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Blog changes

Hi, and thanks for stopping by! We've made some big changes to the blog - including shutting it down! With social networking and micro-blogging these days, there's no need for us to blog. So check out the latest on our homepage, and thanks for visiting.

For years I’ve struggled to keep my office clean. See, with so many projects, and the family stuff, and the Cub Scout stuff, it was just a mess. I’d clean up, but when I’m in my office, I want to work, not clean. One of my goals was to get as much as I could digitized, so then it’d only reside in my laptop.

A couple weeks ago I came across EverNote, a way to capture information and save it in a digital file. I have yet to unleash the true power of Evernote, but I’ve started.

To get my files scanned into my computer, I picked up the Fujitsu Scansnap S300 Color Mobile Scanner. This is one of the most important pieces of hardware I now own. In terms of productivity, I’d rank it right up there with the second monitor. This scanner is truly amazing.

First, I configured the ScanSnap to save the files right to Evernote. You have to create a new profile, and select the Evernote application in the profile preferences. Then left-click on the icon in the toolbar to chose the profile, then either press the scan button on the scanner or right-click on the icon and choose a Simplex (single-sided) or Duplex (doubled-sided) scan. That’s right… this scanner will scan BOTH SIDES of a document AT THE SAME TIME. Oh, and did I mention it does this in FULL COLOR, and it’s FAST?!?!

Here’s a video I took showing how fast the ScanSnap is:

So anything on my desk, I scanned, tagged, and then either shredded or recycled (by the way: you can recycle shredded paper. Save a tree). Right away my desk was cleaner. Then I attacked the pile of business cards from the last couple Affiliate Summits.

The business card software is clunky, but it works (most of the time). I still have to figure out how to export it to GMail, but that can wait. I rarely use these cards, but felt like I had to save them. Now they can go, as I have the data in a database, along with the image of the card (front and back, if applicable).

Looking for more to scan, I thought it’d be a good idea to scan my articles of incorporation, so I’d have a digital backup of them. I created a new journal just for these papers, and in a few minutes had them scanned in. Now I have a digital copy of the papers (convenient to send to my accountant or attorney if I have to), a copy saved with Evernote, and they’re backed up with Mozy (my online backup provider).

What’s nice about the files is that when they’re scanned, they’re PDFs. I haven’t played much with the OCR functions, but that’d make it easier to search & find things (right now, searches are limited to my titles & tags).

Then I figured, since I could use the ScanSnap with Evernote, why not set up a profile for Picasa. So I did. I set the profile to save to Picasa as a JPG, and scan at a higher resolution. Then I took a packet of photos that a Cub Scout parent had given me about a year ago, stacked them about 8 at a time in the ScanSnap, and hit the button. In about 10 minutes, I had all of the photos scanned. Now the quality isn’t the best, but that’s the fault of the disposable camera, not the ScanSnap.

I’ve also used the ScanSnap to quickly make a PDF to then fax with MaxEmail and to make a hard copy of a paper document.

There’s so much more I could probably be doing with my ScanSnap and Evernote, but I have to learn all of the functionality. At least my office is now considerably cleaner.

This entry was posted by Eric on Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 at 11:40 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

I’ve got a dedicated server with GoDaddy, and have been pretty happy with things. I know how important backups are, but don’t like how GoDaddy handles it.

First, you have to set it up yourself, which is OK if you know what you’re doing in Plesk, but Plesk backups SUCK. You can’t extract a single file from them, or get the SQL commands to rebuild part the database.

Furthermore, Plesk restorations SUCK. Plesk removes the current (live) site, then attempts the restore. Oh, and if the restore fails? Sorry – you have nothing now. Talk about back-asswards.

The final nail in the coffin is the fact that you can ONLY access the GoDaddy backup FTP server from your main server. So if your main server fails, don’t worry: you have a backup – you just can’t get to it.

After all that, I decided to write my own backup script. If you want to do something right, you have to do it yourself.

I started with a basic script that saved the files an FTP server, which was a good first step. But I couldn’t find a cheap FTP server for backups, so I looked at Amazon S3. While the pricing is a bit confusing, I know it’s cheap. It looks like I can backup my entire server, daily, for about $0.02 / day. You’re not going to find a better deal than that!

Enough already! Here’s the script. It’s completely free, and probably has more comments than actual code in it. Just PLEASE don’t ask for support on this one – get a sys. admin if you need help configuring it. Or figure it out with trial & error.

Storing your data in “the cloud” can be dangerous if you don’t have permissions set right. A webinar by @WilsonMattos cleared that up for me (previous webinar available for download).

So, get your server backed up, and once you do, make sure you can successfully restore the data!

This entry was posted by Eric on Friday, May 8th, 2009 at 2:21 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

I’ll be speaking at BarCamp Buffalo next week Tuesday at the Pearl Street Brewery sometime between 7:30 and 10:30pm. I haven’t presented in nearly 4 years… this time I’m quickly summarizing my thoughts on how to estimate a programming job. The audience should be mostly IT people, so hopefully this will help freelancers and 9-5ers alike.

First ever Barcamp in Buffalo is at Pearl Street Grill on Tuesday March 3rd at 7:30pm. The idea is to create ongoing events for people involved in new technology and web related development to connect and learn from one another.

If you’re in the WNY area, RSVP for the 1st BarCamp Buffalo! If all goes well, maybe I’ll speak about something interesting at BarCamp #2

This entry was posted by Eric on Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 at 4:43 pm and is filed under Business, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

I’m a geek, and was quite proud of this set-up I’ve got going on. We’ve got a hot tub outside, and during the cold Buffalo winters, if there was a problem and the lines froze, I’d be S.O.L. So through the miracle of modern technology, I’ll know if a problem is coming.

First, you need a temperature sensor for the Hot Tub. I use the Wireless Temperature Sensor with Cabled Probe. The temperature sensor is secured inside my filter, and the transmitter is mounted to the outside of the tub. Now I did have the Waterproof Floating Remote Thermometer, but they’re not really waterproof. Soak it at 105° and turn the jets on, and water gets in there.

Now you need something to grab the signal from the wireless transmitter; I’m using the WMR968 Complete Wireless Weather Station. I also have all the other sensors hooked up, including the outdoor temperature sensor. This is important… I’ll show you why later.

OK, so the transmitter is sending data to the receiver, which then feeds it into your PC. We now need to make this data readily available, which is where VWSql comes in. This handy bit of software sends the data to a MySQL database. Oh yeah, almost forgot… you need MySQL and some sort of hosting.

NOW, write a quick PHP script… get the data “select * from weather order by RecDate desc limit 1″ and check the temperature:

if (
($rsWeather['CH2Temperature'] < 70) &&
($rsWeather['OutdoorTemperature'] < 50)
) {
echo("too cold!");
} // ends
else {
echo("OK");
} // ends else from


What this says is if the Hot Tub is under 70, and the outdoor temperature is under 50, it's too cold! Otherwise, it's OK. This is why the outdoor temperature sensor is important, because if its 80 outside and the water is 70, that's OK... it's not going to freeze.

Finally, set-up a check in pingdom. I have pingdom check my page every 30 minutes, and under "Optional Settings" I set "Check for string on page" "Should contain" "OK". If it's down just 1 time, I get a TXT message to my phone.

So if you've got some unused checks in pingdom, put them to use!

This entry was posted by Eric on Friday, November 14th, 2008 at 2:41 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

I’ve been using Google Chrome for a while now… probably 3 weeks. I like it, although I do go back to Firefox when I need to edit cookies, measure things on the screen, watch headers, or do other things that I have Firefox plugins for.

What bothers me about Chrome is that it’s not integrated with other Google products nicely. Two prime examples:

1. I can’t write an HTML email in Gmail because Gmail doesn’t recognize Chrome as a browser that supports their WYSIWYG editor. Didn’t the Gmail people know Chrome was being developed? Don’t you think at least ONE of the Chome developers uses Gmail and realizes this is going on?
2. Bookmarks are not integrated with Google bookmarks. So now I have Google Bookmarks, Chrome Bookmarks, and del.icio.us bookmarks. Right now I’m cleaning up my Chrome bookmarks, which are typically temporary things that I just don’t want to lose as I find them, and either moving them into del.icio.us or Google Bookmarks. This needs to be integrated better (user option).

Common, Google. At first, I was joking about being your Director of Common Sense, but maybe you really need one…

This entry was posted by Eric on Wednesday, October 29th, 2008 at 1:37 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Last Sunday, we were up at my in-laws cottage in Canada when Laura remembered that she hadn’t set the Tivo to record something that night. The challenge was set forth. I got out my Motorola Q and fired up Internet Explorer. Typically, I don’t get coverage up there, but the weather was just right that I was able to get a signal from across Lake Erie.

I logged into my DirecTV account and got to the DVR Scheduler and set it to record Disney from 8 to 9pm. Imagine my surprise when we got home and it actually worked!

Searching for the TV show didn’t work at all, so I just guessed at the time and got it. I don’t know if it was called something else, but I searched for lots of things & nothing gave me the result I wanted (I wanted to Tivo Studio DC but only found Hannah Montana in the guide).

The DVR Scheduler is a free add-on from DirecTV. If you have DirecTV with DVRs, do yourself a favor and set this up now, so when you need it, it’s ready.

This entry was posted by Eric on Wednesday, August 6th, 2008 at 11:08 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.