Odds & Ends: FireWire vs. USB scanners; nVidia glitch;

Epson and OmniPage; more FireWire vs. USB scanners: speed difference minimal? Gordon Wolford suggests that a FireWire scanner may not be as much faster than a USB scanner as you might expect (see previous related item). It may instead turn out that the scanning speed, not the transfer speed, is the limiting factor. For example, in a test Gordon did, a scan took 333 seconds via USB and 307 seconds via FireWire.

Update: Michael Corbin had somewhat better results. A scan that took 77 seconds via USB took only 31 via FireWire.

Epson/Photoshop tip gets OmniPage working Regarding our prior coverage of tips for getting Epson scanners to work with Photoshop 7 in OS X, Jim Stegbauer replies: "After following the instructions not only does Photoshop 7 work using Twain but so does Adobe ImageReady 7.0. The biggest surprise was that now Twain 5 is recognized in OmniPage Pro X and OmniPage Direct OCR in OS X!" Another reader confirmed this.

nVidia flash problem Postings on this Apple's Discussion Boards thread regarding the "flash" glitch when using nVidia Geforce4MX cards, continue to grow. It now has over 800 posts. There is still no official resolution from Apple. [See also our previous coverage.]

Apple DVD-R media: 1x vs. 2x write speeds: a follow-up Regarding yesterday's item on 1x and 2x DVD-R media from Apple, Kelvin Pang writes that he could burn at 2X speed using the 1X media. However, he adds: "I had recently upgraded the firmware of my stock SuperDrive (DVR-103) to version 1.68 from an un-endorsed patch. Before the upgrade, the firmware was at 1.33 and only allowed DVD-Rs to be written at 1X speed." Bruce Strange was also able to record at 2X with the 1X media.

Dead iPod "solution" This page describes a problem with a dead iPod, why it happened, and how the user fixed it. Try at your own risk.

Icons with bars: a work-around? Regarding the symptom where Finder icons appear with black bars (as confirmed in this Apple KB document and previously noted on MacFixIt), Kent Durvin offers this work-around: "I pasted a custom icon on one drive, and then deleted it. There were still bars on my other drives until I touched each drive icon.

Update: Bruce Turner notes that relaunching the Finder is also a temporary work-around.