Drowning in Receipts

This is probably only useful to those who travel a lot with expense accounts. I generate lots of receipts. One of my former co-workers was diligent about scanning or copying all his receipts and keeping the originals, so that he never had to worry about the US Postal service eating them. Good idea, but too labor intensive.

Recently, I was talking to another of my colleagues this very topic. He had a clever trick: he carries a portable scanner with him. That allows him to scan the paper receipts as soon as he generates them, then he has multiple copies; he can send them in with expense reports via email, and he always keeps a copy. Sold! The only problem was that he was using NeatReceipts, a hardware/software combination that only works on Windows.

After a little research, I ended up buying this light, portable scanner from Amazon. For software, I use either Preview (yes, it can act as a TWAIN device to capture scanner input) or GraphicConverter, my preferred Swiss-army chain-saw for image manipulation. I scan the receipts as PDF, then combine all the files (using Acrobat, the full blown version) to create a nice little receipts package for expenses. This is great for me because I have a terrible time keeping up with the little scraps of paper.

One Password

Generating and keeping track of hundreds of strong passwords is a giant pain. I've used several different schemes in the past (and software to manage it), but haven't found a good alternative for the computer + iPhone situation...until now. When I got my new laptop, I tried 1Password (commercial), based on a review I read somewhere. I was hoping just for good password generation and browser plug-ins, but it has one great trick up its sleeve that I hadn't anticipated: synching with the iPhone.

No, it doesn't hack the iPhone and install an application. It writes a password protected web page to the file system on the iPhone, and you access it through the browser. So, the URL you look at starts with "file:///", but it acts just like a web page on the phone. 

I haven't tried many of the other similar applications, but it seems to have a pretty killer combination of password storage, strong generation, and synching. And, they are beta-ing a service to securely keep passwords on their site so that you can access them across machines. I'll have to see what that looks like when it appears, but I'm pretty happy even without that.

Scary Screen Mode

One of the joys of using a laptop is portability. But as anyone who has tried to use a laptop outside in the sunlight knows, the screen is hard to read.

Which brings up this keyboard shortcut: CTRL-OPTION-APPLE-8, which switches to "inverse" mode. Basically, it inverts all the colors on the screen. Try it -- I'll wait. Notice this this is "8", not "F8".

See? Scary, huh? Great for using your laptop outside, though.

Calendar Madness

I've been trying to coordinate my calendars for a long time. My wife has her calendar and of course I have several of my own for all the traveling I do. For a while, I had iCal files hosted in a protected part of my web site. But that wasn't sufficient: several other people (who don't use Macs) also need access to some of my calendars, and I don't want to be in the business of permissions, software, etc. to make the old system work.

Then I found what I'm looking for: Spanning Sync. This is a commercial piece of software that automagically synchronizes iCal calendars with Google calendars. You can have as many calendars synchronizing as you want. It's licensed by Google account login, so now I can use calendars from any one of my machines and ensure that they all get synced (and that includes my wife's computer, which is using my same Google calendar account). And, I can selectively expose which calendars I want through the sharing mechanism at Google calendars.

The initial synchronization takes a long time, but after that it just runs in the lint bar, syncing on a regular basis (which is configurable). I've used it for about a month now, and it meets my goals: invisibly synchronizing all my calendars so that I have a single source of schedule information.

Now, if dopplr would only subscribe to Google calendar...

DRY: now for updating your status

A quickie: Statz let's you update your status on a variety of IM clients as well as Tumblr, Twitter.

And remember: Don't repeat yourself!

Some not so obvious Leopard features

I've now had some more time to play with Leopard, and I've found a few features that aren't immediately obvious, at least they weren't to me. So, in no particular order:

The slideshow feature in Finder isn't gone. It looks like it has been replaced by Quick Look but holding down the Option (Alt) key when opening the context menu brings back slideshow. I like this much better for viewing a set of pictures or browsing through some movies.

Some Apple applications have special support for Time Machine. This must be described somewhere prominent but I missed it for a good while. Just click on the Time Machine icon in the dock while Mail or Address Book are in the foreground... I like the feature but I don't like the way it is invoked. So far, clicking on an icon in the dock made the application active. Nothing else. Now, however, the result of clicking on an icon in the dock becomes contextual, depending on which other application is active.

Preview now has support for annotations and other markup. Just use the customize toolbar function and have a look around.

There are a few new visualisers in iTunes. And they look good!

Last but now least, change the timezone in one of the dashboard world clock widgets and observe how the hands are animated. I guess, we'll see a lot more gratuitous animations now that core animation has been released.

Don't worry about TimeMachine partitions

When I upgraded to Leopard I also bought an external harddrive for TimeMachine backups. Now, I want to use the drive with two different laptops and because it's quite big I also wouldn't mind keeping some space for a Tiger install to test my software on that. Reading the forums it became quite obvious that each TimeMachine backup should get its own partition, and here's where the agony began: How large should these partitions be? Yes, you can change partition sizes but if you want to keep the contents intact there are severe limitations. So, you starting thinking about the ordering of the partitions, too.

Luckily, I stumbled across another forum thread, in which people discuss copying TimeMachine backups. Somehow, maybe because of all the hard-link magic, I had assumed this wasn't possible but it turns out that the restore facility in Disk Utility can handle it. This means that even if you get your partition sizes wrong initially, you won't lose your backups when you change them later. You obviously need some temporary space somewhere else, though.

Oh, and if like me you did at some point delete that funny .000d8322fed6 (or similar) file in the root directory of your TimeMachine partition, help's here.