5555), who said they would call us with an RMA number within a couple of days.
After a week, tired of waiting, I called them again. They had the RMA number and claimed they had left it on our answering machine. I wonder whose answering machine they really left it on, but no matter: we shipped off the unit at considerable expense (a couple hundred dollars).
It has been gone since May 3rd. Checking the status of the unit has been painful: call Westinghouse tech support, ask for a status update, hear the poor staffer on the other end explain that (s)he needs to submit a status request to the warehouse and to call back in two or three days.
For the past two weeks the answer has come back that the monitor has been repaired, but is still listed as "processing" by the warehouse. They will call me as soon as they have a UPS Ground tracking number. (They haven't called yet.) If I don't hear from them within a week, please call again for an update.
Something sure seems fishy here. Or at least incompetent.
