The Groundhog DID NOT see his shadow!  It’s an Early Spring!

Copyright 2013 Mark Szorady. Distributed by georgetoon.com

It’s Groundhog Day!  C’mon early Spring!

Starting at the arrow, left click, hold your mouse button, and pull it to the right to reveal the answer.)============> Answer: Phil.  His full name is Punxsutawney Phil.

Copyright 2013 Mark Szorady. Distributed by Georgetoon.com

The Hollywood awards season is once again in full gear!  We thought today’s “I Knew That!” would fit right in.

Starting at the arrow, left click, hold your mouse button, and pull it to the right to reveal the answer.)============> Answer: The Golden Globes.

I picked up this hand scanner from the Home Shopping Network. It’s the Vupoint Magic Wand 3 Hand scanner.  I looked around and found that HSN offered the best bundled deal.  The scanner came with additional Windows software, but because I run Linux, I don’t have much need for it.    Still, I  may pass the software disk to a niece of nephew looking for graphic applications.

This thing is great for scanning anything!  Scan text from books, illustrations and photos from magazines, old photos, scrapbook pages, and in my case, cartoons!

I sometimes use it to scan my cartoons.  Especially my comic strip George.  (I don’t have access to my large format scanner. I’m using a flat bed scanner that can’t anything larger than 11 inches.)  With this hand scanner, I can simply run it along the length of my comic strip and I’ve got it scanned!  Or, if there’s a power outage, I can at least scan my artwork and save it digitally until my computer is back up and running.  Or, simply boot my laptop and continue working on battery power.  Plus it’s portable.  I can take it with my laptop and draw and scan while on the road.

After scanning, simply plug it into your computer’s USB port and copy all the scans to the hard drive for further editing.

I scan mostly in B&W at 600 DPI.   But this scanner handles color up to 1050 DPI (I misspoke in the video when I said 1200 DPI. Sorry).  But I’ve found, for my purposes, 600 DPI is plenty.

If a flatbed scane is too pricey, or, like me,  you need a backup scanning tool, check out the  Vupoint Magic Wand 3 Hand scanner.

I’m in a makeshift studio for the time being.  I didn’t want o move my main computer in just yet. So, i decided to grab the spare computer box out of the attic and use it instead.

I added an extra gig of memory (2 gigs no) , and a Wi-fi card.  I then installed PCLinuxOS.  15 minutes later, I have a brand new computer.  this the latest and greatest Linux OS running KDE from PCLinuxOS.

The OS is free, all the software is free, and everything is open source.  PCLinuxOS installed in a snap and found all my hardware.  Within minutes, I was able to get right to work and edit my cartoon features.

Don’t throw out that old computer box.  Just get Linux.