DC member brahman has posted a giant review on scanning using the software program VueScan:

"Since scanning became a minor hobby, I followed the development of VueScan for about 10 years -- occasionally (every couple of years) downloading the trial. This application has now reached a degree of maturity that I decided to do a deeper review for the DonationCoder community. Since VueScan in its expert mode can be quite daunting, some tutorial elements and walk throughs are included so that the reader can feel more at home even with some of the more obscure settings and get a very rich scanning experience out of VueScan. The more I worked on it the more I felt that the review should become even more holistic by also discussing selected software (like scanner utilities,  e-book post processing, and sharpening) and hardware (color calibration targets and monitor calibration devices) that I found over the years which really help a lot to produce great scans in the most effortless way. Then my review grew bigger and bigger - as is the nature of life - until I finally decided to split it in several parts, the first installment you will get to enjoy now."

Part I of the review tutorial deals with an introduction to VueScan, its features, document- and book scanning.

Part II to be published soon will discuss VueScan's color management, profiling, and raw scanning abilities plus more hints and tips and more great software that complements VueScan.

Machinarium is going on sale for only $5.00 as part of Amanita Design's "Machinarium Pirate Amnesty" week. click on the link to find out more..

http://machinarium.n...rium-pirate-amnesty/

This is so wonderful..

The theme for this casual online game competition was "Sandbox Games", and i can't wait to check some of these out.

The competition period will span 3 weeks during which all the entries will be judged by members of the JIG community. If you wish to be a judge, please read the rules and sign up here.

http://jayisgames.com/cgdc8/

Interesting article from  the WSJ  July 30, 2010

The Web's New Gold Mine: Your Secrets
A Journal investigation finds that one of the fastest-growing businesses on the Internet is the business of spying on consumers. First in a series.

http://online.wsj.co...ifeStyle_LeadStoryNA

A DC member asks:

"First off, I'd be very grateful to anyone who may do this. I've tried to read up some about how to do this using AHK but don't know where to begin.

What it would do: You select a file and press a hotkey (left winkey & C would be nice) it then copies the filename eg: image.jpg to clipboard and prefixes a set url to it.
End result would hopefully be hxxp://examplewebsite.info/image.jpg that you could use the normal ctrl+v to paste into an IM window.
It would be very nice for those who have a little web server off a home computer and send links to friends/family very often. It saves quite a bit of time in the long run. In the past year I've taken over 3,800 screenshots and linked every single one of them by typing out the full url and file name by hand.
Preferably in .ahk rather than .exe so the url can be easily edited."