The problem is that AutoFill will only ask to remember account information if it is enabled in Settings -> Safari, and if you visit the login site in Safari itself instead of the logon screen (which is obviously also Safari, but not advertised as such).

The trick is then to trick your Wifi in not triggering in showing the logon form, but have the Wifi connected and surf to any site to get the logon screen working.

You can do it by disabling Auto-logon on your Wifi:

1. Disable Auto-Login in WiFi settings for given network
   • go to Settings app
   • select “Wi-Fi”
   • tap on the blue “>” icon to the right of your network
   • disable “Auto-Login”
2. Start Safari and surf to any site. The Wifi authentication page should pop up. Log in manually. If AutoFill is enabled including “Names & Password”, logging in prompts you to remember the login.
3. Re-enable Auto-Login for your network (same as step 1, but enabling “Auto-Login”)

This could be done easier, I thought. And so thought many before me.

This is a slight modification of the script by Chris Dent, because I needed different results to link site name (which IISWebServerSetting saves as ServerComment) to the specific logfile directory (which is a mishmash of LogFileDirectory and Name).

Function Get-IISLogSetting {
    param(
       [String[]]$Servers = $Env:Computername
    );

    $Servers | %{
        $Server = $_ ;
        Write-Progress "Scaning" $Server;
        $WMI = New-Object Management.ManagementScope("\\$Server\root\MicrosoftIISv2");
        $WMI.Options.Authentication = "PacketPrivacy";
        $Query = New-Object Management.ObjectQuery("SELECT Name, ServerComment, LogFileDirectory, LogFileTruncateSize, LogType, LogFilePeriod FROM IIsWebServerSetting");
        $Searcher = New-Object Management.ManagementObjectSearcher($WMI, $Query);
        Trap [UnauthorizedAccessException] {
              Write-Error "$($Server): Unable to connect or Access is denied";
              continue;
        }
        $result = $Searcher.Get();
        #$Host.EnterNestedPrompt();
        $result | Select-Object @{
            n = 'Server';
            e = { $Server; }
        }, @{
            n = 'Website';
            e = { $_.ServerComment; }
        }, @{
            n = 'Log Path';
            e = { "{0}\{1}" -f $_.LogFileDirectory, $_.Name.Replace("/",""); }
        }
    }
}

Usage:

Get-IISLogSetting [-servers server1,server2,server3,...]

One of the new features is Siri, an AI assistant which uses voice to interact with me as an user, and the backend of what is my iPhone: reminders, my calendar, my contacts, and the internet.

Now, interacting with voice is not something entirely new. My car’s hifi and satnav system supports a basic level of voice commands to call people from my contact list, and even my Garmin Zumo 660 which I use on my motorcycle supports it.

Whereas in my car the voice commands are processed by the car, however, Garmin’s Zumo 660 uses the voice support of my phone. So if I had a phone which did not support voice commands, I’d be out of luck. But Garmin’s Zumo 660 specifies in the documentation that this voice is only limited to calling people: you shout their name in the microphone, and your phone should know what to do: call the contact who’s name you shouted.

It all goes a bit haywire on the iPhone 4S though: instead of simple voice commands, the speech button on the Garmin Zumo 660 starts up Siri on the iPhone and Siri will accept voice commands.

That’s the good bit. The bad bit is that if you’re not quick enough giving your voice command and receiving an answer from Siri, the Zumo will end the voice dialing phase with an error saying that the phone does not support it, breaking off your dialogue with Siri.

So the basic premise is: Yes, Siri can work for you on your motorcycle, but Garmin needs to modify their firmware to recognize and treat Siri differently than any other voice dialer system.So I just received my iPhone 4S. I love it.

One of the new features is Siri, an AI assistant which uses voice to interact with me as an user, and the backend of what is my iPhone: reminders, my calendar, my contacts, and the internet.

Now, interacting with voice is not something entirely new. My car’s hifi and satnav system supports a basic level of voice commands to call people from my contact list, and even my Garmin Zumo 660 which I use on my motorcycle supports it.

Whereas in my car the voice commands are processed by the car, however, Garmin’s Zumo 660 uses the voice support of my phone. So if I had a phone which did not support voice commands, I’d be out of luck. But Garmin’s Zumo 660 specifies in the documentation that this voice is only limited to calling people: you shout their name in the microphone, and your phone should know what to do: call the contact who’s name you shouted.

It all goes a bit haywire on the iPhone 4S though: instead of simple voice commands, the

Click here to view the embedded video.

I also shy away from automatic payments, and believe that to be in charge of your budget, you cannot have utility companies snipping away from your account on any random date, certainly if you only have a promise or not even a vague clue on how much that snipping would be.

But this requires a good filing system.

Scanning

Anyway. The daily cycle is that my wife empties the snail mailbox and dumps envelopes on my desk. I open every envelope, decide if its scan-worthy (invoices, obviously, but sometimes even normal letters. But anything official is a good reason to scan it), place it on the document feeder of the ugly MFC I have in a corner and forget about it.

Archiving

What I should do then (but procrastinate, and you shouldn’t) is fire up Adobe Acrobat and scan the papers in the document feeder double-sided at 150dpi and OCR them. Then, I catalogue each document.

I use Adobe Acrobat because it supports network scanners and can OCR documents. Scanning with Apple’s Preview gave me documents of 3 MB a page, while Acrobat spits out files of 300kb. And contents of the latter is searchable through Spotlight. Imagine trying to find an invoice based on how much I paid someone. I can.

As you can see, I have developed a basic folder structure which I replicate for every fiscal year. The “clients” and “suppliers” are the busiest folders, and I save each scanned document in the format “YYYYMMDD <client/supplier name> <Document number>”.pdf.

Finder automatically arranges files by name, so the files are ordered from january to december. If I need to find invoices of a certain supplier, I just search them using Spotlight. Same goes for invoice numbers.

I use the colored labels within the context menu of Finder to make clear which documents are paid (=green), not paid (= no color) or documents with issues (contested invoices, etc, in red).

Paying

Of course, be mindful of paying your invoices. This you can do on a weekly basis, just go through the documents which do not have a color and pay them. Or not.

The Accountant

He still likes paper versions of all my documents, so he gets the stack that builds up every month at the paper tray of the scanner.

What I cannot forget is print out my invoices. Sometimes, I’m not around my printer to do so, so I created a folder “to print” on my desktop where I drag files which I have filed and need to print for my accountant. This is something which is particularly important with suppliers and yourself if you are sending out electronic invoices.

E-invoicing

Honestly, I love sending PDF’s to my clients. Saves me a trip to the mailbox, buying stamps, … But I have found for myself that receiving electronic invoices can be a pain in the neck.

First of all, you risk like me to forget to print out these electronic invoices. So that means sending them by email to my accountant afterwards. Worse is if I forget to file them after receiving an email with an electronic invoice. Next time you will hear about it is through a (hopefully) paper reminder. I try to scan these reminders too if I don’t pay them right away, since history has proven that even these paper reminders can disappear into the void and my subconscious self.

It turned out that I was quite bad at filing these electronic invoices. The Shell e-invoicing I can handle because they come in batches and are easily downloaded and printed. You can perfectly forget about them for 3 months and then start filing away. But Belgian banks are nowadays offering e-invoicing through Zoomit, which in hindsight is a terror to use. You do get an email when you get a new document, but since the document is behind a pin-code you never bother filing the invoice after receiving the mail. At home you forget about it, and when you do remember, you notice you cannot download all unfiled invoices in a batch. And if you then manage to download them, you’ll notice the PDF’s are protected, so you cannot even copy the invoice number to use in your filing system.

Since then, I’ve cancelled all my e-invoicing. I need to have my invoices on paper anyways for my accountant, so why should I worry about printing my invoices, or having to pay reminder costs because an invoice was left open in Zoomit?

With that in mind, I might even start invoicing clients again by paper invoices.

For years now, I have had a Kenwood TK-3101 mobile radio which is tuned in to PMR446 frequencies. PMR446 is in Europe a way to use radio communication without the need for a license. If the weather is not to crazy and you are in the open, you should be able to receive PMR46-transmissions from up to 5 kilometer away.

I did not have much use for the radio until I started motorcycling. Riding along, PMR’s distance of a few kilometer apart is more interesting than the few meters you get out of bluetooth of the few dozens of meters out of a wireless helmet kit. Nice to talk to the person behind you on the buddy seat, but not enough to talk to a fellow rider riding in front or behind you.

My brother started riding too and I bought/won a few Kenwood TK-3101′s from eBay, intended to using them while riding. I also bought an aftermarket USB serial cable which the seller claimed would work with TK-3101′s.

Now, everyone on the internet claims 2 things:

• You need a slow machine to run KPG48D or KPG54D, since newer, faster machines are too quick for the radio to respond in the same speed the software on your fast computer is expecting data;
• KPG48D and KPG54D, both native DOS applications, need a pure connection to the serial COM port. USB won’t cut it.

Well, it turns out the above is only partial true.

VMWare Fusion, Windows XP

For starters, I needed something that could understand DOS. I had already VMWare Fusion installed, and set up a 32bit Windows XP Professional installation. Both come right out of the box, so you don’t have to modify anything here.

Serial Adapter

The USB to serial adapter I have turns out to be the popular Prolific PL-2030 USB to serial adapter, but in my case it ends in a mini- and microjack connector for Kenwood. Install the driver on the virtual Windows XP, connect the USB cable to your Mac and VMWare Fusion asks you to which machine it should connect the USB adapter. The obvious choice for us is the virtualized Windows XP.

The Kenwood software KPG48D and KPG54D only know of COM1 and COM2 so you need to make sure your USB serial adapter impersonates one of these two ports. Dive into the Windows XP Device Manager to disable one of two COM ports, and set the COM port your USB adapter impersonates to the COM port you just disabled.

The Prolific port will be set at 9500 bps, and this will work.

Installing DOSBox

After that, install DOXBox. It is a DOS emulator, which looks just like your regular DOS window, but it isn’t. For starters, it allows you to slow any program ran in it down on the go.

After installation, you should look in your Start menu to change the Options of DOSBox. This link will open the configuration file of DOSBox. Scroll down to [serial] and make sure that the COM-port you are going to use is set to ‘direct’.

In my case, I was using COM2 so modified the following line:

serial2=directserial realport:COM2

This instructs DOSBox to let any communication from or to the COM2 port in the DOSBox emulator straight to the COM2 port of Windows XP, which in our case is through a virtualized and physical USB port.

Making it all work

Right. Your virtual machine is in place, your COM-port defined and DOSBox installed.

Make sure you have the KPG54D and KPG48D software set up on a easy to reach folder on your Windows XP virtual machine, preferably something like C:\KENWOOD. The reason is that when you start DOSBox, it does not know anything about your C:-drive. You need to mount the directory you wish to use to the emulated C:-drive in the emulator.

mount c: c:\kenwood

Once you have done this, DOSBox will tell you drive C is mounted to the specified directory. Change to the C: drive and start up KPG54D.

KPG54D will show up. Use the Alt key to activate the menu, and use the arrow keys to navigate to Setup where you make sure you have selected the right COM port.

Now we can slow down the emulated version of DOS. Type in Ctrl+F11 to decrease and Ctrl+F12 to increase the Cpu speed cycles which are displayed in the Title bar of DOSBox. Once you reach about 190 cycles, you can navigate to the Program menu, hook up your Kenwood TK-3101, turn it on and read all channel information from your radio.

UPDATED: Even at 3000 cycles, I managed to read all data.

Troubleshooting

If for some reason you still get read errors, try to change the CPU cycles or COM port settings in Windows. It should work out of the box at 9500 bps and 3000 cpu cycles, but sometimes you need to power cycle the transceiver and change the speed of COM port or emulated DOS box to get it to work.

Thoughts

It’s probably possible to skip VMWare Fusion and Windows XP with the OSX version of DOSBox, but I will still have to look into that. At least I found a way that allows me to use 1999 technology with 2011 fastest consumer hardware.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s a bit sad to say, but the 250€ monopod gave better results than 700€ worth of Zacuto ZFinder Pro and Target Shooter. The monopod gives so much extra stability and makes the whole trip even lighter because you can put the weight of the camera down at every shot compared to keeping the weight in your arms or hanging around your shoulder. And oddly enough, I felt the bigger black monopod would be less intrusive than the Fast Draw rigging. Mainly because I feel like a monopod can still scream “i’m taking a photo here” instead of the Fast Draw’s “I’m making a movie here”. I might get the EVF to mount onto the camera for better focusing and optional use with the ZFinder, because you don’t want to use the ZFinder on the camera because you then start to transmit shaking through a quite stable setup, but it is hard to get focusing right on a 5D using the back LCD display, even in low light situations. A sharper EVF might work there, and the Zacuto EVF with flip-up makes it possible to use it as a monitor or EVF whenever you like.

The RODE Dead Cat wind blocker was a nice and necessary addition to make the VideoMic really work well.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

We traveled in 2 days, with a stop in Kingston, ON for burgers. We stayed overnight in Four Points by Sheraton in Lévis, near Quebec City, and drove on to Shediac, NB with stops at the visitor’s centre on the QB-NB border and Pirate de la Mer fish restaurant in Edmunston, NB, a few kilometers past the border.

Click here to view the embedded video.