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 [...]

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 PDF [...]

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 good!]
When Snow [...]

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 portable those [...]

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 enough [...]

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 I [...]

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 ‘09 [...]

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 choice [...]

23 tips for getting organized, streamlining your online time, managing your media and more
In this Computerworld article, the writer gives several great tips on getting your geeky side in order. I’m happy to note that procurement of a Fujitsu ScanSnap and scanning your life to PDF made number 4 on his list.
Other useful tips include [...]