Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Less Clutter, More Space
My home office has always been a cluttered mess. Too many books. Too many papers. Too many gadgets. And not enough working space. Not any more. I'm on the road to getting organized. I recycled my old AnthroCart desk and bought a new desk with plenty of work surface and storage space.
Now I needed somewhere to store all of the scanned documents that could be accessed from any of our home computers. I looked at a lot of different options (such as the Netgear ReadyNAS and the Apple Time Capsule). I ended up buying an HP Media Vault MV2120 (along with a second SATA drive to do RAID 1 mirroring). It was very easy to set up, quiet and unobtrusive.
My scanning workflow is pretty simple. I run each document through the ScanSnap. Once OCR is complete, I drag the PDF to the appropriate folder on the Media Vault and I'm done. The ScanSnap is incredibly fast so it's easy to take a pile of documents and run them through in a few minutes.
The saved PDF documents are in "PDF Searchable Image" format which means that they include page images as well as searchable text inserted by OCR. File size varies between 100k per page for black and white up to 300k per page for color. But disk space is cheap. 50GBs would store 150-500k pages of scanned documents.
We have a mixed Windows / Macintosh household so it would have been nice to buy a single scanner that works with both. Unfortunately Fujitsu sells two different models: the S510 for PCs and the S510m for Macs. But, as it turns out, the hardware is identical and with a small amount of effort you can download and install the software to use the S510 with a Macintosh. (And the color scheme of the S510 matches the rest of the gadgets in office better than the S510m anyway).
By the way, the ScanSnap S510 was on sale at NewEgg (with a $50 rebate from Fujitsu) when I bought it in March. The sale and rebate program are over now but I've heard that the S300 (or S300M) is quite nice as well and is over $150 cheaper.
Now I needed somewhere to store all of the scanned documents that could be accessed from any of our home computers. I looked at a lot of different options (such as the Netgear ReadyNAS and the Apple Time Capsule). I ended up buying an HP Media Vault MV2120 (along with a second SATA drive to do RAID 1 mirroring). It was very easy to set up, quiet and unobtrusive.
My scanning workflow is pretty simple. I run each document through the ScanSnap. Once OCR is complete, I drag the PDF to the appropriate folder on the Media Vault and I'm done. The ScanSnap is incredibly fast so it's easy to take a pile of documents and run them through in a few minutes.
The saved PDF documents are in "PDF Searchable Image" format which means that they include page images as well as searchable text inserted by OCR. File size varies between 100k per page for black and white up to 300k per page for color. But disk space is cheap. 50GBs would store 150-500k pages of scanned documents.
We have a mixed Windows / Macintosh household so it would have been nice to buy a single scanner that works with both. Unfortunately Fujitsu sells two different models: the S510 for PCs and the S510m for Macs. But, as it turns out, the hardware is identical and with a small amount of effort you can download and install the software to use the S510 with a Macintosh. (And the color scheme of the S510 matches the rest of the gadgets in office better than the S510m anyway).
By the way, the ScanSnap S510 was on sale at NewEgg (with a $50 rebate from Fujitsu) when I bought it in March. The sale and rebate program are over now but I've heard that the S300 (or S300M) is quite nice as well and is over $150 cheaper.
MarsEdit
Trying out MarsEdit. Seems to work.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Two Worlds
I'm dogfooding some Macintosh software on a spiffy new MacBook Pro. Rather than carry around two laptops, I've retired my old Toshiba and set up Windows in Bootcamp on the MBP. I also set up Parallels to use the Bootcamp partition. (I considered using VMWare Fusion but I already had the Parallels license).
Migrating the data from my Toshiba was fairly painless except for one thing: moving photos from Picasa to iPhoto. There's no easy way to retain the albums in Picasa without moving them one-by-one into iPhoto. And frankly, Picasa is more powerful than iPhoto anyway. If the buzz that Google is developing a Macintosh version of Picasa is true, I may end up moving my photos back to Picasa.
Migrating the data from my Toshiba was fairly painless except for one thing: moving photos from Picasa to iPhoto. There's no easy way to retain the albums in Picasa without moving them one-by-one into iPhoto. And frankly, Picasa is more powerful than iPhoto anyway. If the buzz that Google is developing a Macintosh version of Picasa is true, I may end up moving my photos back to Picasa.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Boot Camp time offset
I've got my MacBook Pro set to dual-boot between OS X and Windows. After rebooting from Windows to OS X, I noticed that the clock was off by several hours. I reset the time and then noticed when I rebooted into Windows, the clock was offset again. It turns out to be a problem with how OS X and Windows store time for the hardware clock. OS X stores GMT, Windows stores local time. There are several ways to fix it.
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Flux capacitor not included
Along the main road that enters our neighborhood, we spotted a familiar looking car with a For Sale sign in the window. It was a De Lorean DMC-12; best known as the time-traveling vehicle from the Back to the Future series.
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
Laptop woes
My work laptop for the past 2-1/2 years has been a Toshiba Tecra M4. It's been fine for the most part except for one glaring flaw — the GPU overheats and fries itself. It happened for the second time last week. I just got it back and it's fine but in addition to the overheating, time isn't kind to laptops. What seemed speedy 2-1/2 years ago now feels so sluggish. Time for an upgrade.
Big Dog Robot parody
Have you seen the Boston Dynamics Big Dog robot video? It's amazing technology; able to negotiate difficult terrain including ice as well as recover from someone trying to push it over. But it's an odd contraption — it sounds like a chainsaw and looks like a lumpy box with two sets of human legs sticking out; one walking forwards, the other backwards. Absolutely ripe for a funny parody.
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