It’s been popular for 2 years, so I’m trying to figure out if it’s worth getting excited about Evernote.

I like Dropbox a lot. (A whole lot, but that’s another story.)

I’ve experimented with Google and Yahoo sites as a way of storing information online, and it’s just too much, because they’re not really filing systems as much as authoring systems. I want something like Dropbox, but for odds and ends.

Posterous and Tumblr aren’t really filing systems either, and, at a glance, they don’t really work for private information.

So I’m experimenting with Evernote. I’m intrigued with its purported ability to OCR text off the images I upload.

(D’oh! that reminds me: I figured out, eventually, how to get Tesseract working. It was about a half day of work, but when I finished, for the sample documents I fed it, it did better than I.R.I.S. Your mileage may vary. I need to locate and write up my notes.)

Well, actually, no. We still have it. But it’s unplugged. At the next garage sale, we’ll get rid of the carcass.

I replaced my Linksys WRT-54G wireless router with an ASUS WL-520GU. Out of box, the ASUS is a better deal with far superior features. These include using static IPs, so I can permit individual machines rather than allowing all my neighbors to crack my WPA key at their leisure. Another useful feature is meaningful logging. The Linksys and my Westel DSL modem don’t work well together; I have to reboot the pair of them about 2-3 times a week. If the Linksys had logs, I could tell whether the problem was in it or in the Westel modem. Now I can find out.

But that’s the out-of-box firmware. The ASUS router also works with Tomato, an aftermarket firmware upgrade, that provides a slew of additional features. There are similar projects for Linksys routers, but all the Linksys routers I’ve ever found are cost-reduced emasculated versions too lacking in RAM or Flash memory to work with any of the replacement firmware.

So. I’m a happy ASUS customer for three reasons: better out of box features, the potential for even more features when or if I get around to upgrading the firmware, and (best of all) I get to retire a blue Linksys router. What’s not to like?

The Evil-Tron is an electronic gadget not much bigger than a quarter. It’s got a strong magnet, so you can attach it just about anywhere, like under someone’s desk, or in framework rigging for the suspended ceiling.

What it does is make sounds — “unidentifiable scratching sounds,” or “eerie whispering ‘hey, can you hear me?” — at random intervals, and so mess with someone’s mind. Just the thing to get your coworkers.

I have got to get me one of these. Or … perhaps … the economy pack: get three for just $18. Hmmm….

One of my frustrations as a casual Rubyist is trying to use some of these wonderful CPAN-like things that have appeared since I began playing with Ruby after the Hunt and Thomas article in Dr. Dobb’s. For example, gems.

The problem with Ruby (and especially rubygems) is that they don’t play nicely with the other package management tools on your system. (Ubuntu/Debian’s .deb‘s and MacPorts‘ ports). And I’m too stupid and lazy to bypass all that and go back to using tarballs and stashing everything in /usr/local.

Enter RVM, the Ruby Version Manager. It bypasses your system’s package management system. It creates a hidden folder ($HOME/.rvm) and puts whatever Ruby versions (and gems, etc.) there. But it does it all so cleverly you don’t realize what’s going on in the background. I like it.

I keep finding fun things to do with my iPhone besides making phone calls. We’ve had a lot of rain lately, but I went out last night and held my phone up to the sky and this is pretty much what I saw.

Orion Distant Suns iApp

I live in the future. I’m posting from my car. Cool.

Here is the GPS telling me how fast I’m going.

That’s a cool number, because it’s 2⁹. In hex, it’s 200 (traditionally written 0x200, or 200H for old-school 8080 assembly programmers). Inn octal it’s 1000 (or, traditionally, 01000). In binary it’s 100000.

(After I noticed that, I was of a mind to wait until 01-10-10 to publish it.)

Update: it’s actually not number 512. WordPress is counting something (edits? comments?) rather than individual postings?

Lileks recounts the fun of getting a new scanner for Christmas. There’s really nothing new or novel about it though (except that he took time to make screen captures of all the dialog boxes, so he could mock them). The fact is, all scanners suck.

I have ready access to scanners (all-in-ones, actually) made by HP, Epson, Brother, and, at work, a monster Konica-Minolta printer-copier that also scans. Every one of them is a disaster. The printing software is good and the scanning software stinks.

The hardware may be awesome, but the software is horrible. And bad as it is on Windows, it’s worse on a Mac. (Objectively worse; subjectively it’s worse by far, because the majority of software on a Mac is beautiful.) My personal theory, which I developed while working for one of the companies I just named, is that scanner software is written by electrical engineers instead of computer scientists. EE’s may be great with resistors and capacitors, but I haven’t met one in years who was a more than passable programmer. (But these are rants for another day.)

Anyway, my advice to Lileks and anyone else is twofold:

1. Where possible, don’t use a scanner. Just take a picture of the document with your digital camera. It’s a lot quicker. (Consider this DIY book scanner the end-result of this line of thought, but you can start with something more practical.)
2. If you must use a scanner: use one that will write to a USB drive. Do all your scanning to the USB drive, then use sneaker-net to move the resulting files onto your computer, where you can use photo-editing software to crop, etc.