[@798]

NeatReceipts

I just bought a NeatReceipts scanner. I spend most of the weekend scanning 3 months worth of receipts. Overall it's not a bad product. The scanner is pretty good and seems to be doing a decent job at parsing the vital info (date, amount, payment type) from most legible receipts. It's even smart enough to learn about new retail stores, etc. The software is really the weak link. It does an okay job at storing the receipts info, but the interface is really dense. The search feature is pretty much useless. You can't even search the notes field, etc. The Pro version of the software looks a lot better, at least from the screenshots on the website, but I just found out that they won't have an upgrade path from Classic for a few months.

[@838]

They just sent me the pro version. Wow… What a difference…

I'll just have to wait until they have a converter to be able to import the receipts I have scanned so far.

[@584]
U.S. Mobile

Russ is looking at the state of the U.S. mobile phone market.

As I said in the comments section; the problem is that Nokia & co. have yet to produce a phone that is really compelling to the average consumer. 99% of the U.S. mobile consumer market doesn't care about phones, as long as they're free or dirt cheap.

Xbox 360 Russ also bought a Xbox 360. He just found out about its Media Center Extension abilities.

I was seriously considered buying one too. Not that I play a whole lot of games. But I've been looking at ways to stream videos wirelessly from my PC to a TV. Unfortunately the Xbox doesn't support the xvid (or divx) format, which is a pretty big limitation in my book.

I've also been tempted to buy a D-Link DSM-320RD, except that I've returned every single D-Link product I've ever bought. It hasn't gotten very good reviews either. But it's the only box I've seen that supports both WPA and the xvid codec.

[@565]
We're not in Maryland Anymore!

Welcome to Kansas, Matt.

[@603] <Matt770> It is fscking cold

[@410]
Happy Birthday!

to me, Mike and Paul.

The plan… Dinner at Morton's around 8pm.

[@083]
DRM & DCMA

Phil Windley has written a very interesting article on DRM & DCMA. I couldn't agree more. DCMA (and DRM) is not about protecting intellectual property rights. It is really about protecting business models.

The worse part is that we're letting it happen. Everybody is raving about the iTunes store model, etc. It is truly amazing how much rights/freedom we are willing to sacrifice in the name of convenience.

[@067]
Sphere

I'm trying out Sphere, a new blog search engine. The search results are pretty good, but the page design is totally ineffective.

See for yourself:

All of the attention is focused towards the least important elements of the page, the search-bar and sidebars.

Even the orange profile images are distracting from the actual results.

And don't even get me started on the use of bold text…

Learn from Google; Keep it simple, stupid.

The Pulse

Erik's Pulse has been published.

[@525]
New Locations I've changed the structure of www.thauvin.net, everything relating to me is now located under erik.thauvin.net. Erik's Weblog, Linkblog and Wiki are now located at:

• http://erik.thauvin.net/blog/
• http://erik.thauvin.net/linkblog/
• http://erik.thauvin.net/wiki/

Vik's homepage is now at: http://vicki.thauvin.net/ I've also moved all of the #mobitopia related pages to www.mobitopia.org. The old URLs are automatically redirected. The transition should be pretty seamless for most.

[@406]

[@831]
Happy Halloween!

[@768]
AlarmsPro

The Anchorage Daily News is running a story in their money section featuring one of the ventures I'm currently involved with, AlarmsPro.

What the article doesn't mention is that the system is entirely written in Java.

The UI components were build using:

• Straight Swing
• The Thinlet Toolkit
• IDEA's GUI Designer

The underlying monitoring system is making use of the following open source APIs:

• Commons Logging, CLI and Net
• J2SSH
• JavaMail
• joeSNMP
• Log4j