That's right. As if I didn;t have enoug to do, I've just launched an all new online magazine called Netbook MOjo. As you can guess, the publication is 100% devoted to netbooks. It's 100% focussed on netbooks, netbook accessories, netbook news and tutorials.

Please stop by, tell your friends and all that.

To be fair, Apple's design teams usually do a top notch job in the design of their products. However, there's one thing they have messed up on several times recently - the placement of USB ports on the MacBook family of notebooks.

I have a 13-inch MacBook Pro. It's is probably the best notebook I've ever owned or used. But whoever decided that the best place for the USB ports was to have them close together is living in a bubble. Many USB devices, in particular USB modems, are wider that that the space between ports. This means that when one device is plugged in you can't acces the second port. Devices with USB cables suffer similarly if the cable connectors aren't extra slim.

So Apple, please do something about this. 2mm of extra space on either side of the ports would make a huge difference for most of us. That's all I ask - 4mm please.

Business cards are a fact of life. But filing them and being able to find the right card quickly is a major hassle. For the last few weeks I've been scoping out a business card scanner but the cost is, in my view, prohibitively high given that it's a piece of hardware that I'm only likely to use a few times a year.

Most scanners come with some software that performs optical character recognition, or OCR, on cards and then uses the text to populate a new entry in your address book. CardSnap turns your iPhone into a business card scanner. Rather than loading all the OCR onto the iPhone, CardSnap lets you photograph a business card. Once you've checked that the image is OK you send the card up to an online service where the OCR is performed. A couple of hours later, the scanned card comes back and you review the result of the OCR.

I put CardSnap through its paces by scanning a pile of 80 cards. Each card was photographed with my iPhone 3GS. It's worth noting that this app relies on the 3GS's superior camera. If you've only got a first generation iPhone or a 3G then you'll need to shell out for Griffin's Clarifi iPhone case as CardSnap relies on a decent camera to get the best result from the OCR.

Once a card is photographed it goes into a queue that you can view using the "Cards" button. From submission to return it takes about 24 hours although we received some cards within a couple of hours.

The OCR process was quite accurate although we did encounter some problems. For example, where the business card didn't have a country on the address the software populated the field with United States. I'd prefer to have an option to set the default country. Also, when an address had a dash or slash in it, like 2-4 Smith Road, the dash or slash was omitted.

Once a card comes back from OCR processing, it's important to review the card. As the photo of the card is retained this is reasonably easy although having a way to review the card and see the photo at the same time would make that much easier.

As well as testing CardSnap with a batch of cards we've used it at meetings to quickly capture the cards of other people. It works well - there's lots of "cool" factor when you do this - although it does mean that my meeting trick of arranging cards in front of me on the table so I don;t forget names is not longer practical as I don't keep the cards any more.

At $9.99USD ($12.99AUD) CardSnap is much cheaper and more portable than a business card scanner. It works quite well and the OCR accuracy is over 90%. The daly between scanning and receiving the result is annoying but given that I'd probably not carry a scanner to every meeting it doesn't make the actual workflow any slower.

If you collect lots of business cards and lack the time or discipline to enter all the details into your contact list then CardSnap is excellent value.

I typically connect my MacBook Pro to the web in two different ways; WiFi and a Huawei E160G 3G modem. One of the things I've found, that is really annoying, is that OS X is really dumb when it comes to dealing with multiple network connections.

What I find is that OS X tries to connect to a WiFi network while the 3G connection is active. The problem is that if the WiFi connection is poor OS X persists in trying to use it even if the 3G connection is better. I've encountered the same thing when I've connected an iMac to one router by Ethernet and another over WiFi (Idid this as part of some router testing). OS X was unable to aggregate the connections.

The cure is easy - turn off WiFi before initiating the 3G connection. But that's not very Apple-like.

For an OS that's generally very traveller-friendly this is a real PITA.

Well, as the owner of a shiny, new 13" MacBook Pro I was a little surprised to read that Apple had dropped the hard drive spec from what they had on the previous, MacBook. Rather than the faster 3Gbps eSATA drives they previously used, they introduced 1.5Gbps drives.

In response to some comments by customers, they've released a firmware update to support the faster eSATA specification.

MacBook Pro EFI Firmware Update 1.7 addresses an issue reported by a small number of customers using drives based on the SATA 3Gbps specification with the June 2009 MacBook Pro.  While this update allows drives to use transfer rates greater than 1.5Gbps, Apple has not qualified or offered these drives for Mac notebooks and their use is unsupported.

Did you catch the last sentence - this is a firmware update to support hard drives that they won't support.

I sense confusion in The Force.

Now that iPhone 3.0 has been released I thought it would be pertinent to look at what's happening in carrier land and to play with a couple of the new features.

Carriers

In Australia we effectively have three major carriers; Telstra, Optus and the newly created VHA that's being formed through the merger of Three and Vodafone.

VHA
VHA has announced that the new iPhone 3G S will be sold through Three stores in Australia. This is significant locally as Three was never an official carrier for the iPhone 3G although they did offer a $300 rebate for any customers bringing a unlocked iPhone 3G to their network.

Vodafone has also announced that you can register interest in the iPhone 3G S here.

At this stage there's no announcement on whether tethering will cost extra but given that Three has actively encouraged the use of phones as modems I don't expect them to charge customers for the privilege.

Optus
Optus hasn't officially released pricing on their site but have sent a press release that states that tethering ("iPhone as a Modem" in Optus-speak) will cost extra. We're looking at $9.95 per month.

In my view, this is ridiculous. Many iPhone users on the Optus network don't use their entire data allowance now. Why they can't use this for tethering is a matter of some conjecture with managing their network capability through charging structures probably the most likely explanation. However, this is very easily overcome by downloading the appropriate profile from this site. The easiest thing to do is visit that address with Safari on your iPhone.

If you're interested in an iPhone 3G S through Optus you can register your interest here.

Telstra
Telstra has been conspicuously quiet on the iPhone 3.0 front. A look at their iPhone website reveals no new information - not even an acknowledgment that there's a new iPhone or an operating system update.

I wouldn't expect to offer different pricing for tethered traffic as they already charge an arm and leg for their service compared to the other local carriers.

Find My iPhone and MobileMe
The value of Apple's MobileMe service has been questionable - until now. The introduction of the "Find my iPhone" services adds significant value to MobileMe.

Firstly, if you lose your iPhone you can use MobileMe to locate the handset. Enabling the service on the iPhone is a little tricky to find (Go to Settings > Mail, Contacts and Calendars > MobileMe >Find my iPhone).

Then. visit www.me.com and go to Settings. Form there, it's an easy thing to locate your phone. If the phone isn't precisely locatable via its GPS receiver then it position relative to carrier transmission towers is provided.

You can also get the iPhone to display a message or make a sound - even when the phone is on silent.

If your phone is truly lost then you can remotely wipe its contents.

When Snow Leopard Server is released later this year, I'm hoping to see a corporatised version of this service for businesses that have deployed a fleet of iPhones.

Now that I've had my new 13" MacBook Pro running for a couple of days I've discovered a couple of things and thought they'd be worth sharing.

New sound drivers and output hardware

Many Mac users take the easy way when migrating from one computer to the next. Use an application like Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper to clone your old system to an external hard drive and then either clone that back to your new system or use the Migration Assistant to bring all your user data and applications across. As the transfer to my new MacBook Prowas done for me from the by the crew at the local Apple store I suspect they used the first approach - cloning.

All looked fine until I went to check out the latest edition of the Australian Macworld podcast. At that stage I discovered that I had no sound and that the computer didn't recognise the existence of any sound output devices. Strange, as the MacBook Pro made the customary start-up "bong" when booting up. That made me pretty certain that I didn't have a hardware problem.

After some searching (not surprisingly, there wasn't much help online as the unit is so new) I decided to reinstall the operating system using the "Archive and Install" mode and also using the option that lets me retain all my personal settings and applications.

An hour later and all was well. I now have sound and any settings that I need to find are in a folder called "Previous System".

Power Output from USB and Firewire

I have a bunch of external hard drives in the office at the moment and thought I'd try some out with the 13" MacBook Pro. Well, thus far powered drives seem OK but smaller bus-powered units aren't working. I've tried a couple and they just connect and disconnect. I've tried multiple cables and different drives without success.

I won't name the brands in question yet and I have several other drives to try out but at this stage it seems that external drives that are meant to get their power purely from the USB or Firewire bus are a problem.

We don't often think about routers as being computers but they actually are. They have memory, processors and run an operating system. That operating system typically takes that comes into one port (usually the port labelled as "WAN") and routes to the other, numbered ports. All of this requires some smarts so that the traffic comes and goes between the correct LAN ports. That's what the router software manages.

Router software does a bunch of other stuff like manage communications standards, provide a firewall, keep all your wireless traffic protected by implementing encryption and a whole bunch of other stuff.

The Problem

My LAN is not the usual home setup with a single router. As you'd know from the story of how I built my office I require two routers so that both the house and office have wired and wireless LAN access.

The first Linksys WRT310N has been running in the house for some time. It's connected to the cable modem and has worked flawlessly. I reviewed this unit for APC a while ago and I reckon it's a great router.

Until recently, I'd been using a Belkin N1 Vision. It's been OK but I find that it loses wireless connectivity from time to time. Also, I found that some of my shared devices, like my Thecus NAS became invisible unless I restarted the N1 Vision. I've updated the firmware but every week or so the router needed to be restarted. Incidentally, the reason I stuck with the N1 Vision was that it was super easy to use as a second router. It had a single checkbox that converted it from a router to an access point.

When setting up a LAN with two routers you can do one of two things; run each router as a seperate LAN or create one LAN that uses both devices. If you run them as two LANs it makes the job of sharing resources like printers and files far trickier. A single LAN is usually easier to use but you need to make sure that either you have only one DHCP server (a DHCP server gives each device on the LAN it's own unique address), set up both routers to use DHCP but with non-overlapping address ranges or use manual addressing for each device on the LAN (not impossible but a pain to maintain).

I decided that I wanted to use my original WRT310N as a true router, doing DHCP, and the second router configured to just act as an access point, with no intelligence.

The problem was that short of a bunch of complex manual configuration the second WRT310N couldn't be set up as a simple access point. That's what lead me to DD-WRT.

The Solution

My buddy Wayne is a full on Linux user and loves using open source solutions whenever he can find them. He put me on to DD-WRT some time ago.

According to the DD-WRT wiki:

DD-WRT is a third party developed firmware released under the terms of the GPL for many ieee802.11a/b/g/h/n wireless routers based on a Broadcom or Atheros chip reference design.

Installation was dead simple. All I needed to do was download the firmware and then use the default Linksys firmware to update the router's firmware with DD-WRT. There's a compatibility list so you can check if your router can be given the DD-WRT treatment. The whole process took just a few minutes.

What you find is that the DD-WRT does everything that the original Linksys firmware does. However, it adds a a whole bunch of other options.

For example, making the WRT310N into a simple access point and disabling its routing capability only required that I set a couple options. In my case I simply set the Internet connection to "Disabled" (I know that's counterintuitive but it works), give the router a new IP address (so that it's not the same as the main router), disable the DHCP server and then set the WAN port to take the incoming connection from the main router.

A full list of all DD-WRT's features can be found here.

Once all that was set, I restarted the router (following the instructions) and tested basic connectivity. I was able to connect to the Internet and see resources on my LAN. I then set up wireless with WPA2 and my preferred SSID so that wireless was secured. Another restart and I confirmed that all was working perfectly.

Conclusions

Ultimately, my decision to look at alternate firmware for the WRT310N was driven by the lack of a specific function in my router - a simple way to make the router into an access point. Many people tend to equate free software with poor quality.

DD-WRT is a great example of open source software and how free doesn't have to equal junk. DD-WRT takes a great product, the Linksys WRT310N, and expands its functionality significantly.

Yesterday, I spent the afternoon catching up on my filing and paperwork. To be honest, it's one of my least liked tasks. I guess if I was a little more disciplined I wouldn't let it mount up (six months is a little too long) but it's such a boring task and I can always find something more interesting to do.

Part of the problem has been that my filing system was just too cumbersome. I had a couple of folders for bills, three for different bank statements, one for tax and so on. As various bits of paper arrived, I'd sort them and put them into their folders. It sounds good in theory but as soon as stuff mounts up a little the effort it takes to get stuff sorted is too great. So I put off, it accumulates more, the task gets even bigger and... well, you get the picture.

This year, I've decided on an new approach. I'm going to have a single folder for this year. It's divided into sections for each of the various categories of paperwork. This approach has two significant advantages for me

1 - It's easier as everything is filed in one place. When a new piece of paper comes in I have one place to put it.

2 - Under Australian tax law, I'm obliged to retain certain records for five years. Now, at the end of their retention period I just need to dispose of one folder. Under my old system, I'd have to got through several folders to get rid of the papers.

There was a time when I used a filing cabinet but that was way too messy. I prefer binders and I think this new approach, of having a binder per year, makes staying organised easier.

What's your approach?

In researching what will be one of many stories on Windows 7 I'm sure I'll write over the next few months, I've been installing the beta version of Windows 7 (Build 7000) on just about any PC I can get my hands on. One of my test systems is an Eee PC 900.

Just to make sure we're all on the same page here, the pertinent specifications of the Eee PC 900 are:

Display: 8.9" Display running at 1024 x 600
CPU: Intel® Celeron M353 clocked at 900MHz
Networking: WLAN Built-in 802.11b/g and RJ45 10/100 Mbps
RAM: 1GB of DDR II
Storage: 4GB and 8GB disks and SD/MMC slot
Webcam: 1.3MP

As you can tell, this is not going to be a Windows powerhouse. In fact, the Windows Experience Index (a measure of how well a system will run Windows 7) gives a score of just 1.0 - the lowest score. It's worth noting that this score is a reflection of the system's "weakest" component. in the Eee PC 900's case the integrated graphics card pulled the score down.

The Eee PC actually fails to meet one of Windows 7's minimum requirements - available disk space. To install Windows 7 you'll need 9GB of free, contiguous disk space. The Eee PC 900 has a total of 12GB but that's spilt into two separate disks of 4GB and 8BG. However, I was still able to complete the installation with about 1GB of space left on the larger disk. The installation did fail on the first attempt but when I started it over it was able to complete. I had the same experience on another system so it seems that the installer is smart enough to skip over problematic stages.

Once Windows 7 was installed (about an hour using an external DVD drive), it booted up perfectly. It's worth noting that Microsoft has really managed to get the installation process right. Other than some localisation information, I was able to walk away from the installation and come back once it had completed. There weren't any "Click to Restart" dialogs or other such nonsense.

I wasn't all that surprised to find that the Eee PC 900's display was limited to plain VGA after the installation. Clearly, Microsoft hasn't included every possible hardware driver. However, on the Eee and other systems, i;ve found that Windows Vista and XP drivers work just fine. The only potential "gotcha" is that the driver installers provided by manufacturers may not work. in that case, run them in compatibility mode for XP or Vista and they should be fine. I ran the Eee's driver installer in XP compatibility mode and it worked well. You won't get the full Aero experience but I'm not sure that it's worth the overhead in any case.

Using Windows 7 on the Eee PC was surprisingly good. I had low expectations but found that even with some antivirus software installed the system was reasonably responsive. However, I'd strongly suggest that anyone using Windows 7 on such an underpowered system go into the Performance Setting and manage those settings yourself rather than letting Windows work it out for you. I disabled almost every visual enhancement other than "Use visual styles on windows and buttons". This made a significant improvement to the Eee PC's overall zippiness.

Wireless networking worked without any problems although my impression is that wireless range is a little weaker under Windows 7 than XP or Ubuntu. As radio strength can be controlled by software it may be that a driver update will fix this. However, the difference wasn't huge and certainly didn't impact my testing. It was just that places that had a solid five bars of signal now drifted between four and five bars.

I've not been able to get the webcam working yet. It needs a driver but I can't find my Eee PC CD at the moment and I could find the driver on the Asus website. I suspect that once I find a driver it'll be fine. Perhaps someone's sorted that out. If you have, leave me a comment or use Twitter to let me know.

Finally, I've noticed that the power management side of things still needs some work and that the suspend/resume functionality is a little broken. It's not a showstopper for me as the Eee PC isn't a main system for me (my MacBook Air is my principal mobile computer).

What I'd like to see in a future release of Windows 7 is a "netbook" installation. I know that would add a step to the installation process but being able to leave off stuff like the games and some of the accessories would slim the installation back leaving more hard disk free. Also, I suspect that I'll be able to eek out further performance gains by playing with the service that launch automatically. I'm not too fussed about the driver issues - this is Beta 1 so it's not surprising that it's not 100% complete.

If your Eee PC 900 (or better - I don't recommend Windows 7 for an Eee PC 700) isn't a critical working machine for you and you can spare the bandwidth, installing Windows 7 certainly won't hurt your system.