Archiving Documents

A few months ago, we took a look at our filing cabinet in our office.  We have a lot of documents that we have saved, just in case we had a need for that information.  Unfortunately, over time the amount of paper continues to increase.  So I decided to look for a solution for me to digitize all of this content.

The Evernote blog had a post about Pixily/OfficeDrop.  This is a service where you can mail your documents in and they scan them and run OCR software.  Then they host the files in a digital locker, where you can search or organize them.  This seemd like a reasonable service, but it works best for scanning documents as you receive them.  In order for use to scan through our backlog of documents, it would have cost several hundred dollars.

We decided not to go with OfficeDrop, not only because of the cost of scanning our backlog of documents, but also for the cost of the service.  The amount of storage that you get, I feel, is not worth the monthly charge.

We decided to do the scanning ourselves.  We bought a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500M document scanner to do the scanning.  This scanner will quickly scan a batch of multiple side documents.  The included software has some pretty useful features:

1. Automatically detects the number of printed sides on a sheet


2. OCR and creation of searchable PDFs

Comedy Central shows with PlayOn

I have been very happy with our setup now that we have cancelled our Comcast cable TV service.  For the shows that are not available on terrestrial television, the selection of content available on Hulu has been great.  Unfortunately, Comedy Central decided to pull their content from Hulu.

Today, I got an email from the PlayOn team, mentioning they they have added support for playing Comedy Central content, in addition to content from NCAA March Madness, MLB and Pandora.  I installed the update, and it works great.

Moving to hosted blog software? [update]

I am thinking about moving my blogs to a hosted blog software service like Wordpress.com or blogger.com. This would reduce the amount of work that I would need to do to keep the software up to date.  Currently, I need to manually upgrade my installation of WordPress when ever a new version comes out, or if new versions of the plugins are made available.

Also since don't have the ftp server enabled on my server, this would make adding/upgrading plugins a lot easier.

I am leaning towards WordPress.com, as it is an easy export of my blog into that server.  (I have already done this.)  I would just need to pay $10 to have my domain pointed to their servers.

Update:  I am going to stick with running WordPress on my own server.  There are several things that are missing from WordPress.com:

1. You can't have a custom permalink format


2. You can't upload themes or plugin (Adsense and Bad Behavior plugins are not available)


3. If I don't want their ads, I need to pay an extra $30 a year.

Windows Media Center Setup

I have now been using my Windows Media Center setup without cable television signal for a few weeks now, and I am pretty happy with it.  I am not missing anything not having a cable source.  This is the description of my setup.

Over the Air Content

HDHomeRun

We are using a HDHomeRun Dual for our ATSC source.  The HDHomeRun allows me to keep the antenna in the attic, and the PC downstairs, without having to run a antenna drop down the several floors.  It will also be possible for us to add an additonal HDHomeRun if we want to add extra tuners.  The tuners on the HDHomeRun can also be used on other computers in the house, though I am not currently using that feature.

My recommendation for anyone using an HDHomeRun is to use Gigabit Ethernet for the drop between the main network switch and the Media Center PC.  When recording two 19Mbs ATSC streams, you will want to leave enough network bandwidth, so if anything is happening on you network, the video quality is not affected.  For example, on our Media Center I want to make sure that I can record two shows, while the Media Center is backed up, movie that is stored on the Windows Home Server is being watched one the Media Center, and some recorded content from the Media Center is being watched on one of the Media Center Extenders.

I was seeing some degradation of video quality when using 100 Mb Ethernet, but haven't had a problem since upgrading to Gigabit Ethernet.  I haven't upgrade my whole network to Gigabit, but that isn't a problem as most of the other devices can barely saturate a 100Mbs drop.

Personal Rating Store

This week I installed the Slacker Android application on my phone.  This version gives the user the ability to "cache" stations so you can listen to them when not connected to a network.  I really wasn't using this functionality to handle lack of service coverage, but to save battery, since my phone's radio doesn't need to turn on while playing a station.

While setting up and listening to the Slacker stations, I had to mark songs that I liked and didn't like.  This is the same thing that have done on my Pandora and Last.fm stations.  Unfortunately, Pandora and Last.fm do not let you export your ratings.

The same problem also exists for video.  For example, Netflix has a list of ratings that a user has given to DVDs, and Flixster has ratings that users have given to movies.

This got me thinking that there could be a be a better solution for the user.  A user should be able to delegate a "preference service" to maintain their ratings.  When a user signs into a service that would like access to a user's ratings, like Pandora or Netflix, they are prompted to grant permission for the new service to access the user's ratings.  If the user agrees, the user's ratings can be imported into the service.  The user could also grant the new service the ability to update their ratings, so for example if a user gives a rating to a movie in Netflix, it could update the users rating in the rating store.

Since we would want this connection to be easy to setup, the user shouldn't have to manually setup this linking.  One way to solve this is to extend the frederated login services to contain the uri for the user's rating store.  For example, this could be easily added to the OpenID record for the user returned when the user authenticates.

We would have have to agree on the name space for the rateable items.  I propose using Freebase ids as the unique identifiers.  Then services that use the ratings can map these ids to its own name space.

This idea would allow the user to quickly train new services with their ratings, as well as the ability to export their data.

CloudBerry Backup for WHS [updated]

HP appears to have dropped support for their online backup add-in for Window Home Server, HP created their online backup software for the ex47x and ex48x MediaSmart servers, but now are promoting other backup services for their current line of servers.  Their add-in used Amazon S3 for storage.  I have used JungleDisk on my desktop machines to backup, so I am pretty used to that storage system.  But since it that HP probably not continuing development, I wanted to find a solution to have an offsite backup for some of the files on the server, that would continue to be supported.

I am trying CloudBerry Backup for Windows Home Server.  This is very similar to HP's online backup add-in and the old JungleDisk Windows Home server.  CloudBerry lets you pick any share or a connected drive to backup.  Also you can set a time range when backups can happen.

I did have a problem after setting this up.  I has some paths on some of the shares that were too long for Windows (These were copied from my linux computer).  When CloudBerry encountered this error, it listed the error in the error email that was sent.

I will probably pay for CloudBerry Backup once the trial is over

tubeCore

A few weeks ago, I installed our networked ATSC tuner, and I disconnected our Comcast cable feed.  This has been working great, as we are able to get our network shows over the ATSC tuner, and movies and older shows over Netflix streaming.  The one thing that was missing is recent shows on cable channels.

I mentioned before several solutions on getting access to Hulu content in Media Center.  vmcPlayIt allowed you to play content from a PlayOn media server, but the UI didn't look good at all.  Then there are solutions that let you launch Hulu Desktop, like HuluDesktopWMC and Hulu Desktop Integration, but those have problem when switching back and forth between the applications.

tubeCore appears to be the best solution.  It is similar to vmcPlayIt, where it connects to a DNLA server like PlayOn, but the UI is a lot better.  The other good thing about tubeCore is that it is compatible with Media Center Extenders