Archives for the Month of January, 2010

Is there anything interesting lingering on your clipboard?

A few weeks ago I pulled up a chair in front of an aging computer that is shared by many volunteers in order to log their work and do occasional web searches. After an hour or so of doing paperwork, I wanted to look something up on Google, so I selected the word and hit [...]

Bring back the old-school way of managing computer folders and documents yourself!

One of my pet peeves in software is the black-box application that calmly sucks in all of your files and does everything for you, until the day you want to swich apps. This is the iTunes model, followed by many other products. I am of the opinion that rather than allowing an application to shuffle [...]

Could your family access your secrets in an emergency?

Several weeks ago I was sitting at the dining room table with a family friend going through a stack of documents and letters. Her husband had passed away suddenly some weeks before, and I was doing the best I could to help her untangle the paperwork and understand what was what. This unfortunate scene made [...]

Automate ScanSnap OCR process on your Mac with AppleScript (Snow Leopard Edition)

Some time back I published an AppleScript that allows one to automatically run OCR in the background on scanned files generated by your Fujitsu ScanSnap, while you to continue scanning more files. ScanSnap owners should all be familiar with this: the out-of-the-box configuration of the ScanSnap Manager and Abbyy Finereader force the scan and OCR [...]