Scan and scan

Hello there, reporters! Apologies for the missing issue – I took a sick week but I’m back, baby! In fact, this may be the first ever TFR to recommend a piece of hardware rather than software.

Lately I’ve been running around, from government office to government office, scanning documents. I can’t tell you what these documents are, but I can tell you they’re as fun as they look:

The thing on the left is a ScanSnap portable scanner, and one of the biggest marvels I’ve come across recently. It successfully (as in quickly, and beautifully) scans hundreds of pages within seconds. You connect ScanSnap to your computer with a USB, and just like that, you’ll have hundreds of clear, intelligible pages. It even scans both sides at once.

It’s not my typical TFR recommendation. I never thought I would recommend something from the era of the fax machine, but in this case I have to bow down to sheer efficiency. If you work with hard copies often, ScanSnap may be a worthy investment. Good luck!

One more thing...

Did you miss the last TFR? Turn PDFs into workable data with the journo-made Tabula tool