The articles here at PWW tend to be a bit more in depth than this, but I thought this might be a good tips that many would benefit from. As you’ve probably figured out by now, both Alex and I are Mac users, and just adore the design of Apple’s products. As a result of this, both Alex and I bought the Wireless Mighty Mouse to use with our laptops. A couple of days ago my Mighty Mouse stopped scrolling up. It was weird, because I could still scroll down and horizontally. Since this was very annoying, it became the first thing on my priority list to fix.

After some googlin’ and reading on a couple of Mac forums, I found the solution. Press down the ‘scroll ball’ hard. This sounds like a weird thing to do, but after checking some other sites that said the same thing, I tried it. After pressing the ‘scroll ball’ down quite hard the scroll feature started working again.

If you get the following error when you’re trying to ‘make world’ for a jail in FreeBSD,

can’t cd to /usr/src/tools/build/make_check

the problem is simply that you’ve forgotten to run cvsup to download the sources.

I’m posting it here so that in case someone else has this problem they won’t waste 20 minutes wondering what’s wrong and Googling fruitlessly like I did. :)

Once again, I’m sorry for letting you wait for a new article for so long, but I really couldn’t find any time in my schedule to write anything of value. This does not mean that we don’t have anything to write about. We have tons of ideas, but just not the time to write the actual articles.

Now I want to introduce a new section here on the blog. It is called “Ask PlayingWithWire.” This section is really just an experiment inspired by Ask Slashdot. The Ask PWW section is for you readers to write in to us and ask questions, which we hopefully can provide good answer to.

If you have any questions that you want us to answer, please drop us an e-mail at info@wireload.net.

Until a couple of days ago, my bookshelf was filled with binders with old lecture notes from school. The truth is that I don’t think I ever opened one of these binders after I finished the final for the class. Yet, I didn’t want to throw it all away, since it might come handy some day when I want to refresh my memory.

On the other hand these binders really bothered me. They took up space in the bookshelf that I could use for something more useful. So I thought, why don’t I digitalize these papers?

This solution includes:

• A scanner (preferably with ADF)
• A software called PDFLab
• A staple remover
• Quite a bit of time

You may want to use this guide for the archiving of old:

• Bills
• Financial documents
• Lecture notes
• Receipts

1. Preparing your documents

Prepare the documents you want to scan. That means figuring out how you want to group your documents and removing the staples. Since I was scanning lecture notes, the grouping was quite simple. Removing the staples is a boring job, but it needs to be done.

In the process of scanning…

2. Scanning your documents

This is the time consuming part. Depending on your hardware, the time the scanning takes varies a lot. With the scanner I was using (HP Scanjet 5590), one paper (front and back) probably took about 35 seconds in 150 DPI. If you have a scanner with ADF, it doesn’t really matter that much if it takes 10 or 40 minutes to scan a pile of papers, since you can go and do something else in the meantime.

Depending on the software you’re using, the file-output might differ. In the software I was using, the name ‘bus-law_0_0.jpg’ turned out to be working quite well. The first ‘0’ is for the sequence. If for some reason the scanning aborts, you can just continue with ‘bus-law_1_0.jpg’, and the files will still sort in order.

3. Preview and delete blanks

When you’ve scanned in one entire group of documents, select them all and drag them to Preview. Use the arrow-keys to browse through all the documents to make sure they look good. You might want to rotate some documents, or delete some blank pages. I found the shortcut ‘Apple + Delete’ very handy in Preview, since then I can delete the file from Preview, without having to go out in Finder.

4. Convert your documents to a PDF

Screenshot of PDFLab

Up to this point you just have a bunch of jpeg files in a folder somewhere. Since this is not very convenient when you browse notes, I wanted to convert every group to a single PDF-file. When doing my research I found a very handy software called PDFLab. The software is a freeware and works really well.

Download PDFLab and fire it up. Now go to the folder where you saved all those jpeg files. Select them all, and drag them to PDFLab. This might take a couple of minutes, depending on your hardware.

When the files are imported into PDFLab, sort them by name by clicking ‘Name’. Now look through the list. If you have file names that go above 100 (‘bus-law_0_0100.jpg’), the sorting might not be done properly, since the file ‘bus-law_0_0103,jpg’ is sorted before ‘bus-law_0_013.jpg’. If you experience this, you need to move around the files manually until they are in the proper sequence.

When you’re happy with the sorting, hit ‘Create PDF,’ and enter an output file-name in the dialog which appears. If the PDF was generated without any errors, you’re all set.

If you get an error message when generating the PDF, just hit OK, and try to create it again. If this doesn’t work, try to restart the software.

5. Delete/Backup the image-files

When you’ve made sure that your PDF is working fine, you can either delete you jpeg files or burn them to a CD just to be safe.

That’s it. You can now throw away all those papers into the recycle bin. The best thing is that you’re never more than a couple of clicks away from your documents.

Empty binders

6. Drawbacks

This solution is not perfect, but it’s sure better than having all those binders in the bookshelf or in a box somewhere. The main drawback of this is that the documents are not searchable. This could possibly be solved with OCR, but according to my experience, OCR is still not powerful enough to recognize all handwriting. OCR also tend to mess up documents which mix text and images. However, if I was able to scan these documents into a PDF with OCR recognition, this would be the optimal solution, since it would both be searchable and consume less space.

             

Since Playing With Wire switched to WordPress, we’ve had categories. Two months have passed since then and we now have a couple of ideas about how to make our categories work better for you readers.

So today’s we’re introducing these two changes:

Fewer Categories
We want our categories to be like ‘channels’. If you want, you can tune in on our ‘Business channel’ for all the Business related stuff we do. Or you can check out the latest we’ve got on Open Source. But when you thought about it this way the question that immediately came up was: why do we have three channels with unspecified content? We didn’t know either so we’ve taken ‘Other’, ‘Generic’ and ‘Uncategorized’ and combined all of them into a single section: Other.

New How To’s Category
After removing two channels, we decided to go ahead and add one too. Turns out we’ve written quite a few guides about this and that. Now you can read them all by heading over to our How To’s and Guides category. Enjoy!