I started out adjusting brightness levels on a histogram during or after scanning, but then realized a dark backing would make the printing invisible and save me the effort. I use black cardboard when scanning newspaper or magazine clippings in a flatbed scanner, but I figured cloth would let vacuum through. I think there are vacuum tables made for engraving and woodworking applications, or an air hockey game table might work with the blower reversed.

Camera on a stand, and make a vacuum table that sucks it flat. Use a black fabric underneath the newspaper to eliminate bleed-through from the text on the other side.

I pipe a recursive dir command output to a text file named for the disk number, and keep those text files in a folder. To find stuff, I use windows explorer to search for text inside files.

If movies came packed in an archive, I’ll use the checksum from that file to make an sfv. Otherwise, I run Corz Checksum to make a checksum in each folder.

AnyDVD to a folder or iso. Then you preserve all the menus and extras.