Faxes ain't goin' nowhere... But it is time to upgrade

Even technophiles and geeks will have to admit that faxing is not dead - in fact it looks as if it will never die. As strange as it may seem to generation X (or is it Y or Z now?), there is still an established hard core user base that will just not let go.

So one day even you, the technologically super-advanced will be faced with the question: "So what's your fax number?"

Luckily, there are solutions for that, and they are pretty much all web based. eFax was probably one of the first out there. But when they cancelled their free service YEARS ago, they lost me as a customer. Not because I didn't like their service but because I didn't like their business model.

A lot of the software-as-a-service companies forget that there are users like me, who see value in their offering but probably use it very rarely. I'm not going to pay $20 a month just so that I can send or receive a fax 5 times a year.

Enter Trustfax - I now pay $30 per year which covers more faxes than I will ever need (sending and receiving) and if I ever have to send more, I can top up my account.

Here's what I love about it: I can send faxes directly from the web interface or I can send an email with an attachment, like a pdf, and Trustfax takes care of well.. the faxing. I can check the log on my web dashboard and I get an email receipt. 

As we are all riding the green wave: aside from saving paper because I now receive faxes in my email inbox, I can also ditch my fax machine, thereby saving one more device that needs ink cartridges that are (obviously) not the same as my other printers...

There is one enhancement I would like to see: they should add the sound of a dialing modem.. just for old times sake!

In case you wondered: this is NOT a sponsored post. I just like writing about services or companies that I find useful. Sometimes it is not product features that convince me but the business model. Listen up all you SaaS companies out there.

A Fresh Look at Personal Finance Software: Mint.com

In March I blogged about my quest to find an alternative to Quicken in the post "Can I finally kick out Quicken?". At the time I compared Quicken to Moneydance - a cheaper and yet great alternative for personal finance management.

And then it struck me - I am SO OLD SCHOOL! What am I doing using traditional software if there is a beautiful Software-as-a-Service solution out there called Mint.com?
If you can get over the fear of having all your financial information floating in cyberspace, this is absolutely the way to go.Why? Because you don' t have to remember to log in to every account you own every time - Mint does it for you. I set up my Mint with 7 accounts - savings, investment, credit cards, you name it, Mint can take it.

What I love about it is that I can just log in at any moment and get a snapshot of my financial situation. No fussing around required - it just works.

What I don't like that much is the limited report capabilities. I can see a nice pie chart of what I spent in any given month but I miss my column graphs that show me how little cash flows in opposed to the huge amounts that flow out on a month by month basis.
That said, who am I to complain about a product that is completely free? How do they survive you may ask? According to a forum post:
"By showing our customers special offers that can save them money. When users accept an offer from the "Offers" page, Mint makes money from the referral."

Perhaps this is an opportunity for Mint to make some extra cash: a "pro" version that speaks to graph and report fanatics like me. I would definitely spend $20/year on a service like that. I just read that Mint may have another business model in mind - detecting spending trends. Read more in the Techcrunch post titled "Mint Joins The World Economic Forum, Knows That You've Cut Back On Starbucks"

It is no surprise that Quicken followed suit rapidly with an also free offeringnamed Quicken Online. I decided to compare both by tracking my small business financials. Turns out that Quicken shows incredible consistency in providing buggy software. This time it was a simple, two account setup - Bank of America and Paypal. Transactions that Mint showed (and that actually existed) did not appear in Quicken Online. One advantage that Quicken could have leveraged - integration with other Intuit products - was sorely ignored. One can only download transactions in csv format. I was hoping that I could export all my transactions and import them into my quicken app to do some reporting. No such luck.

Oh well... Nice try Intuit but Mint is the clear winner.

A Virtualization Convert - Parallels vs VMware Fusion

I met a guy at a party not long ago who works for VMware. We had a lively discussion as I have been a Parallels user for over a year now and just upgraded to their 4.0 version.

This guy did not let loose and convinced me to give VMware's competitive product "Fusion" another try. I have to add that I actually tried the two about a year ago. Although Fusion seemed faster (which my ultrageek CTO at the time confirmed through in-depth tests) it lacked the Mac-ish user friendliness, so I stuck with Parallels.




Inspired by the party-guy's passion I downloaded VMware Fusion 2.0.1 and contemplated the consequences of messing with my tried and trusted setup.

After making sure I had enough hard drive space and convincing myself I couldn't really do too much damage as I was protected by fantastic Time Machine back up technology, I installed Fusion.
Here's where I hit my first snag: the new Parallels format is not compatible with VMware's import tool. Not a problem of course: all I had to do was retrieve the old format from Time Machine. With hard disk space getting thin I managed to retrieve the image and convert it to the Fusion format with the free tools provided by VMware.

The transition was remarkably uneventful... really, really smooth. When I launched Fusion I found a clean and easy to use interface - a big improvement to when I first tested it. After configuring all the options I started the VM for the first time. It went through automatic configuration routines, installed the VMware tools, similar to what happens with Parallels and after another reboot I was up and running.

Virtual Machines tend to hog a lot of processor and memory resources. Every time I launched Parallels, working on Mac apps turned into a pain (although watching a colorful ball turn can be so much fun...). I won't say it is blazing fast with Fusion but it does seem that a) Windows is running faster and b) Mac apps are still performant enough to not drive me nuts.

All in all, I must say: I'm a convert. I'm sticking to VMware Fusion.

Keeping my Mac and Google in Sync - Spanning Sync

Undoubtedly synchronization is hard. That's probably why so many companies get it wrong. I love Macs but iSync is not one of the apps that deserves praise.

My objective was simple - ensure that all the relevant data on my Mac is backed up on the web and with relevant data I mean contacts, calendar, email and if possible docs as well but that's a 2nd in priority. I went through multiple hand-held devices (Nokia, Sony-Ericsson, Palm, Blackberry, etc.) that synchronized OK with iSync but I caught myself holding my breath every time I would initiate a sync.

I also tried .mac (before it turned into me.com) to see if Apple could hold their promise of a happy synchronized world. They couldn't - not back then. I gave up on .mac but decided to give it another try when it morphed into MobileMe. The promise of "Exchange for the common person" was too much of a draw. I must say I am in awe.

It works... Apple certainly got their act together on this one. I can actually sync contacts and calendar items over the air with my iPhone, MacBook and me.com account. I LOVE it.

That said - I'm still locked into my pretty Apple world. I still need integration with Google. I use GMail a lot, privately and at work, so integration with Google is important. Specifically, I need my Google work calendar to sync with my Mac - I'm not too worried about contacts right now and email integration works fine.

That's where Spanning Sync comes in. They really know their stuff. Setting up multiple calendars is a breeze (I have 4 for some reason...) and I have had none of the common synchronization problems such as duplicate entries, entries disappearing and things like that.

I have not installed the beta of 2.0 that promises synchronization of contacts as well - mainly because I wanted to sort out my MobileMe setup first. I think I will wait until it is officially released for a change. I certainly will upgrade though - I like not having to manage multiple contact databases across disparate systems.
My initial focus was on the calendar though so now I have a seamless sync with Google via Spanning Sync and as long as one of my Macs is switched on (laptop or desktop) also a seamless sync across my many Apple gadgets with MobileMe. It would be great to have a server version of Spanning Sync that takes care of synchronizing Google and MobileMe in the cloud - maybe I should suggest it to them...

If you want to try it out click on the link below - that way you can save some money if you decide to buy it.

Stop Motion Video on a Mac - Take II

In my last post I described how I set up a stop-motion video "surveillance" system - the objective is to document the construction of new school buildings.

Overall it has gone pretty well so far. You can see the results on the Chabot Elementary contstruction update page.
Here's a quick summary of experiences:

• Imagecaster is doing a great job managing the cameras. It would be great if I could not only determine the time of day it is active but also the day of the week. Right now we have to manually delete all the pictures taken over the week-end where there is no activity. There also seems to be a minor but - I am managing two cameras on one computer (two instances of ImageCaster) and sometimes ImageCaster crosses over images from one camera into the other camera's folder. Again - something a manual edit can take care of quickly.
  
• Logmein has been a god sent as I had to log in remotely many times to fix or adjust things. I even got technical support despite using the free version.
• I needed to adjust the parameters for Quicktime a few times to adjust the resolution of the movies. After a month, the movies were approaching 100MB in size. After altering some parameters I managed to reduce the size to under 30MB with acceptable quality.
• Automator rocks and so does AppleScript - this is coming from someone who last programmed in 1989 (in Assembler!). I'll include some code samples at the end of the post.

There are two other technologies I haven't mentioned that I needed to make this happen:

1. Ethernet over power lines
   
2. FTP client
   

Ethernet over Power Lines
One of the rooms that hosts a computer and two cameras did not have Internet access. I tried Wifi but the room was out of reach. The solution was Ethernet over power. After a bit of research I found the Panasonic HD-PLC Ethernet Adapter Starter Pack. I had read about Ethernet over power lines before but never tried it. I don't generally read manuals so I just plugged the two devices in and it worked! I had Intenet access instantly.
This was a really simple solution and cost around $80.

FTP Client
After I had managed to pull together all the technology to create the images and the movies, I still needed software to upload the movies to the web server. A pre-requisite here was the ability to automate the process with scripts. For this task I used Transmit3 by Panic.com.
Transmit has great scripting capabilities and also prewritten scripts - I used one to back up all the individual photos onto the server. I asked for free licenses for my non-profit project and was granted one - thanks to the people at Panic!

One FTP client that I couldn't get to start on 10.4 but works fine on 10.5 is Cyerduck. It is also scriptable and seems very full featured but as I couldn't get it to run on OS 10.4 I used Transmit.


The Code
For those who are interested: here are the scripts I used within Automator. The first one is to convert images into a stop-motion movie:

-- AppleScript to get Quicktime to create the stop motion movie

-- This is to avoid that the script times out:
with timeout of 10000 seconds

 -- Quicktime actions:
 tell application "QuickTime Player"
     activate

     -- point quicktime to the first file and define the frames per second (fps)
     open image sequence "Macintosh HD:Users:UserName:Pictures:picture1.jpg" frames per second 6

     -- export movie in a format more suitable for the web. I played around with Quicktime and saved the configuration settings in a file
     export front document to "Macintosh HD:Users:UserName:Movies:movie1.mov" as QuickTime movie using settings "Macintosh HD:Users:UserName:Movies:ExportSettings" replacing yes
     -- instead of a file you can also type e.g.: using settings preset "Lan/Intranet"

     close front document saving no
 end tell
end timeout
tell application "QuickTime Player" to quit

Here's the script that uploads the video to the web server:

-- Using Transmit from Panic.com to upload movie files to the web server

-- This is to avoid that the script times out:
with timeout of 2000 seconds
  
   -- Transmit actions:
    tell application "Transmit"

       -- Prevent interactive alerts from popping up during script execution
       set SuppressAppleScriptAlerts to true
      
       -- Create a new session window for the script
       set theDoc to (make new document at end)
      
       -- send commands to the frontmost document window
       tell current session of theDoc
          
           -- Connect to password protected server
           connect to "mydomain.org" as user "login" with password "password" with connection type FTP using port 21 with initial path "/media"
          
           -- Set your stuff listing to "~/Movies" folder and upload .mov file
           set your stuff to "~/Movies"
           upload item "movie1.mov" with resume mode replace
       end tell
   end tell
end timeout
tell application "Transmit" to quit

Yes, it's that simple!

A WebCam, an iBook and Stop Motion Video

I volunteered for a project at my kids elementary school: record the historic remodeling of the school with web cams.

The idea is to end up with a stop motion video that compresses the construction work of many months into a few minutes of video.

It goes without saying that the budget needs to be kept at a minimum so I decided to use as much equipment as possible from the school inventory and beg for the rest.

The school owns many iBooks so I started with that as a basis. Given their age, they still run on Mac OS 10.4 which restricts the other parameters: the software and the cameras to use.

After a bit of research I learned that there are some versions of Logitech webcams that plug and play with Mac - in fact it was astonishing to see that there are hardly any 3rd party cameras that are good quality iSight replacements.

The camera I decided on was the QuickCam® Pro for Notebooks, listed at USD99.99. I checked with Logitech and after a little trouble getting hold of the right person, found a very generous soul that sponsored all the cameras I needed!

On the software front I tried multiple applications. The one I liked most was ImageCaster by Econ Technologies. It works great on the Mac and has all the features I needed to record images at pre-set intervals. It can even create a web page for you.
Econ Technologies also were very generous and provided the licenses I need for the school project for free.

ImageCaster manages taking all the individual images and dumping them in a folder, I was still stuck with how to convert them all into a movie. I tried iLife applications - loading the pictures into iPhoto and then using iMovie to grab them and make them into a movie. It worked fine but I wanted to automate the process and it just didn't seem elegant enough.

Then I learned that QuickTime Pro had a very simple feature called "Open an Image Sequence" - Just what I needed. Not only is it simple - all you do is point to the first picture of a series - you can also set the frame rate (how many frames, or in this case pictures, per second). I also learned that Quicktime is scriptable! Not that I knew how to script but I sensed it would come in handy.



Putting it all together
So I had all the pieces, now I needed them all to work in harmony. Setting up ImageCaster was a breeze. I could define what folder I wanted the images to be loaded into. I decided after some tests that I would go with one picture every 5 minutes.
Then the hard part started - automating the process of converting them to a movie and loading the movie to a web server.

I decided to play around with Automator and Script Editor. Automator is basically a graphically oriented way of programming and very well integrated with Mac applications. It also allows you to include custom scripts - something I needed to control Quicktime Pro. After some initial problems due to my lack of programing skills it actually turned out to be really easy (thanks to some big help from capitalj on the macosxhints forum).

The script literally only consists of opening QuickTime, pointing it to the right start file and then closing it... it is that easy.
Automator made the rest really simple - copying files from one location to the other for example. Best of all, it allows you to save the script as an iCal plugin which in turn provides an easy way to schedule the events in the Apple calendar.

So my test setup was complete:
- ImageCaster records images from the Logitech camera every 5 minutes into a folder on the local hard drive of an iBook
- An iCal event triggers a workflow (created with Automator and Script Editor) twice a day that
has QuickTime create a 12 fps (frames per second) movie out of all the files in the folder, then grabs the movie file and overwrites the moive file on the web server.

That's how it works in my test setup. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it works as smoothly in the real life implementation.

Drowning in Social Networks

I would consider myself technically adept and on top of technology fads. One trend I was late to engage in was social networking. In fact, I didn't actually engage in it, it just took me hostage.

The barrage of email requests from friends to join Facebook basically wore me down to a point where I caved and signed up. From then on my social networking career was on autopilot. With no effort from my part whatsoever my network grew and grew.

Although I find the phenomenon very interesting I am puzzled about the myriad of useless applications available to users. Why would I want to send someone a virtual cocktail, let alone pay for it??? A wonderful summary of the uselessness of Facebook is portrayed in this YouTube video (I'm afraid it is in Spanish...) - that was posted on my FunWall


If you don't understand Spanish - believe me, it's hilarious.

I am not trying to indicate that social networking is useless. I have to admit that my initial statement was not quite correct as I was an early adopter of LinkedIn - only at the time, I didn't realize it was called a social network. LinkedIn solved my problem of not being able to keep my rolodex up to date - that's why I signed up.

Now I think it is an incredibly powerful tool - especially if you are searching for a job: How often have you applied for a job by submitting your resume to a web site? You might as well put the resume in a bottle and throw it in the ocean...

LinkedIn actually shows you how you can connect to the recruiter - the better connected you are, the better the chances you have to get an interview.

That's what social networking is all about - it is based on trusting your friend's advice and opinion.


Another one I got roped into is Plaxo. I knew it from the past as a glorified address book application. Now it has metamorphosed into a social network. Not only that, they just got acquired by Comcast... what the???
I don't understand this world any more. Admittedly, Plaxo seems to be the only application that has a decent tool to help clean out duplicates (it's still not perfect - there's an business opportunity for a good address book cleaning application!) but that can't be why Comcast bought them. This is just as bizarre as eBay buying Skype.

So now I am not only connected, I am in some cases connected twice or three times to the same person through multiple networks. LinkedIn has certainly carved out a great niche and made it useful. As for the others, if you build an application, the usefulness will come.... some day...