In this week’s episode I’ll tell you about a document scanner I actually like called the Epson ES-300W. Then I’ll explain how Rogue Amoeba’s Fission software will allow me to easily give you chapter marks in Programming By Stealth. Then we’ll have some quality time with Bart Busschots talking Security Bits.
Hi, this is Allison Sheridan of the NosillaCast Apple Podcast, hosted at Podfeet.com, a technology geek podcast with an EVER so slight Apple bias. Today is Sunday, December 2, 2018, and this is show number 708.
Chit Chat Across the Pond
In this week’s installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots takes into the land of Bootstrap dropdown menus. He explains the differences between dropdown and selects in HTML, and how there’s two different kinds of dropdowns – menus and navigation. The descriptions of how to make the Bootstrap dropdowns takes a while, but when he puts the pieces together, the code is quite sensible. You can find this episode in your podcatcher of choice under Programming By Stealth, or the full Chit Chat Across the Pond feed. And as always you can listen right over at www.podfeet.com/…
Blog Posts
A Lot to Like About the Epson ES-300W Document Scanner
Podcast Chapter Marks using Rogue Amoeba’s Fission
Patreon and Amazon
It’s the holiday season and if you happened to need a scanner and followed the link in the shownotes to the Epson I just talked about, any shopping you did after hitting that link may send a small percentage back to support the show. You don’t even have to buy the scanner to help us out. If that’s a lot of bother, you could be like the fine Martin Stein who went to podfeet.com/patreon and signed up to donate a monthly amount to support the show. It’s a little bit confusing because I charge patrons weekly, but he figured out how to make it monthly. He put in the number he wanted to donate monthly but of course that would become 4.3 times as much as he wanted because I bill weekly. Then he simply set his monthly limit to the same number. I am pretty sure this is the same thing Frank Petrie figured out when signed up to support the show. Please consider helping out through Patreon but if it’s not good for you or your family, don’t do it, and don’t feel guilty about it. Just pin down one of your relatives over the holidays and tell them all about the show. Thank you so much to all of you who help support the show.
Security Bits – 30 November 2018
That’s going to wind this up for this week. Don’t forget to send in your Dumb Questions, comments and suggestions by emailing me at [email protected], follow me on twitter @podfeet. Remember, everything good starts with podfeet.com/. podfeet.com/patreon, podfeet.com/facebook, podfeet.com/slack, podfeet.com/chat, podfeet.com/amazon! And if you want to join in the fun of the live show, head on over to podfeet.com/live on Sunday nights at 5pm Pacific Time and join the friendly and enthusiastic NosillaCastaways. Thanks for listening, and stay subscribed.
Hi Allison, regarding your OCR problem. Do you have PDFpen? I use it to (manually) OCR documents, works fine. You can script PDFpen, so Hazel can OCR your bills first and then put them away. See here:
https://talk.automators.fm/t/automatically-ocring-documents-with-hazel-and-pdfpen-pro
PDF/A is a PDF designed for long time archiving… theoretically it is designed to still be opened in many years. PDF is very flexible with what it allows these days and all that flexibility is “hurting” archival efforts, thus the PDF/A format was introduced, reducing that flexibility and thus longevity. Really shouldn’t have impacted OCR, but whatever works, works…
Epson is most definitely a fantastic problem. However it’s a shame that most of their projector drivers still come on discs. I recently ran into a problem where I didn’t have an optical drive on my laptop to read it. So I had to go and find an external DVD drive that I could use. And I’m a huge Dell fanboy so it took some time to find the one that I liked. Luckily I had this website to help me https://dell.tech.blog/2018/10/16/best-dell-optical-drives/
Regarding Marriott and Starwood… Starwood was the parent company for the Sheraton hotel chain. In 2015, Marriott and Starwood entered into an agreement whereby Marriott would buy Starwood.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/marriott-to-acquire-starwood-hotels-resorts-1447673866
Only very recently (early summer?) have they (finally!) merged their reservation and rewards system (prior to that, you had to manually/annoyingly request that Starwood points be converted into Marriott points).
Their IT systems were separate until quite recently. I think that is why the announcements made the point that the breach impacted Starwood (Sheraton) customers only, and not Marriott customers.
One can also assume that they had different IT departments prior to the merger, and one can hypothesize (but not know) that it was when the Marriott IT team got a good look at the Starwood IT infrastructure (and perhaps put their own security controls in place) that they noticed the breach. Speculating here: Perhaps if Marriott hadn’t absorbed Starwood the breach may still not be known.