Brother MFC machine scan to USB features

I've long wanted a home scanner that would scan to local or network storage without intervention. In the 1990s I thought about ways to add such a facility to an existing scanner, but it didn't make business case. About 3-4 years ago scan PDF to network shares appeared in our office machines and my Brother MFC -7820N, and now our office scanners store PDF scans on an internal drive.

It's a fantastic feature, but the 7820N implementation is quirky. It doesn't work well with multi-user machines and it requires an oddball embedded server run on the recipient machine.

Today I discovered that the Brother MFC-9440CN will scan to a local USB store. Based on the Scan to USB documentation this is now available for 3 networked multi-function machines

DCP-9045CDN
MFC-9440CN
MFC-9840CDW

The MFC-9440CN was first introduced in 2007 (and is probably about to be replaced, so it's on sale now) and I'm writing about this now. Since this is a feature I'm extremely interested in I think there's a bit of a marketing failure here.

Brother's web site has some additional documentation ...

Scan | Brother

1. Scan to USB
   Brother’s Scan to USB enables you to scan documents direct to a USB memory device without the need to start up your PC. This means you can make digitised copies of documents immediately, including handwritten meeting notes, certificates, business cards, and drawings so you can be sure everything has been captured on the USB memory drive for later use.
2. Scan to file
   Save scanned data into a selected folder for easy information sharing.
3. Scan to FTP ...

Both options 1 and 3 are great for us. I could easily setup an FTP server on my OS X machine that would work in a multi-user environment, and of course the USB function is very simple. The Amazon reviews suggests this feature works, though they also point out that the replacement toner cartridges are fantastically expensive and that B&W printing drains the color toner [1]

I'm going to have to look into these capabilities. The fact that they're not marketed more widely does emphasize what a weird bird I am ...

[1] Every vendor I know of is guilty of some form of toner scam. It's an instance of irresistible emergent fraud. In the case of my Brother MFC -7820N the cartridge stops working even when it has ample residual toner. You cover up a transparent port to get a few more months of light duty printing. The scams for these color printers are substantially nastier.

Google Reader share broken? Check your Friends list

Google has been flailing about with their Profile / Social graph strategy.

Recently they refactored Gmail/Google Contacts, and created a new classification of contacts: "Friends", "Family" and "Coworkers". The result broke some of my Google Reader shared feeds.

More details here:

Gordon's Notes: Google's confusing social graph strategy: Google reader friends via Google Chat

... Jacob R is seeing my shares, we have a [Google] chat relationship, but I'm not seeing his shares. I added his share stream as a distinct feed for now. ... turns out when Google switched to their even more befuddled social strategy I wasn't in Jacob's "Friends" group, so his sharing feed went away. He added me in and it reappeared....

...Google has things set up so you do the feed stream share thingie with ONE of (not both of)

• Your chat contacts
• "Friends" as defined by Gmail - "Friends, Family, and Coworkers are groups to help you organize your contacts. You can move contacts in and out of these groups at any time. Various Google products let you share information with people in these groups.
  In addition, you can create a Google profile to help people in these groups keep in touch with you. They will be able to easily find your profile from various Google products."

In both cases of course the Chat contact or Gmail Friend must have as an email address the Gmail address associated with their Google Reader shares....

Just imagine how this hairball plays out when you introduce synchronization of Google Contacts with external contact stores.

It's a Googlicious screw-up.

Now waiting for version 3 ...

Google Voice iPhone apps coming out

The first entry I know of is GVdialer from MobileMax (these are being filed under "Productivity" in the App Store directory). Unfortunately the early reviews are devastating; happily reviewers are getting their money back.

GVdialer is being relaunched at a lower price point, but I can wait.

iPhonefreak has a very encouraging review of GV Mobile that mentions a few others ...

Aside from GV Mobile, there are also three other Google Voice apps for the iPhone that I am aware of. They include VoiceCentral, GVdialer and a third that I cannot name just yet..

I've read that there's no Google Voice API yet, so all apps need to do the modern equivalent of "screen scraping". Even so they're able to offer some great features like Contacts integration, SMS integration (no charge for sending!) and outgoing calls showing one's GV number rather than the mobile phone number.

Of course Google has a "mobile" web client for GV, but it's miserable. I prefer to simply call my GV number from my phone, tap '2', then tap in the number I'm dialing, tap # and go. Since I'm really only calling one number from GV that's tolerable for now. I assume they'll deliver something better in time but I bet they're currently focusing on the GV API (that's where things get even more fun).

Unless the initial reviews are as bad as those for GVdialer, I'll be reporting on my GV Mobile experiences once that app is available. It will launch with a free "lite" version as well as the pay version -- that's a good sign of a quality product in the rapidly evolving App store scene.

Geek joy.

PS. I'm so impressed by the iPhoneFreak review I'm adding them to my bloglist for a test.

TripIt - trying them out

I don't see how they can possibly build the "TripIt" communities they want, but with some reservations I'm giving TripIt | Online travel itinerary and trip planner a try.

The trick is that once your email addresses are registered (and I assume you need to register them for work, home, etc), you can email itineraries of various forms and TripIt managers them and also organizes them into calendars that have .ICS feeds.

Then you add the .ICS feed to Google Calendar and you can view them there. Presumably you can also copy appointments into Google Calendar.

Since I sync Google Calendars to my iPhone this is appealing.

More when I have some experience to report. They also have some LinkedIn support ...

Facebook - getting your photos

Most sites tip toe around data lock. They wanna own you, but they try to be nice about it.

Google is different. Not perfect, but they really have a data liberation front.

Facebook is different too. They don't pretend to be nice. They'd take their users' ovaries if they could get 'em.

I was struck by that when I decided I'd try to download a photo I'd put on FB. Right. No export option.

There's a way to do it though. Marteydodoo.com - Photo Download is a free OS X and Win app for retrieving images from Facebook.

So Facebook could be even nastier than they are. Still, they're bad.

Update: When you retrieve your images this way you still lose the image metadata, such as date and location.

Apple idiocy: iPhoto '09's biggest feature is not documented: sharing

What the #$!$!@% is Apple thinking?!

Would it kill them to document this kind of feature?!

TidBITS Media Creation: 10 Undocumented Changes in iPhoto '09 8.0.2

Sharing via the Shared Folder -- Another major annoyance with versions of iPhoto prior to iPhoto '09 was that you couldn't just put your iPhoto Library in the /Users/Shared folder to share it among multiple accounts on the same Mac, since iPhoto always set the permissions on thumbnails to the account that imported the photos, preventing other accounts from editing those photos and having the edits reflected in the thumbnails.

That limitation has now been fixed in iPhoto '09, so you can share an iPhoto library merely by moving it to /Users/Shared and then double-clicking it to open in iPhoto from each account. You may be prompted to repair permissions on the first access - click the Repair button to do that. Note that this also works for storing an iPhoto library on an external hard disk that's shared among users or on a network volume for access across a fast network.

Only one person may access a shared iPhoto library at a time...

Hell's bells, this is huge for us. This means that I now have to think about either buying iLife '09 or buying a bloody new machine and getting it for free.

The only things they could fix that would be comparable would be if they came up with a viable approach to managing video fragments in iPhoto or if Apple were to trigger the end of time by supporting iPhoto Library import/merging. (Yes, I know about IPLM, I've been a customer for about four years.)

Does Apple not want to sell anything?!

The only reason I can think of for this being undocumented is that there's a catch somewhere -- something that doesn't work quite right. I'll add a comment to that effect to the Tidbits article.

Facebook, Twitter, iPhone, Google Reader: Update with FB feed information

I've been experimenting with Facebook and Twitter again.

The net result is I find Facebook oddly interesting and Twitter still puzzling. Facebook in particualr is proof that usability is not a requirement for critical success. I see the point of this NYT Magazine article:

... Facebook users didn’t think they wanted constant, up-to-the-minute updates on what other people are doing. Yet when they experienced this sort of omnipresent knowledge, they found it intriguing and addictive...

I suspect the Lesser Depression is a powerful tonic for social networking sites. In my case the Twitter retry was triggered by a (voluntarily) departed colleague who does Twitter and the FB reboot was motivated by a critical mass of friends and acquaintances on FB. Both experiments have been aided by solid iPhone app clients.

Some quick comments and potentially useful references ...

• Tech for Luddites: Read, Send, and Share Tweets on Facebook: showed me how to get Twitter posts to show up on my FB wall. My impression was that it would also enable FB to Twitter posts but that hasn't worked (either my error or a security setting or a bug). The author of this blog is a few steps ahead of me so I'm learning a lot from her current and past posts.
  
• I added the Google Reader Share app to my FB page, but it was posting unpredictably. Sometimes it would concatenate my shared items into a paragraph of many links (good), sometimes it woudl create individual wall posts (bad, too much volume). I had to remove it.
• I experimented with the RSS app, but it generated "notes" which don't seem to fit the current FB sharing model
• I turned off the majority of the FB email notifications, instead I subscribe by feed to Events and Friends updates [1 - the friends updates subscription is gone]. So my mail is not interrupted, and I pick up FB activity when I use Google Reader. (I found a FB bug -- if I turn off too many email notifications at once FB doesn't save my preferences. I had to turn them off in 3-4 sets.)
• I've reviewed and played with the copious privacy configuration options, but I treat anything I post to FB as though it were going to my kids, my friends, the FBI, my parents, my boss, my company's customers, etc. So not super bland, but my pseudonymous blogs are much more interesting.
• LinkedIn is my corporate identity, Facebook is my personal "face", and the blogs are my alternative identity. So far, a reasonable balance and an interesting experiment.
• Facebook is very big on "data lock". So I don't put anything there I want to keep. So I won't be putting photo albums, etc on FB. I treat FB as an information black hole -- data goes in, but can't be extracted. (Yeah, I know this is bad physics, it's a metaphor!)
• I don't get the groups and events features on FB, it feels like they've been deprecated.
  

Update 8/26/09: Facebook has removed the status update feed. The feed I have in Google Reader still works, but it's no longer possible to create a new status update feed. The notification feed is still available (see bottom of the All Notifications screen). Yelvington has published a workaround to reproduce the old status update feed URL. Like him I wonder how long this will work ...

Here's how to get your status as an RSS feed.

1. Log into facebook.
2. Click on "Inbox."
3. Click on the "Notifications" tab.
4. Find the RSS link under "Subscribe to notifications" and copy it. THIS IS NOT THE RIGHT LINK but it contains essential information.
5. COPY the link URL arguments -- everything to the right of the "?" in the URL. This should looks something like id=563407515&viewer=563407515&key=1234aa32e7&format=rss20.
6. Attach the string you copied above this URL: http://www.facebook.com/feeds/status.php?

You now have a feed URL that will deliver YOUR status updates. You should TEST THIS URL using a browser that is NOT logged into Facebook. If you get an RSS feed containing your updates, this is valid...

I assume FB removed this to keep Facebook as closed as possible, and, importantly, this feed bypassed FB's access controls. I really miss it though and I'm glad it still works.