> The official Epson TWAIN driver exists, but it’s a complex plugin designed for Photoshop

I remember there were free TWAIN hosts that allowed you to use scanner plugins without Photoshop. Could be worth a look.

TWAIN was not limited by PhotoShop, native (and naive) MS application "Scan & Fax" supported it too, and many other raster editors and document organizing applications too.

Also, TWAIN is not Windows-specific! It is (was?) supported on Windows, Linux and macOS. It was not invented by MS or Adobe, but by working group where MS and Adobe doesn't present!

Also, the UX is deliberately user-hostile.

Its only use case seems to be algorithm playlist. It’s an atrocious music player any other way.

Most likely a coincidence, but the article and this thread are so cool I hope they never confirm or deny.

“learned took a CSS course”

Extra word there

Google is institutionally incapable of understanding that some people can speak multiple languages. Only reliable solution I found is to create one account for each language and restrict the number of available languages to just that one in:

https://www.google.com/preferences?lang=1

YouTube is the worst offender these days. I get Portuguese videos auto-dubbed to English and vice-versa even though I can understand both and with no way to disable other than account switching.

It also can't tell Portuguese from Spanish in search queries.

You also need a VPN, otherwise you'll get results in local language anyway

You can now select languages to not auto-translate in YouTube settings.

I didn't realize they finally added a way to sort of control this behavior. It's under Languages in the YouTube settings. Similarly there is a control for captions languages under Captions/Subtitles.

To avoid YouTube auto-dubbing I use https://youtube-no-translation.vercel.app/

Recommended!

Exactly. There’s nothing that comes close to the Adobe suite. Maybe someday an investment similar to what was made in Proton will happen to Wine in general.

Just because one outcome is more likely, doesn't mean we can't actively work to prevent it. Swimming against the tide is sometimes required.

This sounds awesome. Did you ever filmed it working?

Sadly, I did not. I have the source code on an old laptop somewhere. I was disheartened when I considered productizing it and discovered just how deep of a patent tarpit I was dealing with.

It's on my list to revisit in the future. At this point, most of the patents are coming up on expiration, and it would make for a great open source project. Hardware has gotten much better over the subsequent years; there are nicer lower power solutions with integrated Bluetooth LE as well as other low power wireless technologies.

Exactly my thoughts! Where is the youtube video? :D I really want to see it. :)

PDF is also a lot less powerful, purposefully so. You can start an infinite loop just by double-clicking a PS file, for instance.

It is extremely useful to have a full programing language as a file format, though.

I miss macOS’s Preview.app auto-converting PS to PDF when double-clicked. It was a way to easily distribute a document that could randomize question orders each time it opened, print multiple bingo cards from a single file, etc.

The stack-based and reverse Polish notation thing was also fun.

You could have made a deliberately restricted subset of PS without going all binary.

Btw, doesn't PDF include Javascript these days? So you can still randomise stuff at view-time in a PDF. See https://th0mas.nl/2025/01/12/tetris-in-a-pdf/