the big problem with my technology questions and hacking impulses is that they're all based on making 15 year old technology work with modern technology. i got our ancient a3 scanner to work with mac a long while back just by downloading the latest drivers, but on windows 10 it just sounds like it's tearing itself apart
i feel like on the old internet there was probably a guy with an angelfire page about how to write a whole TWAIN driver. on the new internet i find nothing but abandoned forum posts asking the same question, OR questionable third party driver suppliers trying to get me to download their updater app
tbh i feel like the internet as a whole used to be better at answering questions. maybe that weird hobbyist angelfire page is still out there but the search engine game has been effectively fucked by commercial SEO 🙃
@vfrmedia yeah even for the stuff i was looking for data on (an old flatbed scanner) basically i found a bunch of third party driver sites that wanted me to download their app to get presumably the same outdated first-party driver i already had
@wolfteeth Back in '96-7 (beginnings of anglefire) we would practically need to be told the url, coz altavista et al were so stuffed with simplistic (successful) attempts at SEO just be mentioning words over and over to the web crawlers.
It is actually much better now.
@gemlog i remember sites needed to manually request to be listed in search engines in those days! i always found good stuff back then but also i was like 12 so the answers i needed tended to be pretty simple i guess
@wolfteeth If you want to get answers to anything on the internet you have to hope someone answered it already on a forum before 2009 or (here at least) you have to join a dedicated facebook group about the issue and hope the algorithm doesn't screw you over.
@wolfteeth for "old skool" electronics (especially searching out datasheets for 1980s era components) it has become horrendous, so much is hidden/duplicated under ad ridden rubbish or even paywalls or other clearly bad things that demand some info like an email address (for spam) or registration before handing over the info (and you are not even sure if that might be a good PDF file or something with malware)