You know the feeling: you are involved in some intractable problem that has all kinds of weird angles and you just can’t get your head around it—perhaps you feel like you are inspecting an elephant, one square inch at a time, or maybe you simply feel like you are herding cats. There are plenty of [...]

Do you still have an old machine kicking around in the basement or the back room, long forgotten? For no cost and almost zero effort, you can set it up as a dedicated network appliance, using one of the many turnkey products from the open-source TurnKey Linux project. I’m serious. You don’t need to know [...]

It so happens that my employer has made a most welcome decision to replace the aging creaky old Novell GroupWise mail software with Microsoft Outlook, joining the rest of the modern corporate world. Now, there is little love in my heart for GroupWise, but it does have one feature that the new Outlook configuration will [...]

A while back I had a rare opportunity indeed: I went on a business trip to India to visit our offshore team. We knew it was a once in a lifetime trip, so four of us took some vacation days and paid our own way on a side trip to some of the great cities [...]

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 [...]

It’s too comical to be true. A few months back, when I wrote an article warning about inadequate attempts at sanitizing PDF documents, I thought that any organization serious about censoring documents would not make such a basic error. Especially not a government agency, after the military had been caught by this pitfall. Apparently this [...]

A few months ago I wrote an article that touched upon the problems inherent in attempts to sanitize documents before sending them to the enemy—perhaps to remove competitor’s names or trade secrets. I was reading a post on a board I frequent where a person was describing exactly this kind of activity—removing sensitive information from [...]

This evening I opened my email and found a most welcome message: Fujitsu has released their patched version of the ScanSnap software for Snow Leopard. [UPDATE: I spoke too soon—they only delivered half of the goods. See below.] [UPDATE 2: Hurray! It's fixed! The birds are chirping and the sun is shining and life is [...]

A couple of weeks ago, a co-worker sent me a PDF document to look at. He said that he was having trouble copying and pasting from the document and was scratching his head about why this particular PDF would have such issues. As it would turn out, there were several thousand other documents on a [...]

In my evenings, I sometimes find myself performing the role of “Resident Geek” at my nephew’s school, tending to network issues, computer problems, and my favorite, “The Internet is down!” Over the past couple of years I have considered several different approaches for keeping a grip on which computers had which service patch, which router [...]