Paperless - closer than you think

I don't suppose we'll ever be completely paperless. At least not in the near future. But the opportunities to reduce our dependency on pulverised wood are there. Wherever possible I do all my transactions online, and hardly see a paper bill these days. E-books mean that bulky books are fewer, although I have to say I like to read a real book rather than an e-book. If I see anything online I want to make a note of, I capture the screen or web page, or just a part of it to Evernote, one of my favourite apps with a couple of clicks and it's there and available for posterity, across all my devices - my desktop iMac, my Macbook, my iPad and my iPhone, or indeed online from any internet connected computer.

It's the little scraps of paper that are annoying, or those old photos. However, there is a solution. I've been using a Doxie One  from Doxie for a year or so and I love it. It's a small portable scanner, mains or battery powered that enables you to scan in sheets up to A4 size to an SD card and then import them to, well, wherever you want to using the desktop Doxie application. It's brilliant, and I've cleaned out all but the most important of documents (birth certificates etc) from my "filing". I've never had less paper. Anything that does come on paper now that I need to keep gets "Doxied" and then shredded.

Not only is the hardware great, their customer service is exceptional. A few months after getting my Doxie One, I emailed them to mention that although the scanner was working fine, occasionally the scanner wasn't always being recognised when I connected it to the Mac via the usb cable (not a major problem as I nearly always use the SD card to transfer the files, but slightly irritating nonetheless). They emailed me back with a few suggestions that didn't work. Then they said don't worry we'll just send you a new one - and they did. No questions, no hassle, just "here, have a new one". They said keep the old one (even though it was still working fine apart from that one occasional gripe).

I'm so impressed that I've just upgrade to their latest version - the Doxie Go wireless. Like it's little brother but wireless so I can now transfer files from it's inbuilt memory without any cables or SD card swapping. The photo below shows how diminutive this is - a CD is provided only for scale comparison, not to say anything about my taste in music. If you like gadgets and have a bunch of paper and old photos lying around you want to scan, I'd recommend this little marvel, or indeed any of it's siblings.

Doxie Go Wireless

Be there.....

My new broadband service with Be goes live on Friday.

Everything's ready. My new Be box (router) arrived today. Nothing flash, a capable Thompson router. I'll see how it goes but have my current Netgear DGN1000 available if it proves not brilliant (not that the Netgear is superb).

Everything about the transfer from my current provider Pipex has gone swimmingly well so far.

Pipex delivered the MAC code to me as promised - though I only got it via the post - not also via email, text and voicemail which they also promised me.

Anyhows, the Be order process was smooth, and the communication I've had from Be has been superb. Automated txts and emails granted, but plenty of them from telling me the order has been processed, to the box being despatched, to expected delivery date of the box plus what to do when it arrives. The comms have all been clear and concise, but in a light hearted and easy to understand manner that suggests that they value you as a customer, and want the process to be as pain free as possible (unlike Pipex/Talk Talk/Carphone Warehouse or who-ever they are these days who are pushy, often rude and frequently incomprehensible.

Apparently, I just plug this box in on Friday when my existing connection goes down, and off I go. Virtually no configuration needed. Certainly no complex usernames and other configuration that I have to do for my Pipex connection.

That bit's yet to come of course, and may not be as simple as it''s made out to be - we'll see.

either way. I'm pretty excited in my own geeky sort of way. I'm not expecting a massive speed boost. Currently I'm lucky to get 1.7MB downstream on a connection that promises "up to 8MB". Be say I might get 2.5MB. The main problem is that I'm a fair way from the exchange, but I'm hoping the key is that BE's service has less contention and no throttling (that's what they say). If I can consistently get 2MB I'll be happy. I'll be happy just not being with Pipex any more!

Data, data everywhere.....

So the good news is I've got my shiny new network hard drive set up and whirring quietly away. The next job is to consider how best to use the darn thing.

Here's the current situation.

I've got two desktop PC's running Windows 7, a Macbook Pro running Snow Leopard, a 7" Asus Eee running Ubuntu (to be fair hardly ever wheeled out) and an iPhone. Two iPhones if you count my son's 3G. Oh, and an iPod Touch belonging to my daughter.

I have a wireless network which includes a Canon multi-function printer not connected to anything except the power outlet (how clever is that - never ceases to maze me when it churns out paper without being connected to a PC).

There's also a 500GB external HDD attached to the main W7 PC, but available on the network to all other PC's and the MBP.

One of the problems I have is that I tended to keep the MBP/my iphone separate, so I have music on the MBP, and a bunch of music on the Windows network HDD> Same for photos. A bunch on the MBP and a (mostly duplicated) bunch on the Windows network HDD.

Oh, and this is discounting a bunch of "personal files" stored on Dropbox, but the beuaty of Dropbox is that it syncs to any computer it's installed on - in my case, both Windows boxes, the Eee, the MBP and my iPhone.

So what's my strategy going forward?

Well, I'm going to use my new wireless network HDD/NAS as the "master". My plan is to consolidate my music and photos and videos/movies onto this drive, back them up routinely to the standard external drive.

I can then free up space, especially on my MBP (not that it's tight for hard disk space, but I'm a bit paranoid when I get below half the drive full). My iTunes on whichever box I'm using will be accessing the network storage source, not individual local sources, and it will be the same for photos via Picasa.

Hopefully this will all work.

Of course, I've got to set up the back-up strategy too, but I use the highly effective and configurable Acronis True Image for this.

Fingers crossed!

Shiny happy people

Wooho! It's my birthday, and as is so often the case that means shiny gadgets!

This year I unwrapped a lovely 1 terabyte network hard drive - the Western Digital MyBook World Edition (bit of a mouthful for a bit of electronics).

It looks marvelous in its white casing, though rather clashed with my 500MB black MyBook external drive.

And it's so simple to set up. I unpacked it, plugged in the ethernet cable to my router, turned on the power and let it configure itself.

A couple of minutes later, and there on my Windows 7 PC home network, sits the drive with it's public, download and backup shares.

I turned on my Macbook Pro, and bingo, it's sitting there in Finder just waiting to have lots of lovely data copied to it.

It comes with a set up disk, but I didn't need it. Brilliant. Now, where can I find a terabyte of data?

New wireless keyboard

I bought a new keyboard and mouse this weekend. My old compaq keyboard was full of all sorts of incredible gunge -you wouldn't believe it. Well perhaps you might. It's astounding how stuff ends up in there, most of which by the time you come to clean it out is unrecognisable.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I tried to clean it out,but after putting the thing back together several of the keys were deciding not to play. So I decided to shell out for a new one.

At PC World, prices ranged from about £9 upwards. I'm not using my home PC all day every day so don't need a top of the range one, so settled on a PC Line wireless keyboard and mouse set for £14. Yes just £14! I've used a wireless set before and love them. Wires are just so yesterday, so was pleased to go back to a wireless set.

Set up was a cinch. Put the batteries in, plug in USB receiver and Bob's you're auntie's live in lover.

The mouse is great. Responsive and comfortable. The keyboard not so. There's good key travel, but I'm finding my touches on the space bar are being missed unless I press really hard. I'm sure it's just a matter of getting used to it, but you can immediately tell the difference in quality between this and the old Compaq unit.

I guess there's a moral there. You pay you're money and take your choice.

The good and the bad

Interesting comparisons .

A couple of months ago I bought a PAYG mobile broadband dongle from O2. This week I've also bought one from T-Mobile, as I know I'll be somewhere this summer that has very poor O2 coverage but pretty good T-Mob coverage.

Having both might seem extravagant but it does give me some backup options. Anyway, the interesting thing has been how easy (or not) these things have been to set up and get going with.

The O2 one was pretty straightforward. Installed the network manager on my Mac, put the dongle in. Went to the O2 mobile broadband top up page, entered my number, paid my money, connected and off I went. Now, every time I need to top up, I just do the same. I haven't needed to set up an account (even though I have an O2 account) or register a card.

The T-Mob experience was much harder. The network manager install was easy - easier than O2, as everything was installed from the dongle when I put it in.

However, that's when things went a bit pear shaped. When I bought the dongle it had a compulsory £10 "top up" on it, so I should have been good to go. But I wasn't. When I tried to connect I kept getting a message saying that I was trying to connect but hadn't any top up or hadn't activated my account. Activate my account I had to register a card! So I did. But to register a card I had to put a top up on it! Minimum £5. However, I must have tried a couple of times without success as eventually it told me I couldn't register the payment as I'd exceeded the number of attempts. So a long call to T-Mob ensued. The first problem was I couldn't register my debit card because that's already registered with another T-Mob account for my son's phone, and yo can't register a card with 2 accounts - apparently. So I topped up on my credit card. Now I had paid £15 of top up including the original £10 with the purchase of the dongle, but still only £5 was showing on my account.

Tried again, and got the same message - have to activate, and to all extents and purposes it looked like it was still asking me to pay. In the end I worked out that I had to go through the motions as if I was going to top up again whereupon my initial £2 daily top up charge was deducted from the £5 top up payment I'd made earlier (this was entirely unclear to me). A further phone call to T-Mob as to where my original £10 top up was elicited an apology and assurance it would be put right within the hour (and it was).

So eventually, I'm there. I just hope it's easier next time, and that the bloody thing gets a network connection in the middle of nowhere, where I'm assured by my sister who also uses a T-Mob dongle, it will.

Printer update

A couple of posts ago I was on about getting a new printer, Canon's all in one Pixma MP560. Well, I've gone and done it, as Amazon have it available at a remarkable £90 and if you can live with a 3-4 day delivery period (I can), free delivery. That's £30 cheaper than Comet/PC World which is a bit of a steal.

Chuck in the fact I bought it on Amazon via easyfundraising.org where I've registered my Cricket Club "Dinas Powys Cricket Club" as my "cause", and I've also raised 2.5% of the purchase price for the cricket club!

Win, win!