We moved recently, and, as with many others in the same situation, made the following observation:

Why do we have all this crap?

In my case the situation was particularly bad in terms of paper; I’m a natural pack rat, and file far too much paper away for my own good — a realization I came to while hauling my files upstairs.

Even after a serious purge, I still had too much paper. This is not stuff I can just throw away, but I don’t want to be tripping over it, either. Furthermore, disaster planning is a huge part of my day job, and it bothered me that in most cases I had no backup for the information in my files; one fire and it would all be ashes. The natural solution would be to scan it in, but my experience with scanners was best summed up as ’slow, gruesome toil’.

It turns out that many of the fine folks who lurk at 43 Folders were in the same boat, and some of the discussions there turned me on to the Fujitsu ScanSnap document scanner. Given the praise heaped upon the device there, and desperate for something to remove the piles of paper, I resolved to purchase one.

These are popular devices; I’ve noticed them in use in hospitals for scanning of insurance cards and the like. However, they’re difficult to source, in my experience, Amazon was the best option. As of this writing, the street price of the current S510M model is approximately $450.

The unit is designed to not take up a lot of room. Here’s mine in the closed configuration, using my beloved red stapler for scale:

Quite compact — 6.2″ x 6.2″ x 11.2″. Not difficult at all to find a place on the desk for it, which is a key consideration; if something is difficult to get to, or so large as to require being packed away when not in use, then you’re not going to use it, which would defeat the whole purpose here.

It’s not much larger in the open configuration:

Bundled software includes Adobe Acrobat Professional 8 and ABBYY FineReader OCR software. Considering the list price on Acrobat Professional, the price on this unit isn’t a bad deal. Scan rate is 18 PPM, double-sided, automatic deskew, automatic blank page elimination, with a hopper capacity of 50 pages. Rather than attempt to digest those dry numbers, instead consider the following.

Traditional scanning tends to work like this:

• load paper into scanner
• begin scanning
• clear jam
• reload job
• clear jam again
• realize input is double-sided, reload job
• watch software choke on input
• throw pile of paper across room, seek adult beverage

In contrast, scanning with the ScanSnap works like this:

• load paper into scanner
• press large one-touch scan button
• watch job scan and OCR

This thing has to be seen to be believed. It just churns through paper effortlessly, no jams, no errors, no babysitting required. The rate at which one can eliminate a pile of paper is amazing; so far, I’ve put several linear feet through it. This has dramatically reduced my inventory of dead, bleached, pressed trees, converting them to easily-searchable full-text PDFs.

This is in nearly every respect an outstanding solution. If I have one complaint, it’s that the bundled driver software is an application, rather than a driver, and as such sits in the dock. This wouldn’t be a huge deal, but for whatever reason, the developers decided that the dock icon should be overlaid with a gigantic, garish, red cross symbol when the scanner is off. I find this to be annoying in the extreme.

To address this, I’ve found Dock Dodger, donationware from Foggy Noggin Software, to be just the thing. Dock Dodger allows for the icon to be hidden while the application is running, this removing the fugly icon from the dock. The icon can be reinstated at any time by simply running Dock Dodger again.

However, all in all, the dock icon is but a small issue in what is otherwise a fantastic piece of kit. Highly recommended.

Tags: Organization

I returned from a trip to discover that my router had died. This is, unfortunately, a common occurrence; I think this latest is perhaps the seventh router corpse I’ve left in my wake. Fundamentally, home routers are consumer-grade devices, manufactured by the low bidder, and as such seem to have internal demise timers closely associated with the end-of-warranty date.

The Apple Airport Extreme had been recommended to me in the past, but I’d passed on it due to lack of gigabit ports, which were commonly available with competing products. However, this deficiency has recently been addressed, so it was time for some serious investigation.

I’ve recently subscribed to Don McAllister’s excellent ScreenCastsOnline, which is a treasure trove of Mac reviews and tutorials. Don covered the Airport Extreme in ScreenCast 87; it’s a very comprehensive overview of the product, providing details that aren’t available in other review formats — video is hard to beat in this regard.

The clincher, however, was the following warranty statement on the product homepage:

The AppleCare Protection Plan for your computer covers the AirPort Extreme Base Station.

Well, that was the sale — I’ve already got the 3-year AppleCare plan, and at the rate I’ve been going through routers, that’s at least two of them I won’t need to buy.

I live within walking distance of an Apple Store. Glorious, is it not? My need was quickly fulfilled there, and I returned home to install the new box.

The Extreme is quite minimalist compared to my various deceased routers, sporting only a single LED on the front. The requisite ethernet ports and a USB port are on the rear. The unit is similar in dimension and style to a Mac Mini.

Setup was simple enough; plug everything in, bring up the Airport utility on the Mac, and follow the bouncing ball. Unfortunately, rather than the solid green LED of joy and happiness, I was presented with a flashing amber LED, indicating some problem.

Upon investigation, the Airport was complaining that PPPOE wasn’t working. I fiddled with the relevant settings a few times, to no avail. This was a bit of a puzzler, since PPPOE had been working on the late, lamented router. In desperation, I changed the connection type from PPPOE to stock Ethernet and…presto, connection, although there was some complaint about a double NAT going on.

Weird….that wasn’t supposed to work; my ISP requires PPPOE, and where was that double NAT error coming from?

I learned a great deal in the next few minutes. My DSL modem, as is somewhat common here in the Bay Area, where RBOCs come to die, is a Siemens SpeedStream 5100B:

Interestingly, this is far from a dumb modem; it’s actually quite an intelligent device, providing NAT function and PPPOE on the modem. SBC had shipped the modem with a CD containing the usual selection of blechware; I’d installed it to configure the modem then purged it immediately when we had a difference of opinion as to what my browser home page should be. As it turns out, that initial configuration had set up the modem to do PPPOE and NAT by itself; it had no need of a router for those functions.

Now, that sounds great, and it’s a nice thing for people with simple needs who wouldn’t otherwise have any kind of protection. However, it’s problematic when a router and the need to run VPN software come into play, as the NAT tables on the modem seem to overflow periodically, causing connections to drop. I’d been having this happen for years, but had just resigned myself to accept it, as I was unaware of the issue and customer service was certainly no help (”have you tried clearing your browser cache….”).

The solution here is actually very simple once you understand the problem. Onboard PPPOE can be turned off by connecting to the modem directly at its 192.168.0.1 address, entering the hardware access code printed on the bottom of the modem, and setting onboard PPPOE to off; at this point the Airport can be configured to handle PPPOE tasks, and only one device will be doing NAT. In my case, the modem wouldn’t take the access code, but was receptive to a paperclip in the hardware reset port.

This has happily solved a number of aggravating problems for me. As but one example, VPN connections which previously could be expected to terminate with some odd error after a couple of hours now stay up indefinitely.

Odd that the old router didn’t complain about this at all. Good riddance, I suppose.

Tags: Networking

It’s been far too long since I’ve posted an entry here. To my loyal readers, my apologies to both of you; the day job has just been a bit busy this year.

However, some good stuff is in the works. Stay tuned.

It was time to equip the new Mac with a decent audio interface, something that would allow me to hook up a good microphone.

In my case, that’s a R0DE NT1-A, a nice studio condenser mic which requires phantom power.

I had a few requirements regarding an audio interface:

• External. The components in a computer generate a great deal of electrical noise; this noise gets introduced into an analog signal unless it’s well shielded. Thus, the inside of the case is quite a hostile environment in which to run analog/digital converters, making an external interface a compelling choice.
• Low-latency headphone monitoring. An entertaining party trick is to have someone speak into a microphone while they’re monitoring their own voice with a slight delay. This has the odd effect of causing the victim to dramatically elongate vowel sounds, which is fun to hear. However, it’s no fun at all to do anything serious with, so a low-latency headphone hardware monitor is key.
• Firewire connectivity. Perhaps it’s just me, but I’ve had the worst luck with USB audio devices; it seems as if I’m always tripping over some bug in the chipsets. The pros have been using Firewire for this sort of thing for years, so the kinks have been worked out.
• At least one Mic preamp input with 48V phantom power.
• At least two line inputs or an effects send/return; there’s a lot of very cool analog signal processing equipment available, but it’s all line-level.
• Finally, zero driver hassles. In the PC world that we’ve recently escaped, the dominant vendor in the sound card landscape can’t seem to create a reliable driver despite years of trying. Every so often, a young, vibrant, and forward-thinking company with solid, reliable drivers would spring up, only to be acquired by the dominant vendor, who would then return us to our regularly-scheduled blue screens of death. (Incidentally, this vendor finally appears to be teetering on the brink of demise; don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out, chumps….)
• Cost should not be of a magnitude sufficient to generate The Look from my Lovely Wife.

Now, even with this somewhat restrictive set of requirements, options are hardly limited; ask any musician and you’ll learn that there’s just no lack of gear to spend money on. Armed with a list of my possible options, I ventured forth to Guitar Center, our local audio Mecca, there to fondle the possible choices.

I quickly settled on the Presonus Firebox.

While several gear choices met the requirements, the build quality of the Firebox was a differentiator for me. I’m a sucker for metal, which the Firebox possesses in quantity, while many competitors were mostly plastic.

Hates plastic. Hates it, we do.

However, the clincher on the Firebox was the fact that it’s a ‘class compliant device’. To the uninitiated, ‘class compliant’ should be equated with other two-word combinations, such as:

• tax refund
• winning ticket
• free beer

In short, it means that there are no drivers required for the device. Let me go over that again.

There are no drivers required for the device.

They’re built into the OS; you just plug the unit in and it all works out instantly. Words cannot properly convey my feelings on this topic after reflection on just what it was like to rebuild a Windows machine after a sound driver ‘upgrade’ went bad.

There’s a lot to like here. A total of six inputs, including two with mic preamps. It’s a 24bit/96K interface, which is certainly good enough for my needs. On most machines, it’s actually completely powered from the Firewire bus; a supplemental wall wart power supply is provided for those machines with inadequate bus voltage. Seems to have excellent A/D conversion, at least to my ears, and the monitoring has no detectable latency. Also, the headphone volume does literally go to 11, though I suspect that a depressed skull fracture and/or cranial implosion could be expected to occur in the 7-8 range.

I think the one downside to the unit is the relatively low gain of 45db provided by the mic preamps; this is apparently a Firewire voltage limitation. That’s a decent amount of gain for most mics, but it’ll be marginal for some of the quieter ones. In my case, I had to nearly max the gain to accommodate my mic.

Street price on these is presently hovering at around $300 US.

I’m quite pleased with mine. Presonus produces an array of form-factor equivalent analog equipment such as a preamp and compressor which stack with this unit, thus leaving the door open for further gear acquisition. Apparently, they’ve studied my buying habits…..

Tags: Audio