I have been dealing with situations like this for years, working with computers in a small school and at a nonprofit volunteer organization, shared by many. It seems that whenever I turn on any of these machines, the background is set to something ugly, the screen resolution is weird, there is some cute animated mouse cursor, and someone has left their most intimate secrets in a document on the desktop.

Microsoft Steady State solves all of these issues by providing a means of creating a golden configuration that is restored to absolute perfection the next time the machine is rebooted. But download it before the end of the year, when it will be pulled by Microsoft!

Steady State Magic

This free product gives you the ability to configure accounts on your XP or Vista machine with several fine-level access controls. For example, you can prevent users from changing screen settings or prevent them from writing to anywhere other than their personal “Documents and Settings” directory.

But by far the coolest feature is the ability to turn off hard drive writes altogether. When you do this, Windows slips a layer between the OS and the physical hard drive that intercepts and tracks all hard drive activity during a session. During the session, the user can browse the web, create documents, install programs, whatever…but when the machine reboots, the cached list of hard drive changes is discarded completely: the hard drive is restored to the way it looked before the user booted the machine.

What can you use this for?

There are many places where a completely protected machine would be of great use…

• A shared computer in a public area, like a hotel lobby
• A home computer that is used by the kids and the cat and the dog
• Computers in a school or library setting
• Shared computers in a setting where many different workers use the same computer

Anything to worry about?

• All of your users must remember that everything must be saved to a USB stick before reboot. Steady State warns you of this every time you reboot the machine.
• There are some annoyances that might happen, such as that silly “Desktop Cleanup Wizard” popping up every single day because it thinks it hasn’t been run in five months, or “New Programs Installed” balloons that come up every single day because, again, the machine is restored totally to day-one upon reboot.
• Microsoft is killing the product at the end of the year. Now it will likely remain functional for XP and Vista, but they are not upgrading it for Windows 7. But this is too cool a product not to try out. In theory, you could create a steady state machine today and keep booting today’s version of Windows XP for the next five years.

Additional Features

With the hard drive protection enabled, you can add programs at any time from an administrator account. When you shut down, Steady State will ask you if you want to commit your changed hard drive data to the Steady State disk image.

Even without the hard drive protection enabled, you have plenty of security constraints you can enable for other users to keep them from installing their favorite annoying toolbar and blinking mouse cursor. Think of this as a poor-man’s version of the domain policy tool used in enterprise environments.

More Information

• Microsoft Steady State. How to remotely remove and retain changes on lab computers.
• Defending the C disk with SteadyState from Microsoft
• Alternatives to Steady State for Windows 7: Creating a Steady State by Using Microsoft Technologies
• See Episode #129 of Steve Gibson’s Security Now podcast: Security Now! Episode Archive

Conclusion

I did not understand just how slick a tool this is until I installed it on a spare machine. It took about fifteen minutes to configure things right, but that machine has been running for the past few weeks with the locked-down golden configuration. Whenever it reboots, it looks exactly as it did when I installed Steady State.

Give it a try before it’s too late!

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)

I guess there must have been a time when we all lived simpler lives and didn’t care a whit about who was grubbing through our trash. Honestly, as I am shredding the week’s load of pre approved credit card offers and the like, I imagine I could just be bold and tear them all in half and toss them, unshredded (gasp!).

But anyone who is packing serious scanning hardware should also be packing serious shredding hardware. It may not matter if another Capital One offer slips into the trash intact, but there’s no way I’m going to dispose of old tax records or medical records without rendering them completely useless to the enemy.

Here is my own short list of things to look for when you are buying a new shredder.

A Serious Tool for a Serious Job

There are lots of sites out there that have buying recommendations for shredders, and once you wade through all of the commercial spam sites and get to some good articles, they offer pretty even coverage of the different features to look for. This is where my own opinion differs from theirs.

Don’t waste your time with some namby-pamby little shredder that sits on your desk and shreds three thin sheets of rice paper at a time. If you are serious about reclaiming your home from paper, you need something that can wolf down loads of documents, paperclips and all.

This is my most firm recommendation: go for the most solid machine you can afford. Otherwise you will be buying a new one next year.

I don’t know about you, but I have been through three of the darned things. I tried the relatively cheap one and killed it within six months by overheating it. I then bought a heavy duty model that served five very good years before expiring with some mysterious illness. My current one is a somewhat smaller model, selected specifically for its reduced size by my wife.

Good Capacity

Make sure that your shredder is rated at a minimum of 12 sheets at a time. This way, you can insert just about any stapled document and be confident that it is not going to choke the machine.

See if the device can eat both credit cards and CDs. Both of these features are pleasing to have.

Don’t bother with those silly things that have narrow slots that require you to fold the paper like a letter before insertion. Do you really want to have to fold five hundred sheets of paper like that?

Solid Construction

This is a fairly subjective assessment. Look at several of the machines and see which one is built better. Chances are that the el cheapo version will have plastic gearing and other brittle parts. If you can look inside (often from the underside) look at the gears to make sure they are metal.

Emptying the Basket

Imagine yourself emptying the basket. You will be doing this dozens of times.

Many machines have a built-in trash can that flips out from the front, leaving the rest of the machine standing. I like this feature and look for it. You should try removing and replacing the basket a few times to see if it is a fiddly task and if there are little cheap plastic tabs that are going to snap off after two weeks.

One kind of shredder sits on top of its basket—you must lift it off the basket entirely in order to empty the waste. Pick it up a few times. Do you mind lifting the weight? I know that my wife didn’t want to have to lift the shredder every time she emptied it, so we skipped past this style.

Another point to consider is whether those special shredder bags will fit in the basket of your machine. As far as I know, all shredders have some sort of mechanical interlock between the machine and the basket that shuts off the device if it is not on the basket. This is usually achieved by some little tab on the basket that slides in some slot, closing a switch. If you use a shredder bag, make sure you can do so without interfering with this safety mechanism.

Basket Size

A small amount of paper becomes a large volume of confetti. If you don’t mind having a larger unit taking up space in the corner, then go for the one with the bigger basket. Trust me, you are going to be lazy and let it get filled up anyway—why not at least have a longer delay before you are forced to empty it?

Consider a tall basket rather than a short basket. Once the top of the confetti reaches the underside of the shredder mechanism, it is possible for the blades to draw in the already shredded paper and come to a grinding standstill that may not be easy to recover from.

Strip vs. Crosscut

I don’t know just how much to worry about this one. Everyone says to get a crosscut shredder, so that it tears your paper into little tiny diamonds, but they still are manufacturing strip shredders. The fact of the matter is, strip shredders can handle a heavier load since they aren’t chopping the paper to little tiny bits.

Once the paper is shredded into skinny strips, I’m pretty happy with it. Unless you are some high profile person with valuable secrets, why get worked up about it? Do you really think that someone is going to piece together all of those little strips and read about your colonoscopy three years ago?

I’m not saying that it doesn’t matter at all; if you want the added security of crosscut, then go for it. I’m saying that this can be a lower priority than some of the other criteria. Don’t automatically rule out a solid performer because it is a strip shredder.

Other Features

They all come with various other nifty features such as automatically detecting inserted sheets and automatic reversal when there is a jam. One nice feature is an automatic cutoff when the unit has worked too hard. I think all of them do this, but some do it ungracefully by dying forever, while others tout a graceful cutoff.

Think Before You Shred

You don’t get a second chance. Make sure whatever you shred has been electronically captured and backed up. Is there an electronic copy safely in two places?

If you do not have an electronic copy, then make absolutely certain that you intend to destroy the document forever—this is exactly what you are doing.

Summary

I believe in buying the best tools I can afford for the job, and this holds especially true for shredders. It is a serious machine that has migrated from government/military circles, to offices, and finally to the home. Pick a solid performer that can chew through whatever you throw at it.

A final thought: Don’t buy one sight unseen. These devices must be handled in person to be truly appreciated!

Printing Documents

In a perfect paperless world we would never have need for dead trees. But that isn’t about to happen—there will always be a need to reprint certain important documents, and occasionally one may wish to print something for use away from a computer (e.g. a recipe).

Unless you want to print photo-quality Helvetica and Times Roman, you now are looking at using a traditional document printer, such as a laser printer or an inkjet printer. These days you may well have an all-in-one printer that combines a scanner with printer and fax.

The main problem I have with any of these printers is cost. Good laser printers are expensive and the cheap ones are just loss leaders to get you to spend $$$ on the toner cartridges. Worse still, those giveaway printers that come with new computers are the epitome of loss leaders—they make their profit on ink. Some have posited that the ink cartridge manufacturers have programmed their products to expire before the ink is exhausted.

Printing Online

For those who only have occasional print jobs, why not print your documents online?

For this article, I looked at two services: Staples Copy & Print and Fedex Office (the Copy Center Formerly Known as Kinkos). I selected these because they have a very large brick-and-mortar presence. Though you can have your documents mailed to you, you really want to go there and get them right now, don’t you?

As always, do a quick Google search to see the current lay of the landscape.

Staples

I started by going to the Staples Copy & Print web site.

Then I clicked on Create Copy Project. There was no need to log in at this point.

I was prompted to choose a local store; I entered my zip and clicked on a store.

After this, I provided a job name and quantity and started adding documents:

After a minute or so I had uploaded both my document on Creating a Basic NAS with Ubuntu Linux and my Secret Missile Plans (sorry, no link for that one!).

Staples supports printing several dozen different document types. Even though my missile plans appear to have a PDF icon below, you can rest assured that I uploaded a Microsoft Office .docx document.

The next step guided me through choosing options for each of my documents. There are plenty to choose from such as single-side/duplex, paper type, layout, folding, stapling, and so forth.

I chose some nice pink paper and set it to duplex.

Beware: The Color option was selected by default. I imagine this feature has earned them substantial $$$ from people who were just printing black and white documents. Sneaky.

Once my settings were all chosen, I was given an opportunity to review the print job before adding it to my shopping cart.

At this point I decided to spare a tree and I emptied my shopping cart.

Fedex Kinkos

The experience with Fedex Office was similar.

I started by going to the Fedex Office Print Online website.

Like Staples, I went through the process of uploading my documents and choosing options.

Beware: Again, the Color option was chosen by default. Make sure you choose B&W if you are printing black and white.

Here is the preview of my Linux document:

How was the Price?

With my basic settings, printing 38 total pages in full duplex, Staples was fairly cheap, coming in at just under $3.00, while Fedex came in about a dollar more.

These prices reflect a per-page cost of between 8 and 12 cents. This is not bad at all, considering I don’t need my own printer!

Note that the different features you choose are à la carte, adding little bits to the cost. If you think the price seems a little high, go and fiddle around with the options you selected.

Beware of that color copy trap. Shame on both Fedex and Staples for making color the default! I suspect that they may have consulted some of those ink cartridge guys for their business model.

The Fedex site openly references a Volume Discount, and it is likely that Staples would have something similar.

One More Option: Sneakernet!

One final technique that I have not mentioned until now is good old-fashioned Sneakernet. You can always put your documents on a thumb drive and stop by your favorite office center and ask them to print them. You will pay similar fees to their per-copy charges. Not bad, especially if you want them to use high quality paper and a top-notch laser printer.

And don’t forget that Sneakernet works as well for photos. Many chain pharmacies and supermarkets have a carry-in photo printing service. Just bring in a thumb drive or a SD card with your photos on it and they can print them for you. It won’t be as cheap as Winkflash, but it’s still a better deal than the old days.

Use common sense here. If you are handing over an SD card that has the only copy of your photos on it, you should probably use your thumbnail to flick the little “read-only” lever on the card.

Summary

In these two articles I have provided several options for handling photo printing and document printing, online or in the store, without ever having to curse at another printer again. I hope that you are able to find something useful here. If you have any advice or feedback on different print services, let me know!

Why do we even need printers?

As much as I would like to do away with the wretched devices altogether, most of us can’t cut the paper habit cold-turkey.

In fact, a means of generating an attractive well finished printed document will probably always be a critical component of any paperless home. Think about the many items we capture or scan in that we might wish to print again…

• Short cheat sheets and checklists
• Recipes
• Receipts, for the one time when you need to provide a hard copy
• Sheet music
• Archived meeting minutes or reports
• And, of course, Photographs

Ditch the Photo Printer

I must admit that the day I rid myself of my Epson Photo 870, I did so in a very undignified fashion. It was quite satisfying. Besides the whole cheap-printer/expensive-ink scam problem, the print head nozzles always clog. Then you paint the air blue for an hour as you attempt to clean the heads, wasting more precious ink in the process. As far as I know (or care, for that matter), unless you print loads of photos on a daily basis, your print head will clog. It’s inevitable.

In my opinion, unless you are an artsy photo type who prints and tweaks things all day long, the best photo printer is … no printer.

These days, I do all of my photo printing via Winkflash.

It’s cheaper than buying the supplies for the printer, looks just as good, is more permanent (the photos are on real photo paper), and doesn’t cause aggravation.

When I was printing my own photos, I had to replace the 8×10 picture of Stonehenge that I keep in my office every year or so, as the inks would yellow quickly as air seeped in around the edges. My current copy, printed by Winkflash, has been going for four or five years.

For a cost comparison, a couple of weeks ago I placed the following order:

Qty Size      Unit Price  Price
3   4x6 Matte      $0.08  $0.24
5   5x7 Matte      $0.25  $1.25
1   8x10 Matte     $1.49  $1.49
                 Subtotal $2.98
                 Shipping $0.89
                    Total $3.87

I only had the 4×6 prints done because there was a checkbox next to the 5×7′s for it and they only cost 8 cents each.

Shipping was a flat-rate 89 cents, all you can eat.

I ordered them on Thursday and they came on Monday. As a bonus, they don’t jack up the prices when you place large orders. I have printed sets of 200-300 4×6 prints at times and they did them at the same rate. Amazing.

Other Photo Options

There are dozens of online printing services available. They distinguish themselves in the following areas:

• Ease of use
• Quality of paper
• Quality of ink
• Overall print quality
• Speed of Delivery
• Price
• Shipping cost
• Add-ons (albums and calendars, for example)

If you wish, you can even print your photos online and pick them up at Walgreens in an hour!

Note: if you print online to a brick-and-mortar store, make sure they really are printing your photos on site and that the quality is good. Some years ago I tried a local retailer’s  online photo service, only to find out that I needed to go to the store in a week to pick up the photos. Why bother.

Here’s a couple of sites that compare the different online services (they sell stuff too—take their reviews with a grain of salt).

Pick the service that best fits you

I usually have all of my photos printed by Winkflash because they are remarkably cheap and I am satisfied with the quality. But, I print my fancy-schmancy photo albums of our vacations directly from Apple iPhoto, at a substantially higher cost.

A friend showed me one of the photo albums printed from Winkflash, and we laid it alongside an album I had ordered through iPhoto: the print quality was substantially better in the more expensive album. Consequently, I am willing to pay a premium for Apple to print the album because it is extremely convenient to create the album in iPhoto and the quality is top-notch.

Photo printing is pretty inexpensive, so go ahead and try a few of the services. Print the same shot if you want, so you can compare finishes and quality.

By the way, I seem to recall talk that Apple used MyPublisher to print their albums. I don’t know if this is still true, but I have albums from iPhoto and from MyPublisher and they are identical with the exception of the themes and Apple logo. They are both quite good, though MyPublisher is cheaper and it works on the PC!

To be continued…

I would like to share with you a pair of similar free utilities, one for the PC and one for the Mac, that allow you to easily evaluate exactly where your disk space is going.

(This topic was recently discussed on the Mac Geek Gab podcast, which inspired this post.)

The Old Way

In the past I would often poke around the hard drive, checking out the “usual suspects,” occasionally finding a few plump temporary files or some stale unused applications that could be dumped. When I needed to do a more thorough cleaning, I would run a “find” for files larger than, say, 10MB, and I would sort them in descending order and hack away at the resulting list.

But I have never been satisfied with the results of my efforts—there has always been some lingering feeling that I just wasn’t seeing what the true space hogs were on my system.

Then I found an application that uses the concept of Treemaps to display your hard drive in a colorful visual form.

Treemaps

This is what a treemap of my Mac hard drive looks like:

The application has used color coding and rectangles to represent files on the hard drive in such a way that accentuates clusters of similar items.

Each directory is represented by some rectangular area in this image. The colors represent different file types (e.g. MP3 files), making it easier to spot large sets of similar files, and easier to visualize where your space is going.

For example, the thin yellow rectangle is highlighting the space (in blue) occupied by my iTunes music library. The large red area on the right (seen by the tool as a single file) is my iPhoto library. The area between those two sections is my current video recordings from EyeTV (in green), along with all of my text documents.

You can see quickly from this image that photos, video, and music occupy the lion’s share of my hard drive. Most of the remaining jumble across the bottom is the Mac OS X operating system and all of my program files.

At a glance, I can see that if I deleted all of my EyeTV recordings, I would free up a large percentage of my drive space.

It is through this tool that I realized how impractical tools like Xslimmer are for me. These tools save disk space by removing non-Intel binaries and unused language files (Mac applications often come with Intel and Power PC binaries packaged together). But even if I deleted my entire Applications folder, it would only free up a corner of the map above. I just wouldn’t gain much by slimming down application files and language resource files.

Since I work with both Mac OS X and Windows, I found a freeware version of this utility for each.

Disk Inventory X

This is the Mac utility that I used to make the screenshot above. Here is the application developer’s website.

Besides showing the treemap, Disk Inventory X provides a file browser tree and a sidebar with information about the color coding. You can bring up an Information pane that shows the details of whatever item you have selected in the treemap.

Again, I have selected my iTunes library. You can see in sidebar that blue means “MP3 Audio File.”

WinDirStat

This is pretty much the same application concept in an open-source version for Windows. Here is the developer’s web site. Scroll down to the bottom of their page for the download link.

In this screenshot from Windows, I selected my C:\Program Files directory. You can see the white rectangle on the right side, showing us exactly how much space all of my programs occupy.

Other notable features on this screenshot: my system page file is that fat bluish rectangle in the bottom right, and the collection of red in the upper left is a large quantity of Windows patches.

Summary

Both of these tools provide an excellent means of visualizing exactly where the fat is in your hard drive. The price is right. Try one today!

Of course, it is only a matter of days, or even hours, before the new glow has worn off and I begin to grouse about the things I wish they had done and I grumble about the nit-picky little bugs that are always there.

Even when the program works perfectly, we often want to use it in a work flow, using each program for what it does best.

Work flow is inherent in the kind of work that we do when scanning, indexing, searching, filing, tagging, and backing up all of our documents, photos, music, and video. Once you are committed to digital media, you will find that you often need to cobble together different programs in order to do away with some of the tedious manual labor.

Scripting tools can be as simple as macro recorders, as fancy as drag-and-drop pipelining tools, and as complex as full programming languages. Choose one that fits you and use it to bridge the gaps in your work flow.

An Example

I have never had a harsh thought about my sheet-fed scanner, the venerable ScanSnap S510m. But one thing has always annoyed me about the software package they provide: you can’t start scanning a new document until the OCR process is complete on the first.

What happens is this: you scan in a document; ScanSnap Manager receives it as a PDF and immediately passes it to Abbyy FineReader for OCR. All is good at this point.

But, the OCR process can take anywhere from 10 seconds to a few minutes, and if you were to scan in another document, FineReader complains:

This is where a little bit of AppleScript magic smoothed over this minor work flow annoyance.

I found that you can attach a bit of AppleScript as a “folder action” to a folder, and when a file appears in that folder, your AppleScript gets called. All I needed to do was figure out a way to get AppleScript to do the following:

• Wake up when a file appears
• Grab the first unprocessed PDF file
• Tell FineReader to start up, if it isn’t running
• Tell FineReader to open the file
• Wait for the processing to finish
• Go back to step 2 until all files are done.

It wasn’t exactly trivial—FineReader doesn’t actually have any special AppleScript support built in. But after a few experiments (i.e. a full weekend of fussing around) it was working smoothly.

Now I can scan as many documents as I want, knowing that OCR is happening at its own pace in a totally different flow.

Some day, when I have cleaned up the embarrassing bits of the code, I will share it here for fellow ScanSnap users.

What scripting tools are out there

The automation tools you use will depend on what software you are working with and what operating system you are using. On the Macintosh side, AppleScript and Automator will probably cover the bases. Things aren’t so pretty on the Windows side, but if you are willing to get a little dirty, Windows scripting can work miracles.

Whatever tool you use, I recommend finding as many simple examples on the Web as you can and running them and tweaking them slightly until you make them do what you want.

I am not an AppleScript programmer; I simply downloaded other people’s sample scripts that did file manipulations and poked and prodded them into shape.

AppleScript

In the Macintosh world, the old standby has always been AppleScript, with its quirky syntax that attempts to look like English. It is surprisingly easy to do some fairly heavy lifting with a minimal of effort.

In fact, though I find its syntax challenging and condescending at the same time, I heartily recommend AppleScript. The key is that Apple has built in AppleScript support to most of the main Macintosh applications.

For a taste of what AppleScript can do, here’s a whole mess of cool scripts for automating iTunes.

Imagine running a script that builds playlists for you or tags files automatically or finds duplicates and marks them.

This is the main AppleScript site, and here’s a tutorial from Apple.

Automator

Another Macintosh product, that provides a more graphical approach to hooking your apps together, is Automator. Here is an article that gives a good overview of the tool.

This is what a simple work flow looks like in designer mode:

You can see more or less what is going on here: You use a predefined set of actions, on the left side, to build up a pipeline on the right side.

In this case, the new automation action will get the selected documents, sort them, combine them into one PDF document, and then open that document in a PDF viewer.

I have always been a little confused with the utility of this product: it’s great if your application provides Automator actions, but what do you do if your app is like FineReader, with no special hooks built in?

Nevertheless, with Automator, you can do some pretty fancy things with many common tasks such as file management, email, and browsing. And there are plenty of custom Automator actions out there for the downloading.

Both Automator and AppleScript are Macintosh OS X built-ins.

For the serious Mac user, there is Bash Unix shell scripting, but that’s all I’m going to say about that. It’s there if you want it!

Windows Scripting

Things are somewhat different on the Windows side.

On the positive side, I believe that Microsoft’s COM object architecture makes it possible to script some pretty fancy things using off-the-shelf software.

In addition, the Office suite has amazing macro facilities that have been used by many as a full programming language, as the core of many successful commercial products.

But Windows just doesn’t seem to have anything analogous to AppleScript for gluing things together without getting your hands too dirty.

As a trivial example of the power of the Windows COM architecture, this short script will launch Excel, create a fresh spreadsheet, and automatically feed in some data. To try it out, save the script to your desktop and double click it.

This is what I saw on my machine when I ran the script:

Just like AppleScript on the Macintosh side, many Windows applications provide hooks for scripting.

The down side is that the scripting language is much more like a programming language, so it’s more comparable to writing shell scripts than to using a drag-and-drop automation tool like Automator.

But when you do the same thing over and over every day, it may be worth it to roll up your sleeves and get down and dirty with some VBScript.

An added benefit of this approach is that the language shares much of its functionality with Visual Basic for Applications, found in Word and Excel macros. If you are writing standalone Windows scripts, you can also write very complex Word and Excel macros. You also have the ability to do much of the same application automation within Word/Excel macros.

AutoIT

This is a freeware tool that many use for scripting their applications.

From the product website:

• Easy to learn BASIC-like syntax
• Simulate keystrokes and mouse movements
• Manipulate windows and processes
• Interact with all standard windows controls
• Scripts can be compiled into standalone executables
• Create Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs)

What more could you ask for?

Closing Thoughts

There are other tools out there; don’t be afraid to check them out and try some of the examples. If you can automate just one annoying task that you do every day, it may be worth the hassle of spending a weekend writing the script.

Epilogue

Yesterday at work I finally rolled up my sleeves at work to tackle a nagging document problem that had been lingering for months.

We have a large quantity of PowerPoint slide decks that have critical company information embedded within. I work in the pharmaceutical industry, so many of those PowerPoint slides had chemical structures for various drug molecules embedded within as OLE objects.

The problem was that we wanted to extract that knowledge (the molecule files) electronically and text mine the slides, but our tools did not support PowerPoint. They did, however, support Microsoft Word.

How could I convert the slides to Word documents? There are dozens of ways on the Net to go in the other direction, but the only way to do what I wanted resulted in the OLE objects being converted to pictures—no good for my purpose. I did find that a copy/paste of each molecule from PowerPoint to Word worked correctly, but who wants to do that by hand with hundreds of documents?

After weeks of trying to find a real Microsoft developer at work to do the task, I finally gave in and tried my hand using VBScript and the Windows Scripting Host. In four hours I had the basics of a script going.

My simple VBScript file does the following:

• Prompt the user for a PowerPoint file and target directory
• Launch PowerPoint and Word in the background
• Loop through every slide, inspecting any OLE objects found within to see if it was created by ChemDraw or IsisBase Sketch, two common chemistry editor tools
• If any such molecules are found, the following happens:
  • All of the “shapes” on the slide are copied to the clipboard
  • A new Word document is created with “Slide (1..n)” appended to the file name
  • The clipboard contents are pasted into the document

Sure, there are plenty of warts to work out, but I was happy to be able to run my script and watch as it magically consumed huge slide decks and spit out Word documents containing the exact data I was looking for. Windows Scripting Host is a powerful tool, as good as, if not better than AppleScript.

[Update: Added epilogue singing the joys of Windows Scripting Host]

This is indeed true—not only does one often buy a good table saw before even looking into such things as band saws or jointers, but the machine takes up a huge amount of richly-deserved central shop floor space.

Such is the elevated status of the scanner in the arsenal of the paperless home. Without a scanner, you can certainly eliminate large amounts of paper by improving your selectivity of the stuff you keep vs. the stuff you shred, but the scanner allows you to eliminate almost all of the remaining pages as you archive them on your computer forever.

What scanner should you use?
This is a tricky question to answer. It is tempting to say “Use whatever one you already have,” but scanners and their software vary in features and performance, and they can be fidgety at times, especially older ones. If you have an ancient machine that your brother-in-law gave you five years ago that never really works right, you should consider investing in a new one.

Consider this: if it’s a real challenge to get the thing to work, you won’t make it past your first dozen receipts.

I recommend using a scanner that fits the following criteria:

• Scans to PDF
• Scans with the press of a button
• Performs OCR on the final document
• Doesn’t take an age and a half to do its job

Since most scanners are geared towards producing photographic-quality scans, you will never even begin to tax the image capabilities of even the cheapest scanner while scanning documents. The major factor will be speed.

Just as a woodworker should invest in the best table saw he can afford, I recommend investing in the best scanner for the job you can afford. (I have a strong opinion on this, which I’ll mention in a later post.)

One final note…

Remember that you are attempting to capture important paper documents in digital form prior to shredding them. Never forget this. Every decision you make regarding your hardware, workflow, backups, etcetera, should revolve around “How can I make sure that my documents are accurate and safe.”

If you have an opportunity to test-drive a scanner, print out the documents it generates and compare with the original. Can you read the fine print? Can you open them in Adobe Reader and copy text from them? Are you satisfied that you can destroy the originals?