If you live in a slightly older home, such as mine, you occasionally might want to know which circuit breaker or fuse controls a particular outlet. Besides making it more convenient to disable the power for repairs, some of us have to deal with easily overloaded circuits that weren’t meant for all of the modern gadgetry we depend on.

Every homeowner can benefit from having a good map to their home outlets and circuit breakers, and a PDF scan of this map can make it extremely convenient to find two years later when you forgot you ever made it.

My Map

Last week my wife was asking if she could run her Jiffy Steamer in the bathroom, or if it would trip the breaker. I remembered making my cheat sheet, so I simply brought up Spotlight on my Mac and typed in “home circuit” and was rewarded with this document:

It’s nothing fancy, but it gets the job done. I quickly scrolled to the bathroom and identified the circuit that she was using. A quick scroll through the other rooms showed that she would be safe as long as she turned off the air conditioner in the bedroom.

Making a Circuit Map

There’s a little bit of process involved here, and it helps if you have someone else to help you.

Get a notepad and scrawl a rough sketch of each room in your house that has electrical outlets, switches, and lights. Don’t forget the basement, garage, and attic. Draw a rough sketch of each electrical outlet/switch on the maps. You can see in the image above that I simply drew a little box for each outlet and a box with bumps on it for a set of switches.

Then, shut off a single breaker and go around the house to see everything that lost power. Take a small desk lamp with you or, better yet, a proper line voltage test light, and test every single outlet until you identify the ones that are off.

Every time you find an outlet or switch that is off, write the breaker number on its spot on your map. You can see that breaker 19a and breaker 7 both control the living room in my house.

Now turn that breaker on and then turn off the next breaker and repeat the whole process.

It may take ten or fifteen minutes to make the first round-trip, but with each new breaker you have fewer things to test. You really only need to test outlets or switches that have not been identified yet.

When you are done, scan in everything and give the file a nice long descriptive name. Throw in some keywords if you are indexing your files in some application.

Using the Circuit Map

If you are concerned about the load on a given circuit, you can go through the whole document and look for every matching number (such as the “19a” from my living room) to see how many devices are on that circuit.

If you need to shut down power to a switch or outlet for any reason, find its breaker on your map, shut off the breaker, and then test the outlet with your line voltage tester before you do anything else. Even though you know the right breaker, you must always double-check that the circuit is dead before performing work.

By the way, my wife has had that Jiffy Steamer for years, and she absolutely loves it—it probably ranks right next to her iPad as all-time coolest and most useful products.

There are plenty of different ways to catalog loosely associated knowledge of varying complexity—a few months back I discussed using a wiki for this—but some problems just don’t need that level of complexity and depth.

Some problems are more suited to random scribblings on a whiteboard, and that is where mind mapping software comes in.

What’s a Mind Map?

Imagine you and your family are going to fly to Rio de Janeiro this summer to visit distant relatives and you realize that there are about a thousand things to do  in preparation but you just can’t sort it all out.

You know that you need passports and you need to verify that everyone’s visa is still valid. There is the monumental task of deciding what to pack. You might want to make a checklist of places you want to visit. And you want to go hang gliding down to the beach, but there’s something nagging at you about whether or not your health insurance would cover a broken leg in a foreign land.

The problem is that it is difficult to keep the whole thing in your mind—if you concentrate on the luggage, you forget about the international driver’s license.

Mind maps allow you to visualize the whole thing at once, and you can slide stuff around and get it looking nice and pretty.

This is a relatively simple start at a mind map that represents the vacation. These maps are typically read from the top right going clockwise, though many have no specific sequence. In fact, you can do pretty much what you like with a mind map as long as it works for you.

Just Another Outliner?

At first glance these tools look like glorified outlining applications such as OmniOutliner, and they do serve admirably in this respect, but they are so much more. An outline gives you a very easy way to organize topics and thoughts, adding annotations and such along the way, but it isn’t nearly as easy to visualize and nonlinear concepts do not map well to an outline.

Consider the Rio Trip example above—you could put all of that information into an outline, but it would not be nearly as easy to process mentally.

And these mind maps look especially cool in presentations.

Slick Document Generation

Some of the commercial mind mapping products provide pretty good integration with Microsoft Office products.

Some time back, I needed to write up a set of style standards for Oracle’s PL/SQL programming language for our offshore team. Rather than just dive into Word and hope for the best, I used Mind Manager Pro from Mindjet to make the following map:

This tool supported attaching rich text to nodes in the map, so I used these notes to handle the actual code examples.

I was then able to put together a nice Word template that matched our corporate documents and I clicked the Export to MS Word button and had an instant document:

I have also used mind maps to auto-generate PowerPoint slide decks as well. These days I use Mind Manager on a daily basis at the office; it makes a great difference when I am trying to grasp complex topics with lots of strange dangly bits hanging off of the edges.

Nothing New

Mind maps have been around for a long time. A quick search of the ‘Net will show you that mind mapping software is quite plentiful and mature. There are good free products for PC and Mac available and there are many commercial products that take mind mapping a step further, often integrating with Microsoft Office.

Take a look at what Wikipedia has to say about mind mapping. Here’s a post from 43 Folders on the same topic. Peter Russell has useful information as well about them.

I learned about mind mapping from a friend at work who had been using them for years. After seeing him make some quick notes during a meeting, I was sold.

Closing Thoughts

I made the Rio de Janeiro example using XMind, the free “lite” version of XMindPro. This application is pretty full featured for a free basic version—the Pro version adds enterprise features such as import/export and collaboration.

There are XMind versions for Mac, PC, and Linux.

If you are looking for more, all of the commercial products offer a trial period. I use MindJet’s Mind Manager. Be warned, these tools are expensive, just like buying MS Office, but you might just find that they more than make up for their cost with your newly found productivity.

I’m serious. You don’t need to know anything at all about Linux to use one of these. Just download the image, install, and you suddenly have a full featured NAS file server, or you might have a database or a source code repository.

Last year I wrote an article on how to set up a NAS device using Ubuntu Linux. I have been a fan of Ubuntu since the start because it is a very easy distribution to install and configure. The down-side of using Linux has always been the fairly steep learning curve. Before you can get around to using the server, you need to get down in the weeds with configuration files and other stuff.

TurnKey Linux changes all of that.

Painless Installation

A few weeks back, I was setting up an aging PC as a standalone wiki server for a small office—this machine was going to provide a place for the office staff to document their procedures, how-tos, and other things.

I was about to set up an Ubuntu server, as I have done before many times, and install MoinMoin, like I did some months back. I remembered that it was a bit of a pain to get everything tweaked just right, so I did a quick check to see what kind of standalone wiki options were available online.

This is how I found TurnKey Linux. This project is all about single-purpose preconfigured Ubuntu server images.

One of those preconfigured images happens to be a MediaWiki appliance—the wiki engine behind Wikipedia—and I was in business.

The installation took about fifteen minutes, with very little user interaction. I answered a few basic questions and the installer took over from there. As soon as the install was done, the machine rebooted and displayed a message on the monitor with the IP addresses where you can browse to from any other machine.

Full Featured

The work that has gone in to these appliances is amazing. In fifteen minutes I had installed a complex configuration that has the Apache, PHP, MySQL, MediaWiki core, as well as maintenance utilities such as a neat tool that provides a Flash-based pure-AJAX-based SSH command line in a remote browser (i.e. your browser becomes a terminal). Even someone with Linux experience would have to spend quite a bit of time fiddling around with different packages and configuration options in other to provide the same functionality that TurnKey gives you out of the box.

As with most open source projects, the documentation is about 80% complete, with deep detail in some areas, but leaving others fairly sparsely documented. But don’t let this deter you: in most cases users know how to use the product they are installing (e.g. MediaWiki) but don’t want the hassle of configuring it on Linux. That’s where TurnKey shines.

Some Examples

In minutes, you can set up a NAS device. If you want to try advanced content management in your office, try Joomla or Drupal.

If you are working on a small project team and want to protect your source code, try Redmine or Trac and do your bug tracking using Bugzilla.

And while you are at it, you can document your organization’s working practices using a wiki such as MoinMoin or MediaWiki.

Don’t forget to back it up!

As with any computer, you should include your new TurnKey appliance in your backup strategy. The nice thing is that you don’t really need to care at all about backing up Linux or the other software; just back up the data. I don’t need to back up my entire MediaWiki machine; I just need to back up the database and image files. If anything goes wrong, you can rebuild the TurnKey appliance from scratch in minutes and then restore your data.

To save yourself some pain, keep notes on any small tweaks you made to the configuration.

One Machine, One Purpose

These disk images share common Ubuntu underpinnings, but they are referred to as Appliances because they turn your PC into a purpose-built appliance.

This means that if you want a content management system and you also want a ticket management system, you will need two old computers—not a rare commodity these days.

Take a look at what they have to offer and give TurnKey a shot—specialized software used in corporate environments is now within reach of small offices at the right price.

I am of the opinion that rather than allowing an application to shuffle your life randomly, why not do it the old fashioned way and move your documents into folders of your choosing?

This article discusses some of the advantages of old-school folder management and gives a few hints along the way.

Why bother?

By creating your own well thought out folder structure, you gain the following advantages:

• You can find something fairly easily without needing to launch the special app.
• You can copy reasonable subsets of your document sets to friends or for backups.
• Someone else can find something without needing the special app.
• You can place files in a common network drive that others can see, from PC, Linux, or Mac.
• You do not lose all of the metadata about your files if the document management app ceases to exist.

People have been managing their documents this way for decades, so this is not anything new. What is new, however, is that folks don’t necessarily see what flexibility they give up when they allow the computer to squirrel things away on their behalf.

What kind of folders?

In short, pick some categories of documents that you will be filing, and optionally pick a timeframe which to partition the folders. This mirrors what we do with paper folders, doesn’t it? We create dozens of manila folders with tabs, and optionally create subsets of these files by date (e.g. Receipts, 2009).

One key difference helps us: Computer folders enjoy one feature that their physical counterparts lack—they can be nested several layers deep.

A few examples are probably in order…

I like to keep several kinds of scanned documents relating to day to day home paperwork. Over time, it has become clear that I scan lots of receipts, health insurance papers, banking papers, bills, and … everything else.

As such, I created the following top-level folders: Banking, Bills, Health Insurance, Receipts, and Miscellaneous.

Over time, they start to get stuffed to the gills with things, especially the Bills and the Receipts folders. My answer to this was to split them out by date. Within each category folder I have subfolders by date. This is because some categories need lots of years, while others might not need to be broken down by date at all.

Digital photos are a different creature: I feel that the date of the photo is the most important piece of information, and subject matter is secondary. For this reason, I store my photos in a series of top-level folders labeled with the years.

With photos I have a three-level system: Year, Month, and Subject. For example, within the Photos folder there is a 2009 folder. That contains a 2009-02 folder, and that one contains a folder called Cats. There are many ways to arrange these, I have chosen this approach.

I like iPhoto as much as anyone, and I use it for my photos. The difference is that, for me, iPhoto only holds a copy of each photo—the original photos are all stored on a NAS using the file structure I describe above.

Put a little thought into it and come up with a system that works for you.

Closing thoughts

We are looking for ease of use here, as well as avoiding lock-in to some proprietary app. We also want it to be easy to back up specific bits of the data and share specific bits.

By looking at my example above, you can see how easy it would be to find a bill from 2009. By following a specific naming convention, you can see that each document is fairly descriptive as well. You don’t need DEVONthink or its brethren to tell you how to find the Allstate bill from June of 2009. In addition, the folder names are now easily searchable by my operating system, as are the filenames.

This might create extra work for you in the beginning, but do you really want to be at the mercy of someone else’s application?

Oh, and about making those folders? There are applications out there that can generate a bunch of folders for you following your own chosen rules. One I use is The Big Mean Folder Machine.  I wouldn’t want to depend on an automatic system for daily use, but as a one-time jump start, tools like this can work wonders.

Don’t forget to back up your files!

Imagine that you were to become temporarily incapacitated for whatever reason…

• Can a family member log in to your computer, as yourself, in order to access your files?
• Can your spouse access your online banking details so the bills can be paid?
• Can your family find your insurance information that you scanned and filed away?
• Is there someone who can log in to any online accounts that need care and feeding?

Not a pleasant subject, indeed, but one that worries me from time to time.

One way to address these needs is to keep all of your passwords and so forth in one special place, using a password safe application, and make sure someone else has the access code. For example, you can use a tool such as 1Password or SplashId to store hundreds of secret bits that you use all the time, and your family might need.

You might consider writing down the master passwords that control your life and sealing them in an envelope that you provide to a trusted family member. Since this is such a great security risk if found by the enemy, you might want to omit any identifying information from the note. Impress upon them the need to secure the document very well.

Perhaps you can choose the same master password with your spouse, with one relatively short password locking your computer and a long secure password locking your password safe application.

Regardless of how you address these issues, sit down with your better half (or trusted family member) and review where documents are and how to access them.

As it would turn out, there were several thousand other documents on a file server that shared the same funny behavior. By the time we were done struggling with this problem I had gained new respect for PDF corruption issues and their prevention.

The Problem

We were looking to load a few thousand of these scientific reports into a fancy-schmancy new database, with linguistics searching and other bells and whistles. Much to our chagrin, these documents just weren’t loading, and we couldn’t understand why. They were text documents, with some embedded images, but mostly straightforward text.

Here is an excerpt:

And you can tell that it is right and proper text because when I blow it up all the way, the fonts are nice and smooth—this isn’t just an image of text.

But if I copy and paste that particular paragraph into any handy editor (Notepad, in this case), this is what I see:

And as far as I know, at this point the actual text is beyond the reach of average folks like me. We tried, believe me we tried.

What went wrong?

A quick Google of the subject led us to understand that many PDF generation tools embed subsets of fonts, with nonstandard mappings from the text to the font.

This fellow explains it nicely:

“The PDF file does not contain all the information to extract the text. The problem is that a character in a PDF file may not contain information what “real” character it relates to. Some PDF generators do a pretty bad job when they embed fonts into PDF files. They use a proprietary encoding mechanism (e.g. 1 is A, 2 is B, 3 is C, …) in both the embedded font and when they place glyphs on the page. Without a table that implements the reverse (e.g. character code 1 is ‘A’) you cannot extract text from such a file.

There is nothing you can do (besides to complain to whoever created the PDF file, and the author of the software that created this file).”
— from khkremer on experts-exchange.com

As it would turn out, many of the reports had been generated by printing to Adobe Distiller from Microsoft Word. It would seem that the default settings used for Distiller included the “totally hose my document content” switch.

The Solution

We fretted over this quite a bit. These are important scientific reports, and there is no way to easily ungarble them. We finally ended up contacting the Abbyy Finereader folks and trying out their OCR toolkit for Linux: not only did this product make fast work of running optical character recognition on the sample document, but once we had a script running, we managed to blow through the 10,000 pages the trial license gave us, in a day or two.

Imperfect, at best

I am happy that we were able to salvage the bulk of the electronic knowledge found within those thousands of files, but our work barely scratched the surface.

For example, most of these documents have rich bookmarking of sections and keywording, such as this (content tastefully blurred on purpose).

In addition, scientific documents typically have loads of tables full of numbers. Though it is possible to mine this data with a good OCR tool (the FineReader API provides tools for just this purpose), the tables are far more difficult to extract correctly once the original text information is lost.

Final thoughts

I wrote a few weeks about document formats, mentioning the PDF/A document standard. This is worth investigating, regardless of what your document needs are.

If our thousands of files had been originally generated as PDF/A, it is certain that we would have been able to copy/paste from them without problem: PDF/A prohibits such font shenanigans as were perpetrated on our garbled reports.

In the end, our OCR sledgehammer approach worked like a charm, and is probably sufficient for our needs. Text mining is a pretty slushy business, so no-one will complain if there are a few typos on each page—if they find the doc in a search, they can print it and read it the old fashioned way.

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 is getting flaky, and which cable connects the library to the classroom at the end of the hall.

I have tried Excel spreadsheets, an Access database, even a spiral-bound notebook—none of them made the job any easier. A few weeks ago I thought about trying a Wiki and this has turned out to be a perfect fit!

If you are looking to keep a loose scrapbook of notes with lots of arbitrary categories and relationships between them, a wiki might do the trick. In this article I’ll cover two simple freeware wikis you can carry around on a thumb drive.

What’s in a Wiki?

All of us have used Wikipedia at one time or another, and though it may be regarded with disdain by high school teachers, when you consider how it works, Wikipedia is an amazing achievement. But what is the nature of a wiki?

One of the key features is that any page can be easily edited at any time (of course this can be limited by permissions). Another attribute is the ability to breathe life into a new page just by calling its name.

Between these two features, you get the essence of wiki-ness.

For example, if I have a page that discusses North American bears, I can type in a list of bears in a special format, often in jammed-together Wiki Words, like this:

• GrizzleyBear
• BlackBear
• BrownBear

As soon as I save the page, those bear names become hyperlinks. Even though I haven’t written any pages about the individual bears, whenever it finally suits me, I can click on BlackBear and accept the invitation to “Create a new page called BlackBear”

Better still, a friend who knows about black bears might click on BlackBear and write a beautiful page about the animals.

That’s what wikis are all about.

Back to the School Computers

In a matter of minutes I was able to make a page that described the building and listed the various rooms in the building. I was able to then click on each room and “auto-vivify” a page for the room.

From that point, it was easy to create custom pages for each computer in the building, with each page listing the machine’s stats. I also created pages for each network switch or router.

In a matter of two or three evenings I had the skeleton of a solid knowledge base populated—it’s a pretty fancy looking web site with dozens of pages that took little effort to put together.

Last night I noticed that one of the machines wasn’t connecting to the Internet, though it connects fine to internal servers. I popped open its page on the wiki and added a simple note at the bottom of the page:

2009-10-11 - This machine isn't able to connect to the Internet. Not sure why. It connects fine to internal servers.

A few weeks ago I replaced a fan in a network switch. An easy annotation on the wiki page for that device.

Personal Wikis

There are many uses for personal wikis, mostly centered around personal knowledge management and personal information management. People use wikis as a replacement for time and task management tools, as a place for gathering thoughts, as a sort of amorphous database, and many other things.

There are many different personal wikis available—here’s a short list of free ones. One nice simple wiki to try is TiddlyWiki. If you are looking for something with a bit more substance, you can try a portable version of MediaWiki—the engine behind Wikipedia—that runs off your thumb drive.

TiddlyWiki

This afternoon I downloaded the flyweight portable wiki called TiddlyWiki. This is an amazingly tight little application—it comes in the form of a single fat web page that you copy to your thumb drive. As you make edits to your TiddlyWiki, the single html page is saved with your changes. Since it’s a single fancy file, backups are dead easy.

Here’s what it looks like when you first launch the “empty.html” file:

After a half hour of twiddling around, I had thrown together this basic set of “Tiddlers”

In this screen shot you can see that there are now links that bring up custom “Tiddlers” for each computer and for each room. I have opened one of the little pages for Computer21.

They describe these pages as being comparable to note cards. All in all, it is tight and easy to use.

Want to give it a try? Download it from the TiddlyWiki site. You really need to play with it to get a feel for what it can do!

MediaWiki

If you are looking for something with a little more meat on it, you can run the Wikipedia engine on your USB drive.

The easiest way to set this up is to let MoWeS do everything for you. MoWeS stands for Modular Webserver System. It’s a free product that you can configure as a self-contained Apache web server with a variety of cool apps like MediaWiki, running off a thumb drive.

Here’s how to set up MediaWiki in five minutes:

• Go to the MoWeS Mixer
• The first time around choose “I do not have a MoWeS Portable II Package and want to obtain a new package” when prompted and click Go.
• On the software lists, check Apache2, MySQL5, PHP5, and MediaWiki
• Click Download Now
• At this point they ask you some kind of question in German, to filter spambots, but it seems to be a simple math problem. Fill in the answer and click Submit Query
  (“Zum Schutz vor Downloadrobotern geben Sie bitte das Ergebnis dieser Aufgabe ein: 5 + 8 = ?“)
• Unzip the downloaded zip file, mowes_portable.zip, and copy the files to your USB drive
• Open your thumb drive and double-click mowes.exe
• Select your language and accept the license
• Click install, and confirm when prompted

The installation process may take several minutes, but rest assured that it isn’t installing anything on your computer.

Note: I received two or three firewall warnings for the Apache web server and the MySQL database. I had to click the “Unblock” button for all of them before my new MediaWiki-on-a-stick would work correctly.

After all of the dust settled, I have this little window on my screen:

In order to shut down and close out, just click the End button.

Once your MediaWiki USB key is running, you can go to this web page:

http://127.0.0.1/mediawiki/index.php/Main_Page

It looks just like Wikipedia, doesn’t it?

What a truly amazing thing: you can carry around your own Wikipedia server on a USB key and plug it in any random machine and start it up.

Different Wiki Features

As you try out different wiki software, you will notice that there are plenty of differences in the features they support:

• Each wiki has a different kind of editor. Some are visual; others are simple text editors.
• The markup syntax you use for pages is different from wiki to wiki.
• Most wikis support features such as “category pages” that find all pages tagged with a category.
• Some support adding images and other content; others don’t. I imagine that TiddlyWiki probably has some means of embedding images, but I couldn’t find it.
• A quick glance at the MediaWiki screenshot above shows extended features such as the Discussion tab and the History tab.
• Some use the filesystem for their pages; others use a database.

Since I wanted a central wiki for the whole school, I chose a different product from the portable wikis I discussed here—I decided to run MoinMoin on a Ubuntu installation on an aging Gateway desktop machine. Nevertheless, the basic idea is still the same.

Once that arrangement becomes a little more stable I’ll write up a howto document, like the Linux NAS one from a few months back.

Other Sources

There are loads of different personal wiki options out there and many people have written how-to documents and tutorials. Here’s a few:

• Run Your Personal Wikipedia from a USB Stick (Lifehacker.com)
• Geek to Live: Set up your personal Wikipedia (Lifehacker.com)
• Wiki On A Stick (PmWiki.org)
• Getting Started with Wiki on a Stick (About.com)
• TiddlyWiki for the rest of us (giffmex)