IMAP for Gmail

Previously I wrote about why I prefer to use IMAP for my primary email accounts. Gmail recently enabled IMAP access for their accounts. Not only does it work for accounts at gmail.com, but it also works with their hosted apps account where you use your own domain. Productivity501.com uses Google’s hosted apps for email, so IMAP is a very welcome addition.

You can find this control by going to Settings > Forwarding POP & IMAP.

Google did some creative things to make their concept of tags work within IMAP. Basically each tag becomes a folder, but that means it is possible to have the same item in multiple folders. There is also a folder called “All Mail” that will hold your archived emails. You can archive emails by dragging them from your inbox to that folder.

This is a great feature and I’m questioning whether or not I need to continue to pay for my IMAP accounts I use for my business. I’m trying it out with Productivity501. I’ll probably do another post once I have some more time to try everything.

Tuesday’s Tip: Label Your Warts

I’m referring to “Wall Warts” those blocks of plastic that transform standard house current into lower voltage needed by electronic devices. Modern electronic gadgets require power. And (if you haven’t noticed) every device seems to require a slightly different type of power and slightly different type of connector. When you are setting up your office buying one item at a time, it isn’t really any problem to figure out what goes where.

However, if you have to move your office around, you are going to quickly discover that the power supplies all look pretty much the same and worse yet, some use the same connectors but supply different amounts of power. No big deal because you can just look at the power supply to see which device it goes with right? Right? Wrong. Since the power supplies are commodity items, many manufactures just buy them from someone else to power their devices. This means just because you have a Linksys router, doesn’t mean that the corresponding power supply will say Linksys. It could just list a company that you’ve never heard of. You might be able to figure it out by looking at the power output and polarity diagram on the power supply and comparing it to the diagram on the back of the device, but more and more manufacturers are leaving this information off.

I would suggest labeling your wall wart plugs so you know what they go to. It doesn’t take much time, but it will save you hours down the road if you ever move your office or have to rewire things for a different desk.

FDIC Insurance - When Banks Fail

Recently NetBank was shut down by the FDIC. The FDIC was created to prevent runs on the bank. They insure your accounts so even if the bank goes under, you will get your money back out. In exchange the bank gives up some control. The FDIC can come in, inspect things and force the bank to sell out to another financial institution if the FDIC doesn’t feel the bank is managing things correctly.

That is what happened with NetBank. Most of the savings/checking accounts were sold to ING Direct (the Orange savings account people). For most people this simply means that people were unable to access their accounts for a few days. FDIC insurance covered everything up to the $100,000 (or $250,000 for IRAs) limits. However, the people who are in trouble are the ones who had money over the limits. The FDIC will distribute anything that is left of the assets to these people, but it looks like they will only get about 50% of the amounts they had over the limits.

The $100,000 limit is per depositor per institution, so you can get another $100,000 in insurance by moving any money in excess of the limit to another bank.  $100,000 may seem like a lot of money, but if you have a consistent saving strategy to plan for retirement and emergencies you are probably going to exceed the limit at some point in your life.  It is important to plan ahead so you don’t accidentally end up losing a bunch of money because of a bank failure.

If you have a business this is especially important, because it is very common to have a balance of over $100,000 just to maintain adequate cash on hand for meeting payroll and paying operating bills.

It is also wise to keep an eye on your bank’s financial status.  If it is a publicly traded company, keeping an eye on the stock price should give you an idea of how the bank is doing as will the financial statements and SEC filings.  A private bank may be a little more difficult to track, but you can generally get an idea based on their press releases.

Self Inflicted Insult

Most of the readers of Productivity501 are very nice and gracious.  That is why I was surprised when I found this comment in my moderation queue.

When I read this, I was at first a little hurt.  I consoled myself by deciding it was some type of new blog spam or something.  As I got ready to delete the comment I realized that the ip address looked familiar.

It turns out that I posted the comment as the first thing that came to mind when I was trying to solve a problem with the email notifications last week.  I had forgotten about it. I felt better knowing that my insult was self inflicted.

In college I had a friend who would call himself and leave encouraging messages on his voice mail at night.  By the morning he would  forgotten about this and check his messages only to be surprised by an encouraging message from his past self.

USPS Online Orders

If you go to www.usps.com and order stamps, you’ll find there is a $1 shipping/handling charge. This has always puzzled me. I would think that the Postal Service of all places would deliver stamps for free. Lets assume that the pricing is a well thought out business decision.

Evidently it costs the Post Office roughly $1 more per stamp order to sell you a package of stamps online than it costs for you to walk in, talk to a clerk and deal with the transaction in person. This seems surprising to me. I would expect the cost of providing stamps from one centralized location would be cheaper than paying people to do it in person from the physical offices. Here are a couple reasons this may not be the case:

1. Many people who buy stamps wouldn’t buy over the internet. It is possible that the more likely you are to make an internet purchase, the less likely you are to use stamps. Of course this is precisely the ideal audience for stamps–people who might buy but never use them.
2. Stamp sales act as a “filler” between the postal workers other duties and the reduction of this role wouldn’t allow them to lower their staffing significantly.
3. The internet fulfillment is a very manual process and they have invested very little in automation so far.

I’m not really complaining.  I enjoy going to the Post Office to buys stamps and ship packages and I’d hate for that to go away.  Last time I went in the older postal worker chided me for my sloppy signature on my credit card receipt. “Your mother would be ashamed of you!” she said. Reprimanded for bad handwriting–it will be a good many years before the Internet is able to replace that part of the checkout process.

How to Create a Scanned Signature

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If you want to create a scanned version of your signature, there are several ways to do it. The “right” way would be to send your signature to a company that will create a truetype font of your entire signature so you can print it at any size and still have the beautiful vector drawn lines.

The easy way to do it is to scan in your signature and remove the background. If you make it large enough and scan at a high enough resolution, you don’t have to worry about it looking bad when it gets printed.

I’m going to walk you through the “easy” way. I’ll be using Photoshop simply because you probably know someone who has it and wouldn’t mind doing this for you. I’m sure you can do it with other programs as well.

1. Sign a piece of paper

This is harder than it sounds because you’ll be very critical of the way it looks. I suggest signing with large letters. When you shrink it down, it will look better. I used a blue gel pen and got decent results. Sign a piece of paper several times and then scan it in. This will give you some options to choose the best looking image.

2. Scan the paper

You probably want to use a high resolution for best results. I wouldn’t go below 600 dpi.

3. Crop down to the best signature

4. Use the magic wand to select the area around the signature

5. Invert the selection and copy

6. Paste the signature into a new document with a transparent background

7. Use the magic wand to remove any white still left inside letters.

8. Save the image in a format that supports transparent backgrounds.

I’d suggest using PNG. It can be imported into Acrobat, supports transparency, and doesn’t have problems with “artifacts” like some other formats. You don’t want to use JPEG because of the artifact problem.

I can’t say that this is the absolute best way to create a signature and I’d be interested to hear any suggestions on how to improve the process.

Dvorak Keyboard

Michael Sampson is trying to switch to the Dvorak keyboard. The Dvorak keyboard is arranged differently to help you type faster and with less finger movement. While the advantages sound promising, I have never quite understood why you’d want to switch to the Dvorak keyboard if you are already proficient at QWERTY.

I type somewhere between 50 to 75 words pre minute, but it is very rare for me to type at those speeds because I usually spend more time thinking about what I’m writing than I do actually writing. Maybe I just think slower than most people

The basis for most of the claims of Dvorak’s keyboard was done for the Navy in 1944. However, it appears that the report is fairly difficult to locate and people who have actually looked into it found the methodology to be questionable.

Even if it was clear that the Dvorak keyboard was superior in 1944, you have to consider the way typing has changed in the past 50 years. The way we use a keyboard today is significantly different than the way it was used half a century ago. .

I can see the advantage of the Dvorak keyboard if you are simply doing transcription or copying text. Back when it was invented, word processors didn’t exist, so there was a lot of mind numbing retyping of documents in order to fix errors. With word processors, this isn’t as much of an issue because you don’t have to retype an entire document to make a bunch of small edits.

Has anyone tried using the Dvorak keyboard? What were your results?

Dealing with Signatures in a Paperless Office

With email, one of the main reasons I have to print things off is to sign them and fax or mail them back.  As I transition to a paperless office I’m having to look at ways to sign documents without printing them out.

There are really two types of signatures.  The first is just an image of your handwritten signature.  The second is a digital addition to the file that “proves” you were the one that signed it.  By now digital signatures should be common, but they aren’t.  I’m not saying they aren’t used in big companies, but the average web user isn’t signing emails or anything else digitally.

Right now most of the paper that requires my signatures needs to be faxed to someone.  If I want to sign papers to buy some investment property, transfer my retirement account to a different broker or open a new savings account, I’ll have to sign a piece of paper and fax it back.  Using a digital signature does nothing if you are going to be sending the document over a fax machine.

So for most of my day to day use I need a way to put an image of my signature on a document. Acrobat gives you both the image and digital signature capabilities.  It can be a little tricky to setup, but once you get it working you can sign documents with ease.

They way I’ve done this so far is:

1. Create a image of my signature on a transparent background.  (I’ll talk about how to do this later.)
2. Create a self generated digital signature.
3. Add the digital signature to Acrobat.
4. Add an image to be used as the visual representation of the digital signature.

Once this is setup you can basically drag a box onto a document to add your signature.  If you save and email the document it has your digital signature.  If you fax it to someone, it has your visual signature.

AT&T DSL Only Option

This week I noticed that AT&T is offering DSL without requiring phone service.  For about $29 per month you can get 3.0Mbps down and 512Kbps up.  This also gives you free access to AT&T wireless access points across the US.  This service would normally cost $39 per month, so if you need it, this can work out to be a very good deal.

Personally I wish they offered faster upload speeds.  (They have a 768Kbps up service, but it isn’t available in our area.)   I do a lot of online meetings where I share my screen and the lower speeds cause problems.

This “DSL without phone service” package is something new.  (I don’t think it was available two months ago when I was looking at a faster alternative to my cable modem.) I know a lot of people who don’t have a normal land line telephone that have been stuck using a cable modem because the combined cost of a phone line plus DSL was greater than the cable modem charges.  The new service offers these people some additional options.

Quick Update: Paperless Office

I am still working on my paperless office experiment. I’ve had an huge influx of consulting requests in the past 60 days, so I haven’t dedicated as much time to this as I had originally planned. Here is a quick update on what I’ve found so far.

Optical Character Recognition

One of the most important parts of being able to search for your documents later is recognizing it as text. A generic scanning process simply recognizes the pixels and doesn’t actually turn them into words. (A simple test to see if a PDF is storing data as pixels or text is to try to copy and paste a paragraph into a text editor.) I’ve found that for a proper workflow I need to make sure that the character recognition happens automatically as part of the scanning process.

Scan Snap Scanner

I purchased a Fujitsu ScanSnap and so far I’ve been impressed. It isn’t perfect and occasionally it misfeeds, but overall it has been a welcome addition to my tool set. I don’t have my document repository setup yet, but already it has made it easier to deal with documents that need faxed or emailed. The ability to scan both sides of a document at the same time is a significant advantage.

DEVONThink Pro Office

I’m still playing with the trial version of DEVONThink Pro Office. I had a personal edition, but the Pro Office version interfaces with the ScanSnap and will do OCR conversion automatically. I liked the idea behind DEVONThink, but I’m still more comfortable keeping my files in a hierarchy in the filesystem instead of in a database. DEVONThink offers some ways to help make this easier, but I’m not completely sold on it yet. I am still experimenting with it. I may like it better once I understand it more.

So there is a quick update. I’m still hoping to have my paperless office up and running by the end of the year. I’ll keep you posted on my progress.

As always, please let me know if you have any suggestions that might help me out.

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