Waffle

I have a working SCSI card again, and though it uses a different cable configuration than I described earlier, I know what cable that is and where to find it. I may balk a bit at the cost but will probably put in the order soon, as the alternatives aren't too appealing. I have had a few items scanned at a local scanner service, but at a price of € 5 a scan and a maximum resolution of 400 DPI (NOT good enough for archiving or indeed for submission to a professionally printed magazine), the cable price becomes worth paying very quickly.

It may still be a few days before I can scan at home again, and today after testing the card, I spent some time exploring yet another alternative: all-digital drawing. I've had tablets for years, and do a lot of work with them, but until today, I had never created more than a doodle from scratch in any art software. Today, I changed that by drawing this:

It was a bit awkward for me to work on as I found it hard to draw some of the curves. I undid the jawline a few dozen times before getting one that was good enough. But the result, while flawed, is flawed in pretty much the same ways as my hand-drawn work, so for a first attempt, it's very encouraging. The image is used in the new cast pages on Modern Tales and I will try and do a full-body portrait this weekend. Total time less than an hour and likely to get faster with practice.

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.

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.