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 [...]

Like most people who are trying to archive reams of paper, the one reliable tool I always turn to is Adobe Portable Document Format. I trust my digital life to PDF. Almost everything I scan and most documents I write eventually end up squirreled away somewhere as PDF documents. Have you ever considered just how [...]

I can’t help it. As soon as I hear of a new version of anything, whether it’s an application or the entire operating system, I have to install it. Now prudence would lead one to take careful steps and wait until all of the wrinkles are ironed out before starting. I was almost not prudent [...]

Some months back I wrote an article on using scripting languages to glue workflows together. My inspiration for that article was a bit of AppleScript that I had suffered over in order to smooth over a minor annoyance of my scan-to-OCR workflow. I had promised that once I cleaned up the embarrassing bits of code [...]

Thanks to its face-recognition tool, iPhoto ’09 can now put names to the faces in your photographs, letting you quickly sift through your library based on content rather than how photos are arranged. But putting this feature to work requires some effort on your part. A few months back I received my copy of iLife [...]

Whether you are a cube dweller sharing an electronic document with your next door neighbor or a homeowner attempting to catalogue your digital life, you will soon encounter resistance in the form of document incompatibility. What good is a byte-for-byte perfect duplicate of the original if you cannot open it in an application? My own [...]

A nastygram from my ISP let me know that I needed to take action to lock down my home network. In this article I discuss using a spare router in a somewhat unusual daisy chain configuration in order to banish the teenagers and all of their wifi devices to their own network.

Anyone who has kids in their home worries about how easy it is to access the seamier side of the Internet, even if by accident. Indeed, it is thrust upon us in our email in-boxes daily in the form of misspelled spam with links that only a fool would click. Another issue altogether is the [...]