Waffle

I've been back from my holiday at Aggie's for a week. Aggie has already written up the whole week in her blog, and I don't have anything to add to that. It was a fantastic Christmas.

Since then, I've been back to the grind, and one of the items on the list is getting my A3 scanner to work again. Last time I wrote about it, my PC wasn't recognising the SCSI card. I've since received a potential replacement card that may or may not work; I've also noticed that the BIOS sometimes does notice that there is a SCSI card attached. The reason I haven't tested the new card yet is that the position of the suitable connector is awkward - I'd have to leave the case permanently open to hook the scanner up to it. I'll get to testing it out next week though I don't know yet how I'm going to scan the next comics page yet.

Meanwhile, though, the work has hit a new snag. I have reason to believe that the SCSI cable is also broken. It's a 68-pins High-density SCSI cable built in 1997 and I may have a hard time replacing it. The connectors are 2 1/2 inches (6.3 cm) wide.

The connectors I need

I need a cable with connectors matching those, and I need them from a supplier in the Netherlands, so that I can just go and look at the connectors and check that they are the same. Like I said earlier, this may be a lot of effort to go through just to get a cable, but replacing the scanner would be prohibitively expensive. As would depending on an outside service, in the long run. As I'm doing more pencil art and more single-panel pages lately, splicing artwork together or scanning from reduced copies isn't an option either.

So if you have a cable that looks like the one in the picture, or you know a store that sells them, preferably in Groningen but anywhere in the Netherlands will be all right, please let me know at reinder.dijkhuis@gmail.com or in the comments here. Thank you.

Line art for page 17 (really) of the epilogue for Invasion, shot using my cell phone camera

I'm not out of the woods yet. The desktop PC has a new hard drive, Ubuntu linux is working beautifully including the tablet and Photoshop over Wine, but the scanner is still bust. I got a SCSI card sent to me courtesy of Mithandir and Alien of Chasing the Sunset — Mithandir also set me up with the A3 scanner three and a half years ago — but there's a new problem. Before sending me the card, Mith asked me whether the scanner needed SCSI 1 or 2, and my reply basically amounted to "Moo?". Like most computers everywhere, I know buggerall about SCSI. It's an old, but fast hardware interface with large 68-pins connectors, right?

Wrong.

Once I noticed that the connector at the back of the card wasn't the same as that on the scanner's cable, I did some research. There's a wide range of different connectors. SCSI is still being made and developed, mostly for higher-end systems, but for cheaper systems like the one I bought last march in a rush to replace the studio computer (which has since become the home desktop - I've had a very rough year, computer-wise), getting support will be hard and will become harder in the future.

Why is this important? Because the A3 scanner, antiquated though it is, is still a very nifty device that would take me over fifteenhundred Euro to replace with a similar but newer, USB-based, one. This would effectively wipe out my hardware budget for the next year so that if any other machine breaks, it would have to be replaced in a hurry by another cheap and nasty box that will have more problems within the year like the one I'm typing this on now. Instead of finally moving over to a schedule of smooth, no-interruption replacements of my production hardware before it breaks, I'd have another year of having to react to incidents as they occur, which is exactly the thing that's been frustrating me so much about the computer troubles I've had all year, including the latest hard drive/SCSI card breakage.

It's not hopeless though. When I investigated the card I got in the mail more closely, I noticed there was a 68-pins connector on the side of the card. If the physical chassis allows me to, I might be able to plug that in if I leave the side panel off the system and take the whole shebang out of its niche in my (old and decrepit) computer desk. That's a long-shot though. It presupposes that a) the problem is with the SCSI card in the first place (I still haven't tested that fully, and can't do so without a second box to put the card in); b) the connectors are as compatible as they look; c) it is actually possible with the compact box configuration. We'll see. If the card doesn't work, I'll have to start looking again, and it's going to cost me in both time and money. There may be renewed comic delays.

I've got a new hard drive, and managed to buy a SATA drive this time. I've got Kubuntu linux Hardy Heron running, and because I've reinstalled Kubuntu so often during the past year due to repeated hardware failures, I've found the usual configuration hassles to be pretty bearable. So I'm all set to get back to business as usual, right?

Wrong.

Once Kubuntu was installed, I was initially pleasantly surprised at how fast it booted compared to what I'd got used to. Until I realised that part of the reason it booted so fast was that the SCSI initialisation got skipped in the process. The SCSI card in my machine is there to connect the A3 scanner. Since new A3 scanners are ridiculously expensive, I'll be looking for a new SCSI card for it, in the hope that that will in fact fix the problem. It could be a number of different things and I can't really test for any of them with just one functional desktop PC in the house.

Luckily, I won't have to do any scanning in the next few weeks. Invasion updates are scanned for the next five weeks and all I have to do is finish them up. But it's yet another hurdle to getting Feral back on track. And it's more expense just keeping this system going. I guess I should start a hardware fund and put a hundred Euro or so in it every month. Don't know if I can manage that on top of what I already save... not without seriously tightening the belt anyway.

In more positive news... I've figured out how to make a sidebar appear in individual blog pages... that was rather easy. I can't remember or easily tell what the original source of the solution was but it involved very minor changes in the template code. Now the sidebar's more or less consistent across pages, shows more of what's in the blog to people coming in from search engines, and shows the two ads everywhere. Win.