You can’t (really) virtualize OSX under Linux, sadly, as this would give an elegant solution if you’re trying to run a Linux server.

Some suggested alternatives are easily found by googling, but most fall short. A commonly recommended one is KnowledgeTree as they have a FOSS version. Unfortunately, it’s not what you think and the install is cumbersome. I’d recommend you try out the online demo before getting into installing it yourself – you can sign up via their website.

So I am still looking. What I’d like is the following workflow type thingee:

• Docs scanned to network share in PDF
• Periodically OCR’d
• Manually sorted, if need be
• Available on a local network in a searchable, retrievable form

One potential option is Zotero, but it doesn’t do any kind of previewing and it doesn’t search contents of OCR’d PDFs. For organizing scientific articles it’s the SHIZ though. I regularly use it for that purpose. If you keep your collections sync’d across the webs with dropbox, it can be really cool.

Referencer is pretty cool in that it offers a preview of PDFs, but it wants to make everything a scientific journal article.

Nautilus – the file manager – can do PDF thumbnails which is handy. There’s also a nice search feature in there. I’ve tried using gscan2pdf, but the OCR is laughable and it doesn’t create proper searchable PDFs. Did I try tesseract in addition to GOCR? Yes – tesseract is only marginally better.

There’s just not a good Linux solution I’m afraid, though just using Nautilus may be your best bet.

Works like a charm.

AppCleaner.

So I tried some of the other OSX personal finance software which is available. Rather than blow smoke up anyone’s ass with flowery language, I decided to test the software with a one-shot out of the box compatibility test. Face it: online banking is why most of us use this software, and downloading transactions is critical.

Here’s what I did: each software got tested with three online bank accounts: USAA credit card, Regions checking account, and American Express credit card. All three work perfectly out of the box in Quicken Windows.

Here are the results:

• LiquidLedger – Nice UI, worked for AmEx, not the other two. FAIL
• iBank – Prettier UI, worked for AmEx, not the other two. FAIL FAIL
• Moneydance – Ugly UI, worked for AmEx (sorta), not the other two. FAILFAILFAIL
• Gnucash – not gonna go there. Reviews primarily negative
• ????????mint.com – shows promise, perhaps. At least all my accounts work

In the end, they all suck. Perhaps Intuit will do something good for Mac users. As it stands, Quicken Mac has poor support for investment accounts, no invoicing, and poor compatibility with its Windows cousin. Almost doesn’t make sense to switch or port your data.

Given that the iPhone lacks a todo or task list application (short of online ones – WTF?) I opted to go with a Windows Mobile device since Epocrates is now available for them. Epocrates is the second most commonly used application on a PDA/smartphone for me (after the task list, natch).

I was able to find a AT&T Samsung Blackjack on Newegg for $0. I figured I could afford this so I took the plunge and I’m delighted with it, but I wanted to post a couple of tidbits for anyone else who might run into similar problems I had. I use OSX on my home machine, so these comments mostly center on that.

Syncing is the first this OSX users have issues with, since the ActiveSync product runs only on Windows machines. Mark/Space’s Missing Sync fills in nicely here and does a fine job. PocketMac bites ass. Avoid it. So far the only issues I’ve run into with Missing Sync are – iPhoto import and Notes syncing.

Firstly, iPhoto export works great. It’s really nice to tell it to sync the last year of photos to your storage card so that you can basically have a whole photo album on you at all times. I really enjoy this feature. The photo browser in WM5 is quick and loads thumbnail previews lightning-quick compared to the Treo. iPhoto import seems to be broken in MissingSync, though. This bug has been documented for some time (since August) here and a work-around is available here. Why haven’t they fixed it? I dunno. Their support is a little shoddy, though.

I can’t seem to get notes to sync correctly with their desktop app, so I am just using the folder sync feature to sync text files which works OK.

Now, on to the device itself. Compared to the Treo is very snappy and responsive. Built-in apps are nice but could use a little help. First off, the PIM is marginal and needs to be replaced with a third-party app. I usually consider this the rule for PDA devices. I previously used Agendus on the Treo, which I loved. Unfortunately, Agendus for Smartphone is a flaming turd of a piece of software. It seems like pre-beta software to me. The UI is garbage. I elected to use Papyrus from SBSH instead which works really nicely. They make another product called Facade which adds tasks and calendar events to your home screen. The combo works really nicely and I would recommend it.

One hitch I’ve run in to is that task priorities on WM5 are numbered 1-3, unlike the 1-5 on the Treo. This can create problems with apps like iGTD which works on the 1-5 scale and creates new tasks with a default priority of “3″ – the lowest priority on the WM5 system. Not a huge deal, but a minor annoyance.

Next item is a password manager. I had heard that Keepass had a viewer for WM devices, but it’s alpha software which I’d rather avoid. SplashID has a nice password manager for Treo, WM, Windows, and OSX. Unfortunately, the OSX version doesn’t talk to the WM version. I actually didn’t understand this until I bought the software. So if you want to use it you have to edit your passwords in OSX, manually export to their file format, import into the Windows version (I used Parallels on my MacBook) and sync over ActiveSync to the device. Kind of a pain. Still, this is the best solution I can come up with until Keepass gets out of alpha (which may be a while).

WM5 does not support editing of Word or Excel documents. The Blackjack comes with a wonderful piece of software called Picsel Viewer which opens everything quickly and flawlessly. I don’t really use a smartphone to edit documents, so this is AOK for me. WM6 fixes this shortcoming. Picsel viewer is a really nice piece of software, though. It’s also really, really fast. It loaded up a 30+ page PDF with pictures and text in a split second and allows you to easily zoom and navigate documents.

The built-in email app works fine, but does not support HTML emails which is a drag. The only option is to use FlexMail which is expensive. I don’t really dig the push email thing, but there’s a free product from Consilient which gives real-time push if you’re into that. Last note about email – Gmail’s IMAP has a bug which gives blank message bodies to emails with rich formatting or HTML. Hopefully it will be fixed.

I used to use MySportTraining for the Treo which I could sync up with my Polar S625X heart rate monitor to download workouts. Unfortunately, I can’t do this with the Blackjack because it lacks an IR port. I have found a great website that I think works a little better than MySportTraining – Gyminee. They have an iPhone version of the site that works well with WM5. Further, most iPhone sites work great with WM5.

Finally, the free and excellent Windows Live Search is reason enough to buy this device. It sports voice recognition, and has fast search results for addresses, phone numbers, movie listings, etc. Really a nice piece of software.

I’m really happy with it. No complaints. AT&T coverage has been better than Sprint where I live and call quality is noticeably better than on either of my Treos.

Finally, as luck would have it, days after I got the Blackjack the Blackjack 2 was announced. Oh well. I’ll wait until it has GPS and WiFi…

Hope this helps someone out.

In the folder ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Firefox there are two scripts: Add link to DEVONthink.scpt and Add web archive to DEVONthink.scpt. You will need to edit both of these files in the Applescript editor, but the changes are identical. Change the line that reads set this_url to curl of theWindow to read set this_url to «class curl» of theWindow.

Worked for me. I’ve also emailed these changes to the developers.