Pither.com

I'm a little late with this entry as Edward was Christened just over a month ago now! However I did want to say that we did all survive, even Liz managed not to have a heart attack from the stress!

It was actually a lovely day, for the weather, the service and to see so much family and a few friends (sadly we didn't have space for too many) join us to celebrate Edward.

Thank you very much to Liz's parents for hosting and to Liz's Mum for preparing much of the food.

Just for the record here we are in our posh frocks...

Xsane does do this, but it's an awful lot of clicks, even between pages and that's after you've got to the right screen and before you eventually output the file.

So here's a simple bash script to the rescue...

#!/bin/bash

export DEVICE="device, use 'scanimage -L' to see list"

echo Pages: $1
echo Filename: $2

FILENAME_BASE="/tmp/$2"

for (( i = 1; $i <= $1; i++ )); do
        echo Press ENTER to scan page $i
        read
        export FILENAME="$FILENAME_BASE.page.$i"
        scanimage -d "$DEVICE" > "$FILENAME.pnm"
        pnmtops --width=8.27 --height=11.69 "$FILENAME.pnm" > "$FILENAME.ps"
        FILELIST[$i - 1]="$FILENAME.ps"
done

gs -sDEVICE=pswrite "-sOutputFile=$FILENAME_BASE.ps" -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH "${FILELIST[@]}"
ps2pdf "$FILENAME_BASE.ps" "$2.pdf"

for f in "${FILELIST[@]}"; do
        rm "$f"
done
rm "$FILENAME_BASE.ps"

Just give it the number of pages to scan and the output file name to use (without .pdf). It will prompt you for each page to be ready (I don't have a document feeder), scan them, combine them and convert it all to a PDF.

It does have a number of dependency utilities, but I already had them all installed and this was only a quick hack so I've not made a list.

Having failed to find the option in the GIMP to create colour mapped PNG files, I have just had to discover a couple of handy commands...

pngnq - tool for optimizing PNG (Portable Network Graphics) images pngcrush - optimizes PNG (Portable Network Graphics) files

The first of these takes a RGB PNG and gives back a colour mapped (by default, 256 colours) image.

The second takes those images (or RGB format ones too) and crushes them by about 20% (on the images I have been using today).

So the 22k file that GIMP created is now about 9k!

Is there actually such a thing as a small family?

I thought mine was fairly small with no more than three children in any family unit. Yet I'm still managing to account for nearly half of the 60-ish guests we're expecting at Edward's christening tomorrow!

I guess 60 isn't really a very large number. Yet when you start thinking about making 120 sandwiches it does seem to take on a far larger feeling.

Still, I think we're just about prepared, Liz has spent half the day writing lists of things we need to take, we collected a fantastic cake yesterday that my Aunty Joy made and I have my cameras on charge.

So I'm sure that tomorrow will flow easily, smoothly and in a completely stress free fashion....

A few days ago we finally migrated Edward to his cot.

Prior to this he had been sleeping in a moses basket, but he recently got to the stage where he could push with his feet and knock his head into the other end! For a while he's been looking rather cramped width-wise. This moses basket is supposed to be "Suitable from birth to approx. 3-4mths (or until babys starts to pull himself/herself upright)". He's certainly not pulling himself upright yet. Although we probably should have moved Edward out of it as he turned two months and we've had to move him only a couple of weeks after that.

This crazy baby growth has been echoed in various other areas too. He's been in 3-6 month clothes for a little while and some of his socks are 6-12 months! Some of this is definitely down to Edward being quite large, but I do think that a good part of it is due to manufacturers having totally different opinions of what size certain aged babies should be.

He's also having a good go at putting on weight faster than the muscles in Liz and my arms can increase their ability too!

At least he's got some growing space left in his cot... :-)

A couple of weeks ago Edward started to sleep through one of his normal night time feeds. He hasn't managed this every night since, but hasn't been far off.

The unfortunate part is that he doesn't seem to have quite worked out when "night" is yet. He has taken it upon himself to become comatose from around 5 or 6 in the evening, waking again at around 4 in the "morning"! :-(

Perhaps if we keep the TV on really loud for an extra few hours in the evening it will help sort him out!?

Now we just need to find time to actually watch the TV!

:-)