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I’m really trying to adhere to Washington’s cell telephone driving law (RCW 46.61.667), however I have yet to find a comfortable bluetooth headset.
For me, comfort is a combination of:
1) please stay in my ear,
2) can I hear you, and
3) where did that damn plastic cover fall off to this time.
So I reverted to plugged in headsets that include in-line mic and volume controls. So far, my favorite wired headset is the Klipsch S4i. However I’ve run into a fairly significant problem…I normally keep my iPhone in my pocket and I keep breaking the headphone plug. There has to be a better solution.
Thanks to a CNET review, I found the LG HBS-700.
Surprise!!! It’s a bluetooth stereo headset. Now I can listen to music and talk on the phone…all without wires. The guts (electronics) sit comfortably around your neck and the earbuds plug into your ears. Pair it up with your iPhone and you’re good to go. There is a mic in the around-the-neck portion as well as controls for both music and phone calls. I find myself wearing it all the time.
What about safety while driving? I simply unplug one ear.
What about battery life? I’ve gone all day, listening to music and talking on the phone, and it hasn’t died yet. I plug it in every night to recharge. LG says 160 hrs stand by and 10 hrs consecutive phone conversation…my phone will die before the headset will.
What don’t I like? Well if you’re a neck crinker like I sometimes am, you have to adapt a bit. What’s a neck crinker? Its anytime your neck touches your shoulder, say when you’re lifting weights or riding your bike and turning your head to look behind you, or digging weeds out of your garden and your kid suddenly jumps on your back. But I digress. Since the controls are on the neck portion, I have found that I sometimes press the controls, with my neck, when I’m crinking. Fortunately that’s the only complaint I have with these babies.
Really, that’s the only complaint? I guess I have one more. I have yet to get my hair and body into the LG advertising pose (below). False advertising perhaps.
Generally speaking I follow the Peter Lynch investing philosophy of owning stocks that represent what you purchase and use everyday.
I own Apple, for example. A MacBook Pro is the primary tool that I use for my job. That and my iPhone. They do everything that I need to do. I can work at the office, at home, at my client’s, at the coffee shop…everywhere. Everything is synced up. Its even in the cloud if I don’t have my own technology with me.
However I do like playing with new toys. Particularly technology toys. So last night I downloaded the trial version of Outlook in the Microsoft for Mac 2011 suite.
Let me digress. What are the primary tools technology folks (and dare I say, everyone) uses for work: a phone and computer. The mission critical applications are email, contacts and calendar. You might also argue tasks.
What doesn’t Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 sync? Why its the calendar and tasks.
So if you only sit at your computer and don’t need your calendar and tasks synced to your phone, to the cloud or to anything else, then Office for Mac 2011 is for you.
For everybody else, this is totally unacceptable. A “released” software application must provide the basic functionality or users will go with the competition. Here is Microsoft’s response.
This is a deal killer. Its like buying a new car: it looks great, nice engine, fancy wheels, killer stereo, lots of trunk storage, gps, dvd…all the bells and whistles. Everything is wonderful…except there aren’t any headlights. Which is fine, if you only drive during the day, never in stormy weather, or never want your headlights on for safety. Heck, for most people this is all they need.
I’m going with the competition, I’m not using Outlook for Mac 2011, and I’m not investing in Microsoft stock.
Once my shiny new Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300 showed up, I knew I needed some way to organize all of my scanned documents. I was organizing my PDFs by elaborate naming and subdirectory schemes, but that’s a hack, not a real solution. I thought about putting everything into Bento, but what I really wanted was a dedicated document management system with easy organization, backup, meta-tagging, etc. It also had to be integrated with my shiny new scanner. Luckily, Macworld’s S1300 review listed 3 such applications: Mindtouch, Evernote and Mariner Software’s Paperless.
Mindtouch is opensource, which I like, but its pricing is a subscription model and it looks complicated. Reading through its website…well let’s just say they appear to be programmers and not marketing folks. Looking for a simple document management system and seeing Mindtouch comparing itself to Microsoft Sharepoint was an immediate downer.
I like Evernote. I use Evernote. I have it on my Mac and I have it on my iPhone. What I don’t have is Evernote Premium which allows me to save loads of documents. I’m also concerned about having all my personal and financial information and client documents stored in their cloud.
I’ve been a customer of Mariner Software (Macjournal) for 3 years now. Once I researched their Paperless product I knew this was the answer.
Paperless integrates directly with my Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300 and allows me to create unique libraries for all my documents. The software also allows me to tell Paperless if a particular library contains general documents or receipts. It even goes a couple steps further and allows me to customize the meta-tags in each library. So far I haven’t needed to do any customization, but do see its usefulness…when I have more time. It also has a user-definable, automatic backup function to make sure my documents stick around (I shred my originals after scanning). I have a library for both my personal docs and separately personal receipts, and the same for each client and my own company. I also have a library just for woodworking articles from magazines. I rip out the pages of a particular article, scan it and then throw away the magazine.
I wish the documentation contained better instructions for configuring Paperless to work with my ScanSnap. Both Paperless and the scanner have configuration settings for the scanner. Which to use? What settings should I have for my use cases? Nothing. Ultimately I setup my ScanSnap software, when I push the blue scan button on the scanner, to automatically send my scans to Paperless. The blue button only sends the front page of each document (not duplex). I setup my scan button in Paperless to the exact same settings as my scanner software, except the software scan button scans documents in duplex.
Here’s a few quirks (bugs), which I am confident Mariner Software will address in its next software release. First, I can’t shut the app down from the dock. OS X also can’t shut down the app when it tries to turn off. This might not be a big issue, but it forced me to change how I (and all all my other Mac software) work. So Mariner, please fix this quirk. The solution is to go into the app’s pull down menu and close it manually. Second, the meta fields sometimes act up and don’t accept my keyboard’s input. The field’s automatically recognize previous entries and then autofill (which is cool), but when the app doesn’t recognize what I’m typing…things go awry. This one is almost a deal stopper for me, as it significantly slows me down. However this quirk is intermittent and a quick shutdown and startup of the app seams to fix it.
There are many other apps and methods of organizing PDFs, and I’m going to keep playing around with Bento. However, with a few quirks aside, I’m pretty happy with Mariner’s Paperless.
I’ve been wanting to go paperless in my personal life for some time, but it took a business requirement to push me over the edge. Previously I used my client’s high volume, high speed, copier/scanner to archive documents and to create PDFs for email, etc. I have a flatbed scanner at home, a $100 HP POS that I got for free when I bought my Mac. Scanning documents on a flatbed scanner was extremely time consuming and frustrating. Ultimately my requirements included, multi-page sheet feeder…and portable. I need to have a scanner at my client sites whether they have a high speed copier/scanner or not. I also wanted color, but it wasn’t a requirement.
So the search was on. The March, 2010 edition of Macworld included a review of Scanners (find it here: Macworld Scanner Review – 3-1-10) [I couldn't find the article online...why Macworld?...so I scanned it with the S1300 to a PDF]. I wasn’t in the market for a $500 scanner (ie Fujitsu S1500M), I wanted a mid $200 scanner. Then, at Macworld 2010, the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300 was announced to great fan fare (example here). I bought it for $249.
 
The ScanSnap came out of the box pretty much as expected. Its small size makes it easily portable, and although slower than its big brother the S1500M, it handles multiple duplex scanning, in color, and in a timely manner. I bought a neoprene case for it at the Fujitsu website (here). Its marketed as a case for the S300, but works just fine with the S1300. The cords fold up in a compartment below the scanner and it all fits in my larger messenger bag (doesn’t fit in a standard laptop bag due to its width).
The S1300 scanner comes with drivers and software, but the software really isn’t geared towards a paperless office. I’ll write a followup post about my paperless office software. Instead, the included software allows you to easily create scanner profiles that can be saved and easily clicked to activate. The software also allows you to save to a variety of formats and destinations. I have it setup to automatically scan duplex to my paperless office software (config in followup post). Note, Adobe Acrobat does not come with this scanner. I already have Adobe CS4, so no worries there.
Satisfaction with any piece of technology depends on what you are used to. The S1300 isn’t as fast as my client’s big copier/scanner that schwap, schwap, schwap scans everything and sends it to my email. Nor is it as fast as the S1500M and it doesn’t have the same sheet capacity. So from that perspective, the S1300 felt like a downgrade. However, the portability and excellent scanning quality more than made up for its slower speed and smaller capacity. If you haven’t used a high powered (and expensive) sheetfed scanner, you will be rightly impressed with the S1300.
My Receivership work is requiring a lot of spreadsheet work…which is a pain on my laptop…Mac, Windows…it doesn’t matter. Numeric Data entry on a laptop is simply for the birds.
I picked up an external 10-key keypad at Staples tonight and plugged it into my Macbook Pro (Snow Leopard) and found Targus doesn’t know how to spell MAC.
I was almost ready to test its high impact wall resiliency and promise myself to never purchase a Targus product again, when I came across a solution on the MacRumors forum.
First, although there is a solution (below), Targus get a #FAIL on hardware compatibility.
Second, here is an excellent write up of the problem from Makosuke:
I just bought a Targus USB numeric keypad (the corded one without built-in calculator, but with a 2-port USB hub) for my MBP. Plugged it in, OSX (10.4) recognized it as a keyboard but couldn’t figure out the type since it was a keypad not full keyboard, but it works… almost.
End result it’s useless in Calculator (or the widget) since it hits clear after every number so you can’t input anything, and while I can input numbers into a text document the extraneous “clear”s slow it down and make annoying beeping (since there’s no defined action for that key in, say, TextEdit).
Targus’s website help is pretty much useless.
Luckily Shawn Levasseur found a solution in the reviews of this keyboard at Amazon.com posted by someone with the username, “The Wizard”: http://www.amazon.com/Targus-PAUK10U…R30E5W6AUBQKQK
Great job Shawn and The Wizard!!! You saved my wall from an unfriendly dent.
Here’s the solution:
This [Targus PAUK10U Keypad] doesn’t work with a mac unless…
Do exactly as I say and it will work fine:
- When your Targus keypad is disconnected press and hold the Num Lock button.
- Connect your Targus Keypad USB cable to your mac USB port (not a hub) while still pressing and holding the Num Lock key.
- When the Num Lock green LED light goes on, wait for exactly at least three seconds (count 1, 2, 3) then release the Num Lock Key.
- Now it shouldn’t Beep and it will work fine in programs like Excel.
Bill Bryant, a member of the Seattle Tech Startup Mailing list found this post…thanks Bill!
Dharmesh Shah posted this great list of things to consider when starting your first sales team. Excerpt:
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Your sales force if your company’s lifeblood. No matter how good your product is, it won’t sell itself, no matter how much you believe otherwise. Establishing a competent, effective team to draw customers is often challenging for entrepreneurs, though, who would rather focus on research and development or chase VCs.
Read the list here: 14 tips for building a startup sales team
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If you are interested in the Seattle Tech Startup mailing list:
Seattle Tech Startup mailing list
Organize@seattletechstartups.com
I have been frustrated with Apple’s instructions on syncing my Mac’s contact list to my Gmail contacts. I think the root cause is the assumption that I am already syncing an iPhone or iPod Touch with my Mac. Simply stated, the sync with Google option does not appear as a Preference option.
Luckily I just ran across Franklin Davis’ blog post at Zaphu:
How to Enable Mac Address Book to Sync with Google’s Gmail Contacts without an iPhone or .Mac [Mac Guide]
The critical information is changing the Family ID to 10001 in the Plist. Uh, Plist? Uh, Terminal? Not to worry, Franklin refers you to Gina Trapani‘s Lifehacker post:
Enable Google Contact Sync Without an iPhone or iPod Touch
This post shows you how to enable the functionality without using Terminal
I ended up following Gina’s instructions since I am not comfortable in Terminal. Couple 10 minutes later everything was put together and syncing.
Thanks to Franklin and Gina for finally helping sync up my Gmail contacts without having to double post information in both Mac Contacts and Gmail.
In their February 6, 2009 blog posting supporting the book Communities Dominate Brands by Tomi Ahonen and Alan Moore…
Understand why everyone wants to be Mobile.
Everyone you ask? Yes, 4 Billion everyones. As they say, there are only 800 million cars on the planet, Internet user equal 1.4 Billion, only 850 Million cable & satellite subscribers. So yes, everyone has a mobile phone.
Its a great read.
On last week’s Macbreak Weekly, Leo Laporte reported he liked Blogo. It is a blogging editor for the Mac.
I downloaded it, set it up in no time flat, and posted my first blog posting with it.
Slick interface and very easy to use.
I’ve been using my Livescribe since Christmas and have found adequate value so far. Adequate because I’m taking written notes in a notebook…big wow. Although I have been syncing everyday, I have not exported to PDF and have not really used the true power of the tool.
I view it as an insurance policy, meaning all my notes are backed up electronically and I can listen in at any point of a meeting’s audio. Although I haven’t used it for a CYA yet, I can see how useful it will be. I wish I would have had meetings recorded last year when we had a need to hold our incompetent CEO’s feet to the fire.
 Here is a cool use for Livescribe. I listen to my voicemail on speakerphone and have the recorder turned on the Livescribe. I write down the person’s name and phone number and thats it. Later I can click on the person’s name and listen to voicemail. Its like a backup voicemail system. Pretty Slick.
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