{"id":250616,"date":"2026-05-20T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-20T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/20\/bring-back-that-aged-scanner-in-your-browser\/"},"modified":"2026-05-20T14:10:14","modified_gmt":"2026-05-20T18:10:14","slug":"bring-back-that-aged-scanner-in-your-browser","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/20\/bring-back-that-aged-scanner-in-your-browser\/","title":{"rendered":"Bring Back That Aged Scanner, In Your Browser"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/hackaday.com\/2026\/05\/20\/bring-back-that-aged-scanner-in-your-browser\/\">Bring Back That Aged Scanner, In Your Browser<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/hackaday.com\/2026\/05\/20\/bring-back-that-aged-scanner-in-your-browser\/\">https:\/\/hackaday.com\/2026\/05\/20\/bring-back-that-aged-scanner-in-your-browser\/<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Publish Date: <a href=\"publish_date]\">2026-05-20 07:00:00<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Source Domain: <a href=\"hackaday.com\">hackaday.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p>We have probably all at some point had to replace a peripheral not because it is faulty, but because it is no longer supported by our operating system. It\u2019s especially bad for Windows users, but for older hardware this is increasingly a part of the Linux experience too. [George MacKerron] is here with what may prove to be a valuable technique to keep these devices active. He\u2019s running a minimalist x86 computer in the browser, with just enough OS to support the device.<\/p>\n<p>In this case the hardware is a USB scanner, and the resulting software takes a WebAssembly x86 emulator and adds a bit of glue software allowing it to use WebUSB to talk to the real-world hardware. It runs a minimal Alpine Linux environment with SANE \u2014 something that\u2019s normal for Linux users but which has never been there on a Windows machine. The result is something which needs no installation, but can be run on any machine with a powerful enough web browser.<\/p>\n<p>While such an approach might at first seem like overkill, we\u2019re told it runs surprisingly quickly. In this case it\u2019s for scanner, but we can see it could find a use with many other pieces of aged hardware.<\/p>\n<p>If WebAssembly is new to you, we gave it a primer a few years ago.<\/p>\n<p>Header image: Fir0002\/Flagstaffotos, GFDL 1.2.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/hackaday.com\/2026\/05\/20\/bring-back-that-aged-scanner-in-your-browser\/\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Bring Back That Aged Scanner, In Your Browser https:\/\/hackaday.com\/2026\/05\/20\/bring-back-that-aged-scanner-in-your-browser\/ Publish Date: 2026-05-20 07:00:00 Source Domain:&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":250617,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/hackaday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/yes-we-scan-featured.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[71],"class_list":["post-250616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-linux","tag-linux"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250616"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=250616"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250616\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":250619,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250616\/revisions\/250619"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/250617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=250616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=250616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=250616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}