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Skyhawk128 writes: "I was in my local Radio Shack yesterday, and as I was checking out, the manager offered me a free barcode scanner to use with their new catalog. By hooking up the scanner to your PS2 keyboard port and installing their software (Windows only) you can scan the bar codes found on most pages and be taken a web page with expanded information about that product. They claim to be able to scan the bar code on all sorts of things (i.e.- UPC codes on food, etc.) I have been too busy playing with the scanner in Notepad to install the software, but I thought this gadget might be of interest to other geeks." Several folks have confirmed that you can get a free barcode reader if you're into it. P'raps a SANE module shall soon follow? [Note from timothy:] Not all RS locations are giving them out yet -- the nearest one to me, despite telling me otherwise on the phone, refused to give me one until they had the new (bar-coded) catalogs in stock. That's at Chatham Station shopping center in Howard County, MD.

Chacham asks: "There's a lot of scanners out there, and I'd like to buy one. I first checked the Ask Slashdot archives and found this, but at over a year old I thought it might be good for an update. I'm looking for a SCSI, Linux supported, color scanner. Although price will eventually play a role in which I purchase (probably up to US $500), I would like to hear comments with emphasis on quality. Speed is nice, but unless it's super slow, I'll go for quality. Deja lists scanners in a poll but it doesn't look like there are enough submissions for a real comparison. I was looking at SANE supported scanners. Many are listed as alpha or beta, and only a few as stable. I've been hearing good things about HP scanners, but with alpha support under SANE, I'm not so sure it's a good idea. Although, I guess I don't need to use SANE; are there other good packages out there? "

Chacham asks: "There's a lot of scanners out there, and I'd like to buy one. I first checked the Ask Slashdot archives and found this, but at over a year old I thought it might be good for an update. I'm looking for a SCSI, Linux supported, color scanner. Although price will eventually play a role in which I purchase (probably up to US $500), I would like to hear comments with emphasis on quality. Speed is nice, but unless it's super slow, I'll go for quality. Deja lists scanners in a poll but it doesn't look like there are enough submissions for a real comparison. I was looking at SANE supported scanners. Many are listed as alpha or beta, and only a few as stable. I've been hearing good things about HP scanners, but with alpha support under SANE, I'm not so sure it's a good idea. Although, I guess I don't need to use SANE; are there other good packages out there? "

Quite a few submissions have come in about parallel port scanners, but Quicker was the first to ask a question generic post (others were about specific scanners, but they neglected to include models and manufacturers) : "I'm looking for a scanner for my Linux box, and the only support I see is for various SCSI scanners, namely HP, which is fine, but they are expensive. I see all these less expensive (but lower quality) parallel port scanners and would like to get one, since they are good enough for what I do. Anyone working on support for these devices?" SANE supports Plustek Parallel Port scanners, but I don't know if there are any other parallel port drivers in that project. Can anyone shed more light on this subject?

magnificus writes "There is a new release of S.A.N.E available at It's version 1.0. " H: For those of you got it already, a fix for v1.0 was put up on 22 Nov, so check the page out.

magnificus writes "There is a new release of S.A.N.E available at It's version 1.0. " H: For those of you got it already, a fix for v1.0 was put up on 22 Nov, so check the page out.