This one falls a bit out of my usual categories list (freeware, Open Source, free downloadable content, or interactive web service). However, I’ve been thinking and speaking a lot about Enterprise Knowledge Capture as it relates to an aging workforce in my day job. And, like many other people I have parents that are aging (doing well so far!). And, of course, me and my fellow Baby Boomers are aging too. So, I figured some fellow baby boomers might find this site interesting/useful…

Caring.com

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Sandy Your Personal Email Assistant comes from values of n. This is the group led by former O’Reilly CTO Rael Dornfest. They previously launched stikkit which used a similar natural language interpreter to schedule events.

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The long holiday season the U.S. starts with Thanksgiving weekend (and the Black Friday store sales). Here’s something to let you you legally load up videos for your travels whether short or long…

Internet Archive: Moving Image Archive

…contains thousands of free movies, films, and videos.

Hmm, should I create a separate category for Facebook applications? In any case, here’s an interesting looking Facebook application: Mapdaze Photo Map. It is a mashup that lets you use Google Maps to display the locations of photos in your Facebook account. You need a Facebook account to read more about this and use it.

Top European developers have banded together to offer a Mac software feast under the headline “Give Good Food to Your Mac” to holiday shoppers over the next ten days. In contrast to other deals in the past, this one offers a steeper discount the more products you choose. A kind of ad hoc bundle deal.

This is another experiment at gaining attention for the products of innovative Mac developers. Apple sells more than 2 million Macs in a Quarter, but for independent Mac software developers it remains a challenge to reach a larger audience.

BZFlag 2.0.10 was released on Nov. 15 (bug fixes for dual-core and 64-bit processors). It is a multiplayer multiplatform (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, etc.) 3D tank battle game. You can find screen shots of the game over on SourceForge.net.

Just in time for your Thanksgiving (US) travels…

Federal Aviation Administration: Flight Delay Information - Air Traffic Control System Command Center

The map (see image above) dynamically updates based on current US airport conditions. The largest airports are located on the map. Smaller ones can be found using the pull-down menus. Hovering over an airport location on the map brings up current flight delay information for locale.

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Mashable.com’s list of 20+ Places for Public Domain E-Books looks like a pretty exhaustive list of free e-book sites (including the few I’ve mentioned in this blog). Head over there to get the full list.

Microsoft recently released the beta for their Live Calendar web service. While it looks ok and has reasonable features. It doesn’t distinguish itself from the dozens of other web calendars available (most notably Google’s). What could Microsoft have done to make it stand out a bit more? How about…

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If you’ve wanted to try Emacs on a Mac but didn’t want to install X11, you might want to check out the Carbon Emacs Package port by Seiji Zenitani. The latest release came out on November 6.

If you want to learn more about the Emacs editor, head over to the GNU Emacs home page.

Carbon Emacs Package: Emacs Editor on a Mac without X11
Sat, 10 Nov 2007 23:33:17

If you’ve wanted to try Emacs on a Mac but didn’t want to install X11, you might want to check out the Carbon Emacs Package port by Seiji Zenitani. The latest release came out on November 6.

If you want to learn more about the Emacs editor, head over to the GNU Emacs home page.

I’ve previously written about how I use Radioshift as part of my home automation setup. However, in the last week or so I’ve been using it as a desktop application, as it’s intended, instead.

And frankly, it’s driving me crazy. I’m continually running into two problems:

First, the show streams from KGO-AM are seriously messed up. Without exception, about half-way through the recording, the first 10 minutes of the show repeats. Sometimes this happens more than once. After the repeated segment, the show picks up where it was before the flashback. It’s frustrating, and I’ve reported the problem to Radiotime (the provider of the streams), but it is exacerbated by Radioshift’s interface.

Which is the second problem. Although Radioshift is sometimes described at “TiVo for radio,” it really doesn’t offer many playback controls at all. There’s no “resume playback” feature, so if you stop listening to a show, you can’t get back to where you left off. Not only does Radioshift not remember your stopping point, it does not offer any controls for navigating the recording. No rewind. No fast-foward.

But there’s an easy workaround that you can use until Rogue Amobea addresses this oversight. Specify QuickTime Player as your “audio editor” in Radioshift’s preferences. Then, when you want to listen to a show, click “Edit Audio” to automatically open the recording in QuickTime Player.

This works exceptionally well because QuickTime Player, even without buying QuickTime Pro, provides almost all the playback controls that Radioshift lacks. My favorite is that the fast-forward button, if held down while the audio is playing, allows you to skim ahead and easily skip over commercials.

If you do have QuickTime Pro, you can use the AV Controls to speed up the playback of talk shows. Simply open the AV Controls window, then adjust the Playback Speed setting. I use about 1.5X faster. Then, adjust the Pitch Shift slider until the voices sound normal again. It’s really quite amazing and a great time saver.

Finally, don’t forget that you can also skip to points in the recording by dragging the playhead. If you want to temporarily mark a point in the recording for later review, use the “I” and “O” keys during playback to set selection markers in the QT window (QT Pro required).

I hope these tips help you get more out of Radioshift. If you have one of your own to share, please leave a comment.

Going through list of the new features in Tumblr 3.0 is mind-blowing. Check out the blog post…

Third time’s a charm

…for the details (there are a lot of new features).

I am not a frequent tumblogger. But, I really do enjoy using Tumblr when I do get the urge to post something there (usually a couple times a month).

Here’s some words you don’t see next to each other too often: Mac OS X freeware from Microsoft.

Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac 2.0 (Beta 2)

If you need to remotely work with a Windows XP/Vista or Windows Server box from your Mac, you definitely want to keep an eye on the development progress for the RDC Client for Mac. It let’s you manage those Windows boxes without leaving the comfort of your Mac :-)

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Here’s a list from Lifehacker that is bound to be a popular read…

Top 10 Free Video Rippers, Encoders, and Converters

The list includes freeware and Open Source video apps for both Windows and Mac OS X. Be sure to check out the huge number of comments that follows the list. Lots of interesting information there too.

Some sites (not this one though) have a custom icon to the left of the URL in the web browser’s address bar. This is called a FavIcon and comes from the favicon.ico file in the website’s directory. Creating the little ico file can be tricky, but the FavIcon from Pics site turns this into a simple process. Click the browse button on the web page to search for a suitable image on your hard drive, upload it to the web site, press the generate button, and then save the favicon.ico file back to your local hard drive.

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FedEx delivered my Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard box this past Friday. I installed it on my 1st generation MacBook that evening. The update took quite a while (around 2 hours). But, the system looks quite stable after the upgrade. BTW, Apple issued its first 10.5 update the next day.

Haven’t done much with Leopard except confirm that major components seem to work and fire up VMware Fusion to see how Fedora 7 (Linux) runs. I’m still running the 1.0 release. I hope to get some time to download and try out the 1.1 Release Candidate soon.

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The 43Folders piece Workflow for the Fujitsu ScanSnap reminds me that I haven’t written about how I’ve been using my ScanSnap S500M. I got it about 5 months ago, and its easily the most useful electronic gizmo purchase of the year. (Since I bought it, the newer S510M has been released.)

I was hesitant to get a ScanSnap because of its price, but when I discovered that it was available through my credit card company, via Amazon, in exchange for “reward points” I dove right in. I already had a flatbed scanner, but the ScanSnap’s document feeder and single-pass duplex scanning makes it a lot faster and less hassle to use compared to a flatbed. (It’s not, however, a high-resolution photo scanner so if you’re into that, you’ll need to keep your flatbed.)

My second concern was about the size of the scanner. I really don’t have room in my office for another piece of equipment, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that the ScanSnap is a lot more compact than it appears in a photograph. Its footprint is less than the size of standard US piece of paper, and its height, when closed, isn’t much taller than a CD jewel case. You need a bit more room when it is open, but it is very portable and I keep mine tucked away behind my Cinema Display when I’m not using it.

I’ve been using DevonThink Pro Office to catalog and manage the PDFs that the SnapScan creates. So far, I’ve got about 1,000 documents spread between three DevonThink databases. (I have no idea how many pages that is total, maybe around 5000, see below for details.) Here are some notes about my workflow:

• I wait until I have 10 or more things to scan, instead of scanning documents “on demand.” This is because I don’t keep the scanner hooked up all the time, due to space limitations and a paucity of unused USB ports on my iMac.
• I’ve eliminated about 3 boxes of stored paper so far, and thrown away countless of magazines I was saving for just a few articles. Now, when I see something I want to save, I tear the pages out and put them in my “to be scanned” pile. Some might consider this a “marriage saver.”
• The three DevonThink databases I currently use are: one for conjuring literature, one for household/legal items (bank statements, credit card bills, pay stubs), and a general “this is cool” catch-all. My intention is to eventually use DevonThink’s AI to categorize documents and my understanding is that specialized domains are better kept separate for this purpose. I haven’t yet tried to train the AI, though.
• I normally use Skim to view PDFs, but while scanning I prefer PDFPen instead. It’s the perfect tool for this task because it lets me rearrange and delete pages within the finished PDF. SnapScan does a good job of automatically removing blank pages, but when scanning magazine articles I sometimes need to eliminate the back-side of the last scanned page. I only wish that DevonThink Pro allowed you to specify a preferred PDF application instead of using the system’s setting.

Speaking of DevonThink Pro wishes, here are some additional items that would improve my satisfaction:

• DevonThink shows the file size of a PDF, but you have to open it to see the number of pages it contains. To me, pages are the most important count, not bytes.
• The integration between SnapScan and DevonThink basically boils down to SnapScan sending an open-event to DT after the PDF is initially created. It would be much better if the two could actually “talk” to each other. For example, in order to make a single-sided scan you have to use SnapScan’s contextual Dock menu. A set of controls for this within DevonThink would eliminate this awkwardness.
• While the OCR process that DevonThink uses is essential for finding things later, it’s unfortunate that you can’t easily postpone until after you’ve completed several scans. Your choice is to either wait while each document is recognized immediately after scanning, or to turn off the OCR and then tediously process each document later. If you do this, you end up with two copies of the document in your database, one that has been OCR’d and one that has not. This is probably my biggest “gripe” with DevonThink so far.
• A similar, but more minor, nit. When DevonThink opens the scanned file it can prompt you for meta info to add to the PDF. Title, author, and so on. Unfortunately, the document info dialog is modal and the author’s name defaults to your login name; which of course is rarely the right answer.
• The folks at Devon Technologies are too generous with their trial period for DevonThink Pro Office. You can use it a very long time before it starts urging you to buy it. In fact, when it goes into “sales mode” it simply stops running the OCR process. Which, as I’ve discussed above, could be viewed as a timesaver.

So, all-in-all, I’m satisfied but there are plenty of opportunities for improving the workflow. I think the DevonThink Pro Office, PDFPen, and SnapScan combination is a real winner. There’s no doubt that this is the first time that I’ve felt good about converting to a strictly digital storage method for paper files.

If I discover any more tips, I’ll add them later. For now, just a quick note that SnapScan and DevonThink Pro Office are working just fine for me under Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. If going paperless appeals to you, now might be the time to dive in.

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) 2.4 was released on Oct. 24 along with a new look for its web site. It is the first major release since version 2.2 was released in December 2004 (although there were many minor point releases between then and now). Despite GIMP’s immense graphic editing capabilities, I’ve never really been able to get past its idiosyncratic user interface (and never tried GimpShop which attempts to address this issue).

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Here’s a Mac OS X freeware utility from Eternal Storms Softwre to enhance iTunes that I’m planning to try out as soon as my Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard upgrade arrives and is installed.

GimmeSomeTune

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IMAP4 has not been turned on for my Gmail account yet. However, if yours has, Google has instructions for configuring your email client at…

Supported IMAP Client List

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As a long time musician-composer-wannabe, I found this list on the Making Music blog interesting even though I have never heard of, um, oh, ALL of the free music software listed. So, head over to the blog entry at…

All About Free Music Making Software

…and let us know what you have tried and like.

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Eclipse isn’t just for Java development. You can also download the…

Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT)

…which provides PHP development tools for the Eclipse platform.

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