Observation:

At the local cake supply, I noticed, for the first time, that their dedicated edible printing system (I'm guessing they bought it as a turnkey system from DecoPac), rather than being a Mac or a WinDoze box, runs Linux. Hmm. Interesting.

Question: Their card reader and their optical drive have both quit on them, and the software is only recognizing the scanner as a source of images, even though there's a pigtailed female USB "A" socket hanging out of where the card reader was. Does anybody know of a way to jury-rig DecoPac software to mount and recognize thumb-drives under those conditions? Does anybody know whether it requires a specific card reader, or whether any card reader can be hooked up instead?

AI haven't a clue, but noticed your use of "jury rig" and wanted to approve of it, lol. That is what I say, too. I always hear "Jerry rig" and it makes no sense to me.

For more information on the term's origin, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury-rig

I've also heard a rather offensive synonym invoking "The N-Word"

Can you contact a techie at Deco-Pac for advice.  I have no idea either and use Gerry Rig here in the North East.  :-)

A

AIf I were you I would probably approach the store owner and offer to replace the internal card reader. You would just pop open the PC to find out the make and model of the card reader, order an identical replacement (should be in the $20-30 range), and come back to install it when it arrives.

I've considered that myself. Maybe barter for several pages of free edible hardcopy.

While I was surprised at how good the "roses and spare Squad 51" page turned out, scanned from my own color laser print, I'd kind of prefer to avoid generational loss, and print the "51st Birthday images" page directly from the PNG file.

They've already let me behind the counter to diagnose a problem they were having with a thumb-drive and another computer (it appears that they have a corrupted thumb-drive, because my own thumb-drive worked perfectly).

Jerry-rigged is widely accepted and explained very well here: 

http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2008/08/a-jerry-rigged-expression.html

It's the term which I grew up hearing and using.