How to hack Scansnap Organizer to use any PDF documents

To avoid clutter, I scan everything: bank statements, business cards, brochures, receipts, anything. Then I OCR them (convert the image into text), store them in the cloud, share them in all my computing devices, and, in my laptop, heavily index them so I can find anything I ever touch, or so the idea. (hmm... what was the phone number of that car rental company I got a brochure last trip to bali... just run search! done)

Thus, one of my pride and joy, (and nearly single most expensive device acquisition outside of a laptop or a smart phone) is my Fujitsu Scansnap S1500. This work horse scanner can scan double-sided up to 50 page per minute. And for someone who scan just about everything, this is a must. And at $500, the Scansnap is a necessary evil. (Don't try it unless you can afford to fall in love with it, its dangerously convenient).

Sadly, the ABBYY Finereader that comes with it (that OCR docs better than Adobe PDF Pro)  only works for documents I scan on the Scansnap. Same with the Scansnap Organizer and Viewer (that can rearrange PDF documents since my Adobe PDF Pro stops working). 

And since I convince a lot of people to send documents to me already in PDF from various scanners, camera, etc. This is annoying. So here is the hack that I found on the web (see http://www.jsilence.org/blog/2011/01/25/edit-pdf-metadata/ ) to allow me to trick MOST pdf documents to be usable.

The trick is to add/edit the "CREATOR" tag of the PDF document to say "ScanSnap Manager #S1500M".

Step 1. Get and install a free software called PDFTk.

The software installation should install the software in 

C:\Program Files (x86)\PDF Labs\PDFtk Server\bin

Step 2. Create a directory in Window. Mine is called FixPDF.

Step 3. In the above directory, Create a text file: scansnap_meta.txt containing:

InfoBegin
InfoKey: Creator
InfoValue: ScanSnap Manager #S1500M

This file contains the meta data of the PDF, and will be used by PDFtk to inject into the pdf file to be fixed.
 
Step 4. Then create also a script text file: FixPDF.bat containing:

for %%a in (*.pdf) do (
"C:\Program Files (x86)\PDF Labs\PDFtk Server\bin\pdftk.exe" "%%a" update_info scansnap_meta.txt output "..\%%a"
)
This script will run the PDFtk software on all '*.pdf ' files in the directory and replace the original copy as the output.

Step 5. Put all PDF files to fix in the directory.

Step 6. Run the FixPDF.bat script.

Done.

Personal Computing - 2013 edition - Jakarta in the Cloud

Back to bloggin after all this time...

Well, i'm here to update the world how I configure my computer to face 2013 and onward.

Same setting, but now more cloud integrated.Now, Jakarta is much more Internet enabled, and it is finally possible to shift massive quantity of my personal data in the cloud to survive crashes, obsolescence, and just plain simple I forgot my computer at home, issue.

First, my personal computers revolves around a Dell Studio 14 (old) laptop, a Blackberry Onyx, and a Samsung Galaxy Tab, (and various mp3 players, TV and DVD Recorder with DivX player, my wife's iPad and my daughters' kindle, android, netbook, laptop, etc etc.)

A 3Mbps cable modem (12Mbps this month only, due to a promo by Firstmedia) connects my house to the world, sadly with only 100Kbps upload capability.This connection is shared via 300m+ of UTP cables and no less than 4 wifi access points accross my house and my inlaw's. I must have the most networking hardware in my entire apartment complex.

In my offices I have 5Mbps leased lines but shared among heavy gaming and torrent users. Needless to say, I get better bandwidth personally at home.

Now, as 2013 rolls around. I want to upgrade my systems and those of my family to allow us to share more data in the cloud (like 400MB of just about every documents that my family comes accross, bills, bank statements, passport, house deeds, brochure for car rentals, etc.), watch movie (Samsung Allshare?), and backup the ever-crashing kid's computers.

Anyways, in various other posts I will be discussing various aspect of my computing platform. 

Anyone interested? Care to share yours?

Clearing ALL Contacts in Blackberry

Well, after many attempt of trying to sync contact wirelessly between my Laptop, Blackberry, Galaxy Tab, (and google and yahoo), I end up with double my contact entry (each about 4500 contacts), one from yahoo and one from google. (long story, not relevant right now)

I have decided that Google is "it". so I am going to synch all my clean-ed up contact in outlook, to Blackberry and Google, then let that sync to my Android.

Now its time to wipe them out. and end up with only 1 entry per contact.

1. Connect your device to your computer
2. Open the Blackberry Desktop Manager software
3. Click on Device menu on top
4. Click on Delete data...
5 Choose Selected Data
6 Choose "Address Book" and Address Book - All"
7. For safety, choose also (optionally)
8. Now with “Address Book” highlighted hit the Clear button

This will clear all the contact from the device.

Cheers,

D

URL Shortener with Tracker

OK, next on things to learn to use on the web is the URL Shortener with Tracker.

An absolute essential service for the internet professional.

For now, this is just a place holder on articles I found useful on the subject. The two articles that ranks the various services are (as of October 2011):

- http://www.toprankblog.com/2009/01/11-best-url-shortening-services-vote-your-favorite/

which suggest that the top service is cli.gs. However, that service refuse to allow me to create a login just now.

- http://techpp.com/2009/04/12/top-5-url-shorteners-track-analyze-links-statistics/

which suggested that tr.im is the best, but bit.ly is what the author actually uses.

The feature lists to lookout for are:

SHORTENING FEATURES
- short URL
- re-type-able URL (http://bit.ly/oExwOi is not re-type-able, but http://cli.gs/tn70wv is, note: no CAPS)
- custom URL (you can explicitly ask for http://cli.gs/indomog)
- integration with your favorite twitter client

TRACKING FEATURES
- Aggregrate tracking summary
- Instance-by-instance
- Country of Origin
- Browser Spec
- Referrer URL
- Private statistic (statistic is only view-able by creator of URL)
- Public statistic (statistic is accessible by all)

How to Lock Screen Orientation in Samsung Galaxy Tab

A month ago, I discovered how to lock the screen orientation on my Samsung Galaxy Tab. I then locked my screen on potrait mode... and forgot how to do this... :(

After various searches on the web, I finally rediscovered how to undo this. So I'll post it here so I won't forget.

I think this is somewhat device dependent.

In a Galaxy Tab, from just about any screen, you "pull down" the notification screen, and up there on the top right you'll see, "orientation lock" (either in color (On), or gray-ed out (Off)). Tap it. and you're locked.

See this URL for a Youtube demo http://bit.ly/oAC16U

But in another Youtube http://bit.ly/oExwOi, it shows that on an O2, its different, maybe an older Android OS. It is in SETTING -> Display -> Orientation. I'd say this is a more sensible place.

(This is part of my answer to this androidforum article.

How to install Google Maps 5.8 in Samsung Galaxy Tab (and get offline Map)

I got my Galaxy Tab last week, and about to head off to Australia for some vacation. Of course, I will be renting a car and driving. Of course, I don't want to pay an extra $10 per day for GPS. after all, I got one in my Tab, right? right?

Well.... Kinda... Yes the Google Map work as such, but you can't use it when you're offline, and who wants to pay the data charge of downloading all those maps as you roam Sydney. There got to be a better way.

I have downloaded all kinds of maps, ... to name a few. But none quite get it there.

Then I learn that the new Google Map 5.x has a "Lab" feature for offline caching of 10 mile radius. That will do it.

Sadly, My Galaxy Tab doesn't come with Google Map 5.x. It doesn't show on my android market, and everywhere I go on the official update sites, it says it can't find the update.

Fortunately, someone "cache" all the Google Map versions, and that's what I finally use.

So if you have a Galaxy Tab (7" variety) and want to add Google Map 5.8 (or more) please go to this URL:

http://www.freewarelovers.com/android/app/google-maps

and just pick and load the Google Map you want. You will be warned that you're replacing a system app, but I did it, and so far so good.

Incidentally, one 10 mile radius (20 mile x 20 mile box, actually) is enough for downtown Jakarta, and the entire island of Singapore.

Thanks.

Donald

Free Site Monitoring Tools

The straw that breaks the camel's back is the outage of my Firstmedia FastNET Cable Broadband at home. Again. Second time this month.

And I get the usual runaround about "Yes, we'll get our customer support engineer to monitor this and call you". Such bullshit. So, the second time this month, I use the threatening line "If this is not up, I am not paying for the downtime". Yeah, sure, she said, you can call our customer service to get that arranged.

But you know, i have never done that, even with the 1 week outage a few months ago. Cuz, I have no data. (as in, I can't even remember when was the outage. and I have no easily accessible record of when that happened.)

So this time around, I will get data.

I will get a site monitoring tool. I will monitor my home router, and if it ever went down, I will email me.

I don't really delete email. I have 15 years worth of email in my backup files. the last 5 years is in my computer, actively indexed for fast searches. Thats just me.

So if it is emailed to me, I can find it.

Now this have to be a free monitoring tool, of course. And I can use the finding to set up the web monitoring of my own company website. Two birds with one stone.

STEP 0a - Register for a free Dynamic DNS address so that you can monitor the ever-changing IP address of your broadband. I use dyndns.org. I have done this long time ago, so this part is set up for me.

SET 0b - Get a home router with dynamic dns option. I use Linksys WRT54G and a DLINK DL-524. Detail on this later.

STEP 2 - Choose a free site monitoring tool:

The first one I found is SYSOJO. Which advertise itself on google. Looks very powerful. It monitors website (HTML), MySQL, and even PING. As I am looking for Ping monitoring, its good enough.

For free, I can set it to ping my home router every 10 minutes, and on 3 consecutive failures, email me. The 3 consecutive failure is important, it is inevitable that at some time

The second I will try is from the recommendations of WebDistortion. It recommends 5 "best uptime monitoring tool".

This will be an ongoing post...

What features should I compare?