Embassytown by China Miéville
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Not bad, Mr. Mieville, not bad. I didn’t know if I’d like a non-Bas-Lag book by China Mieville, but Embassytown was a very interesting world.

Set in a world far, far in the future long after the human diaspora (after faster-than-light travel is discovered), Embassytown tells the story of a group of humans who have taken residence on a planet inhabited by a race they call only the “Hosts.” The name is given in deference to the permission the humans have obtained to live on the Hosts’ planet — a permission obtained with some difficulty, since the Hosts’ do not recognise other creatures than themselves as being sentient.

There’s also a brief B-plot about the “Immer,” which sounds a lot like the “Immaterium” present in the Warhammer 40K universe… :p Basically it’s a sort of sub-space that a craft can enter to travel long distances — very, very long distances, such as from galaxy to galaxy, halfway across the universe. The main character is one of the rare people who can pilot ships through the Immer, as most peoples’ minds go “slack” and they vomit uncontrollably the entire time they’re inside of it.

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After six months or so of being wowed by a little portable scanner in a doctor’s office, the spouse and I finally decided to buy one.  I wanted one that’s compatible with Ubuntu, since that’s our main OS around home, so I did a little research, and found some info about the Plustek Opticslim m12 (it’s the same model that the “NeatReceipts” company rebrands for their own scanners).

Found one on Ebay, bought it (for 1/3 of the price of a NeatReceipts model), and plugged it in… and of course it didn’t work.  This is the world of Ubuntu with proprietary peripherals, of course.  The “Simple Scan” program that’s built-into Ubuntu recognized the make and model, oddly enough, but it wouldn’t scan, throwing up an error message whenever I tried.

I did a little bit of searching, and found a site that talked about it: http://www.fishandcross.com/blog/?p=844

Apparently, all you need to do is download the driver file mentioned from the site at http://gkall.hobby.nl/gt6816-07b3-0412.html and copy it to your /usr/share/sane/gt68xx folder.  Then, just start up the Simple Scan program again, and scan away!  Works really well — doesn’t auto-crop or anything like the provided Windows software does, but that’s cool.  I’ll take it.

To Visitors:  If you’re visiting this page, trying to find information about how to get this scanner to work, and you’re trying it years after this article was written, I can’t guarantee these instructions will work — if you know Ubuntu, stuff changes from version to version sometimes.  Hacks and fixes that’ll work one year won’t always work the next.