Fitheach

Ceud Mìle Fàilte

Thank you for dropping-by, I hope you enjoy your visit. The main content is to be found in the blog, where I discuss everything and anything, but, topics including: photography, nature, technology, food, movies, music, politics, and life in the Highlands of Scotland, make regular appearances.

I commonly write reviews of movies (or films, if you prefer). Some movie reviews are short, others will be discussed in more detail. The scope covered will be mainly mainstream English language movies from the 1930s until the present day.

About me

My name is Iain MacDonald, and I live in the Highlands of Scotland (although I have lived elsewhere in the past). I use Fitheach as my online pseudonym, on this website, on Mastodon, and on Matrix. I am a big fan of Free & Open Source Software, which I use both professionally and at home.

Computing and technology tend to infuse themselves into my other interests, as once you learn some skills in one area it is convenient to use them to solve problems in other spheres.

When not tinkering with computers, I am likely to be found repairing things because living in the countryside you learn to be resourceful.

Of course, man doesn't live by SSH tunnels and kerosene vapour burners alone, so, food, as a subject, makes regular appearances, too.

My latest Life articles

My most recent ramblings can be found in the Life section.

My latest Mastodon posts

Mastodon is a microblogging app that is part of the decentralised web known as The Fediverse. See this article for more details.

Fitheach

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 12:13:03 +0000

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Consequently, I'm probably going to operate the IBM as a headless scanner server, and access the Epson using the SANE net backend. Using my Thinkpad will be very convenient.

Attached is an example scan from a monochrome negative, taken with an Zeiss Ikonta 521/16 medium format camera. It shows two farmers, and two heavy horses (Clydesdales?), harvesting potatoes on the Isle of Skye, circa 1949.

I will post further interesting example photos.

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Sun, 14 Jun 2026 11:48:25 +0000

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I decided that there may be a hardware fault on the Epson's USB connection. Luckily, the Epson also has a Firewire interface. Not so luckily, I only have one PC with a Firewire interface, a really old IBM Netvista Pentium III 993. On the plus side, the IBM is built like a tank, & is very reliable.

Within 2 minutes of powering-up the PC and Epson I had SANE working. The Firewire configuration was simple, & just worked.

SANE has a nice feature whereby it can be accessed over the LAN.

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Sun, 14 Jun 2026 11:32:42 +0000

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I'm going to use SANE on Debian with the Epson scanner. When I originally got the Epson it was the age of the scanner module for 2.4 kernels. This always worked well. The dawn of 2.6 kernels saw the intro of libusb. For some reason, I always found getting my scanner and libusb working was a struggle. I had hoped to use my scanner with the Lex Light that I used for the Star TSP700. However, I couldn't get it to work. The Epson on USB wasn't recognised on any PC

sane-project.org/

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Sun, 14 Jun 2026 11:19:51 +0000

I'm a photographer. My father and his father were also photographers. This was back in the day when it meant something to be a photographer. Nowadays, of course, everyone is a photographer. 😃

Neither my father or grandfather are with us any longer. So, I have a huge archive of photographic prints, slides and negatives that I would like to digitise.

For my first pass at this project I'm going to be using an Epson Perfection 2450 flat-bed scanner.

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Fri, 12 Jun 2026 14:17:11 +0000

I was in Glenfinnan, to-day. It was the perfect example of tourism gone mad. The use of the Jacobite Steam Train in the Harry Potter movies has resulted in the village being inundated with people wanting to photograph the locomotive. Every car park was full, and people had ditched their cars in any available spot, regardless whether it was safe, or not. Residents were charging £10 for one hours parking in their driveways. After the train passed through, half the cars left.

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Tue, 09 Jun 2026 09:19:25 +0000

It's not everywhere that the road traffic is stopped while yachts cross the highway. 😆

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