iFill: stream radio directly to the iPod

It's in beta, but a very cool service. Good for listening to NPR ...I wonder if it will do commercial skip ... (that would be radical)

iFill - Griffin Technology

RapidWeaver: a personal web management tool for OS X

I still do my web work using FP 98 on XP. I'll change over someday. On OS X there's nVU and now Rapidweaver (which has gotten good buzz): Realmac Software - RapidWeaver

At last: a SOHO document scanner for OS X

This is potentially quite interesting, a document scanner for OS X:

Macworld UK - Apple Expo: Fujitsu comes to Mac: "Fujitsu announced its brand-new desktop colour image scanner - 'ScanSnap for Macintosh - at Apple Expo.

The 'ScanSnap for Macintosh' is a compact, upright desktop A4 image scanner. It also offers the capacity to scan documents into accurate PDFs using Fujitsu's software, which also lets those resultant PDFs be fully searchable by Mac OS X's Spotlight search feature.

The machine scans 15 pages per minute (A4, portrait, 150dpi) in the one-sided simplex mode and 30 images per minute in duplex mode (A4, portrait, 150 dpi), scanning front and back pages in just one single pass.

The scanner automatically recognizes whether documents are black & white or colour, and even deletes unwanted blank pages.

It ships with a 50-page automatic document feeder (ADF) and is about the size of a UK phone book. It supports output resolutions of 150, 200, 300 and 600dpi, with an optical resolution of 600 dpi.

This is for documents, not images. I'm going to look at it.

Digital TV: much easier to capture to a computer

TVMini - Watch Digital TV on your Mac

This tiny device is all that's required to capture broadcast digital TV and capture it on a computer. Good for PBS?

Inexpensive solution for migrating outlook data to iCal, etc

Little Machines:Outlook to Mac$10

macosxhints - 10.4: Limit a Smart Folder search to a specific folder

macosxhints - 10.4: Easily limit a Smart Folder to a specific folder

The solution? First navigate to the folder to which you want to limit the search. Hit Command-F, or in the menu, go to File -> Find. The "tab bar" at the top of the search criteria window now shows the folder you are currently in as one of the options. Select it, and then you can (as always) specify the other search criteria to your liking. Hit the Save button, and you now have a Smart Folder restricted to a specific folder (and its sub-folders).

Google secure access -- and one ring to rule them

So Google finally launched their wireless service. In bloody San Francisco. So what's wrong with the twin cities?

Ok, so that's no surprise. This is the interesting part -- Google Secure Access.

There's a deep problem with current wireless networks. The transmission between a wireless client and wireless access point is only encrypted (can't be read) when the access point handles authentication and security. Problem is there's all kinds of ways to do the encryption and no easy way to provide useful passwords to everyone using an access point -- whether across a city or in a cafe.

So the authentication/encryption has to move from the access point to a central service. Keep the access point stupid and simple. That's what Google is doing. I hope they're using a VPN standard and that it will work with non-Windows machines (Google has a disturbing tendency to only support Windows).

Google secure access, combined with Gmail, is turning Google into a vast identity management service. Next up is providing backup service and Google's PayPal annihilator.

There's no way Google won't be taking out PayPal. eBay must be in panic mode now. I like Google and despise Microsoft, but I hope Microsoft isn't completely zombied by their claustrophobic bureaucracy. We will need a counterbalance to Google someday soon.

Update: Apparently they're using a standard VPN solution that works on the Mac, though it's not flawless.