Posts

Posted on

Fax a PDF from a Mac

Faxing seems to be an ancient technology that just won’t die.  It is still embraced, often even preferred or required, by many businesses.  Most people don’t want to have to own a fax machine any more but do have to fax from time to time.  There is a modern day solution.  You can easily fax any PDF from a Mac.  And since you can convert anything in a browser to a PDF easily on a Mac, it allows you to fax almost anything you could print out.

Apple makes a USB fax modem but sadly, they’ve not maintained it so it doesn’t work on the latest Macs any more.  Fortunately, US Robotics makes a great US Robotics USB Fax Modem that is compatible with a Mac.

Once plugged into a Mac, you’ll notice you have gained a new option via the Print PDF menu.

If you’re like me and have dropped your expensive home phone service for a cheaper Voice over IP phone line, then you may have a little more work to do to actually get a fax to go through.  In the case of the popular Ooma Telo Free Home Phone Service, you have to tell the line that you are about to fax so it can optimize the connection.  This is done by prepending a *99,, to the phone number you are faxing to.

Posted on

Seagate Momentus Hybrid Hard Drive

I recently upgraded the client’s old laptop hard drive laptop to a hybrid drive from Seagate:
Seagate Momentus XT 750 GB

Hybrid

What’s special about it? It’s got 8GB of solid state drive. That makes its speed somewhere between a standard hard drive an SSD. The drive intelligently moves commonly used files to the solid state portion. The hard drive handles all that on its own, appearing to the computer as just one drive.

With the original hard drive in this 5 year old Mac, it booted up in 55 seconds. With the new drive it booted up in 43 seconds. But after three boots, it had moved the boot files to the SSD and was booting up in 24 seconds. It felt much faster for common tasks and commonly used programs.

If you need a large fast drive, this Seagate is a great compromise. SSDs at 750GB are prohibitively expensive. And standard hard drives are much slower.

Posted on

Why People Torrent

Cartoon from The Oatmeal depicting why people torrent content illegally.

It’s clear why people torrent. But it took me a while to figure out why HBO does not offer HBO GO, their internet video streaming service, as a stand-alone option outside of cable, even for a high fee like $40/month. HBO’s co-president Eric Kessler said that they would never offer HBO GO for sale to non-cable subscribers.

The reason is that HBO is owned by Time Warner Cable. They want to keep the existing cable TV model going. Time Warner doesn’t want to become a “dumb pipe” for TV programming streamed from others.

An independent HBO would clearly find that it makes business sense to offer HBO GO for sale and bypass the cable/satellite providers. So Time Warner created a content/distribution cabal that unfortunately limits the options to consumers. Comcast purchased NBC for the same reason.

See Freepress’s ownership charts showing all the vertically integrated media organizations.

Posted on

Sodastream Hack

Sodastream is great at making bubbly water. To save on the cost and time needed to switch out the CO2 canisters, I decided to hook up a regular CO2 tank instead of using the small canisters from Sodastream.

ITEMS NEEDED

1) FreedomOne+ adapter from CO2 Doctor on this order page. I ordered the model with 72H (meaning 72 inch length straight cable) and CGAWG (connector type for standard CO2 tanks, as opposed to PBWG for Paintball Tank connector). Other companies make similar adapters, but this one is well built and the company is helpful and responsive. With this modification from the CO2 Doctor, a 5 or 20 pound tank can be connected.

2) 5 lb CO2 tank that I fill at my local paintball store for $10. Gas companies also do refills. I consider myself a normal-to-heavy user of Sodastream with a few glasses/day. I make extra fizzy water (4-7 farts of the Sodastream, depending on mood). My pressure gauge still shows that I have a lot of CO2 left and I’ve been using the single 5 lb tank for over 6 months.

3) Sodastream. I liked the look of the Sodastream Pure model the most. It can hold only the smaller 14.5 oz cylinders which is fine because I’m not using the internal tank. I drilled a hole at the bottom of it and another hole in my kitchen counter to hide my large tank underneath (see pics).

VALUE

This isn’t cheap at $300 total: adapter from CO2 Doctor ($130), Sodastream ($80-130), CO2 tank ($65), and a single fill-up ($10). But any addict to carbonated water can easily spend this in under a year. And the ongoing cost or marginal cost per additional amount of carbonated water after the initial cost is almost nothing.

SODA

You can easily add syrups to make your own sodas. The Sodastream syrups don’t taste good to me and they contain Aspartame. Instead try the great syrups from Pittsburg Soda Pop.

Posted on

SEO Services Continued

Just got this Spam.

I had stopped by your site and took a look at your ranking for some of your terms and just wondered if you’d be at all interested in having your site improved in terms of where it’s ranked on the major engines with the terms you’d like as well as some I’d like to suggest. I can get your site a much better ranking and have done so for about 400 people to date. Many of which now have a first page listing for ther keywords they wanted. Yes, I’m a real person, Yes, I actually just came back from viewing your site. I already know you get a ton of offers day to day. This is obviously different, I have plenty of references, work from home alone, have been doing this since the early 90’s and still find time to raise 3 little girls.

Call me at home if you want to, check out my site [removed]. I work at home all day long helping people out with their traffic and sites, automating page content updates via rss feeds (google loves that), doing press releases, article creation and distribution, building one way inbound links, Social Bookmarking, starting RSS feeds for your site, setting up Web 2.0 properties, social networking help for twitter followers, Facebook likes, setting up link wheels, etc. I have clients that are swearing by what it is I do for them and would love to show you some examples if you’re at all interested. Otherwise I won’t bother you again.

Winston
(319) XXX-XXXX
PO Box 8822
Cedar Rapids, IA 52408

So Winston, you’re a real person who just read my site. Did you read my most recent post on SEO Spammers like yourself?