Manualslib – Database of More Than 2.6M Manuals
manualslib.com
manualslib.com
1. Go to the manufacturer's web site, if they still exist, and see if they have a manual there
2. Search Google for "MODEL# pdf". Wade through pages of pond scum search engine spam and paid sites for a half hour. Apparently, enough people search for manuals to make this profitable.
3. Do some web research to find similar product model numbers (maybe 8029A manual would cover 8029B too?) and repeat 1-2 above.
4. Start searching through forums and other hard-to-index parts of the web.
5. Check torrent sites? (now I'm getting desperate!)
It's crazy how tough it can be to find a user manual. In many cases, I end up finding one scanned by another end-user and posted online to be helpful. It's also a shame that 1/2 the comments here are about copyright. I can't see how taking a site like this down would in any way benefit a manufacturer whose manual is available. Unless the manufacturer is trying to make money selling their user manual, in which case to hell with that shitty company.
Will point to manualslib.com if it is comprehensive.
it sounded interesting so i downloaded it. there was a prompt to add items to a wishlist after starting it... i was only able to monitor the price of the added item afterwards. there was no mention about any user feedback, youtube videos or manuals anywhere i could find after a cursory look.
sorry for the ninja edit on my previous comment. i didn't see your response before i rewrote it. i kept the meaning, just clarified my point a little.
has worked every time for me
Not that hard
Don't know if that's the exact syntax but I've definitely done it before somehow, on mobile rn
Companies like John Deere exist, who don't even want you to repair your own equipment...
This is part of a larger project to significantly reduce the amount of paper that I'm keeping, which is why I'm using a document management system as opposed to a Dropbox folder. My goal is to divide the mounds of paper into things I need to keep for a long time (e.g., tax documents), and things that I can shred after a year (e.g., bills, receipts, etc). In all cases, I want the documents searchable and backed up.
I'm terrible at organizing paper, and it's like a plague.
My plan is to step up to something like a Brother ADS-1000W[0] or ADS-1500W[1]. I also hear good things about Fujitsu ScanSnap scanners, but those are USB only. If you step up to Fujitsu's fi series you can get a network interface, but I think they're more expensive than the Brother models I'm looking at.
Regardless of the brand and model, the required features are that it has a document feeder, scans both sides of the page, and that it can save the output to a server without needing a computer to mediate it. The Brother scanners have WiFi and can save directly to an FTP server - Mayan can pick up PDFs from a filesystem directory, so it would be pretty easy to have stuff go right from the scanner into Mayan.
[0] https://www.brother.ca/en-CA/Scanners/11/ProductDetail/ADS10...
[1] https://www.brother.ca/en-CA/Scanners/11/ProductDetail/ADS15...
I hadn't thought about using WiFi --> FTP. That's a pretty handy feature. I run Linux, and there is a lot of great hardware that is barely functional on Linux, especially from the likes of Brother.
I've thought about bringing paper to a staples to scan, or paying a scanning service to scan everything. The benefit of the latter is that they'll preserve your filing system and name your files for you. We went paperless at work, and they can be pretty expensive per document unless you have a ton of paper for them to scan.
Thanks for that though - I'm hoping it's available in Australia. I was previously looking at the Fuji Xerox DM4440 series which are much more expensive.
- backups. I plan on using it to go paperless and keep tax returns etc. I can't afford to lose that info, but I can't come up with a robust enough backup plan. How are you doing it?
- concurrency. It runs on a 8 years old home server, and when I scan multiple pages documents, the ocr slows down to a crawl. Have you run into this?
OCR is going to be CPU bound, so the solution seems obvious.
My ideal solution is to have everything backed up "in the cloud" plus have a backup at home. So far I've got the home backup happening - every machine uses 'attic' to back up onto my NAS. I'm still figuring out what the "in the cloud" side looks like.
One thing you can do is keep copies of important documents elsewhere - like Dropbox, a USB drive in a safe deposit box, etc. It all depends on what technologies you trust and how much you trust them.
For OCR, I can't say I've had much trouble with it. Mayan breaks the PDFs into pages, then feeds each page to tesseract. All of that happens in a worker process and I haven't found that it has a significant impact on the use of Mayan. The OCR section for the document will be incomplete for a while though.
[0] http://mayan.readthedocs.io/en/v2.1.4/topics/backups.html
For the OCR, my issue is that if I import several documents Mayan will feed them all to tesseract in parallel. Then I have two available cores, but 40 tesseract workers and the system comes down because it runs out of RAM and CPU. How did you set up your OCR?
Maybe something changed at some point to limit the active workers to the number of cores.
[0] http://mayan.readthedocs.io/en/stable/topics/deploying.html
Is there some way to pay to remove the watermark? Is that how this works, these manuals are effectively just free previews?
I wish every manual was mandated to come with QR-code or at least short URL to its own electronic version.
The PDF has been OCR scanned and allows searching. This is way easier than ordering the manual from a reseller. Copy to cloud, and now I have online copy of the manual always in my pocket..
I understand it is copyright infringement, but still super-useful. And I might still order a physical copy if the digital copy proves helpful.
I think you can find most of these online in their respective manufacturer's sites for free, but I'm not entirely sure they would be cool with people lifting them and slapping them on another site.
IANAL, of course.
I mean, most sites like this are about sharing, but this one just provides content freely and that's it. I couldn't find an "upload" button. Great for us though, but I'm still curious :-)
There's an upload button on the top right of the page for me. Clicking it asks me to login / signup. It's not exactly hidden.
Anyone know how they support something like this? There's got to be a bit of cost associated with the hosting and processing. Are they selling a commercial version of their software platform?
This is a problem I've had for ages when buying old hardware. Thank you, thank you, and thank you.
PDF rendering looks crippled from quick check on some pages.
Otherwise - looks like promising repository.
so to the point besides being annoyed by crappy manufacturer websites: should i be worried about exploits buried in pdfs? isnt it possible to hide rootkit attacks in a pdf?
Just open it on a Safari or Chrome browser instead of a native pdf viewer.