Well, there are two things, far as I can tell. One is it has trays set up so you just stick a stack of business cards in the business card slot or whatever and away it goes.

But the more important thing to me is the software side, where it then goes, hey, this is a business card, and presumably grabs the information and OCRs it and puts it in the right fields in a database, which I can then import to Quickbooks. Or it says, hey, this is a receipt, and pulls in the expense information and categorizes it so I can just treat it like I was doing manual data entry.

And then it keeps .pdfs of those receipts, which I can pull into Expensify or wherever, and keep those for the IRS, since the IRS will now accept electronic copies of receipts for under a certain amount, I think. (Note to self: check details.)

Presumably. I have yet to talk to someone who is actually using it the way I intend to, so I can know if it'll actually function that way or not. It seems like there is a more robust commercial equivalent (Fujitsu? I forget) but I can't figure out the software side of that one.

But honestly I think all I need is the software, which doesn't appear to sell separately. So maybe I should try for the mobile/cloud option? Which is a monthly subscription, which I don't probably want to do long term, but if I could buckle down and tear through my old stacks of paper, maybe that would work best? I dunno.

I have a ScanSnap scanners and they come with software to do OCR (and I think business cards as well).

Meaning: I think various scanners may come with that software.

It's not the OCR itself, it's what it does with the OCR'd info; i.e., puts it into a database with fields, address, name, number, or company, credit card, amount.

So, hey, ND, what is your Pro Tools rig setup? Dave's been bitching on facebook, and now a donor might be buying us our dedicated audio computer. Which is startling, because we hadn't actually yet thought through what we'd want to get.

I have a few Pro Tools setups. The main one in the studio is an older 24" iMac 2.66 GHz with 4 GB of RAM with an original MOTU 896 as the audio interface. That machine is pretty much trimmed down and only runs Pro Tools and a few other audio apps. I only update it to whatever OS Pro Tools has currently approved, so it's almost always at least one OS behind.

I have two other 27" iMacs that both run Pro Tools. One is a 3.06 GHz Core2Duo, and the other is a Core i7. I'm not sure of the memory on them, but both of them are over 8 GB of memory. I just switched one of them to a Focusrite interface, and the other one either uses built in audio, or a MOTU Ultralite.

Finally I run Pro Tools with no interface on a 2 GHz Core i7 11" MacBook air using the built in audio, and I just did a bunch of 24 track recording for a film shoot on a Core i5 Mac Mini.

As long as the machine is configured correctly just about any current Mac is great for Pro Tools. If I were buying new right now it would be a 27" iMac mainly for the large screen for editing. I'd also consider a second monitor. In my studio there's also a 40" LCD on the wall that is connected to the Pro Tools rig and it gets used quite a bit for ancillary windows, viewing the mix and edit window at the same time, opening lots of plug ins, etc. etc. I'd also have at least 8 GB of RAM in a current machine, and would recommend putting as much RAM into it as you can afford. Have a good fast external hard drive that you use to record the tracks. I've got a stack of FW800 drives that are used for this purpose, and then I have a 4 TB FW800 drive that also hangs on the main Pro Tools rig as a time machine volume, and then copy sessions off to a network drive at the end of each day when I'm doing big projects. Almost all the difficulties I've had over the years have been related to drives acting up, so I like my data in many places. Multitrack recording and editing is much harder on a hard drive than standard use. Lots of very fast random access reads and writes going on.

Okay, that was more long winded than in intended.

Feel free to ask any more specific questions you need.

No, that was exactly what I needed. Thank you.

I'm in the midst of converting all my old projects over to .wavs so I can use them outside of Roland's proprietary world. That alone is eating up my space, and that's just temporary, on the way to storing them offsite.

Oh, what's the deal with the Thunderbolt port?

Oh, oh, and I heard that solid state drives were slow because of the rewriting factor, so not appropriate for the recording drive, but would be good for loops storage?

Oh, oh, oh, and would the giant iMac travel? What's the story on the rumored rack-mountable Mac Pro? Is that vaporware? Maybe I should ask that over in tech.

I am having that feeling of "what if no one ever hires me again". I hate that. I swear it has more to do with me than the actual work, but it still feels scary.

I am having that feeling of "what if no one ever hires me again". I hate that. I swear it has more to do with me than the actual work, but it still feels scary.

I'm going through that now because I've hit my first dry period. I know this time is very slow in publishing, but I hate this feeling. I suppose it's good in that it's forcing me to start working leads that I've been lazy about, but, ugh.

On the upside, I'm happy to report that, with my 2012 taxes now finalized & paid, in my first 4 months of freelancing from Sept to Dec, I ended up clearing my regular monthly living expenses (which, as a singleton in SF, are fairly high). Not enough to also save for vacation, IRAs, etc., but still, I'm relatively pleased that my emergency fund remains intact.

Of course, since it’s been slow, I will probably need to dip into that soon. Yet, despite feeling slightly panicky about that, the psychic wages for quitting my previous crazy job remain high. I do not regret that decision in the least.

Thanks to everyone for the encouragement and tips here! They are very helpful and appreciated by this (mostly) lurker.

Pix and I have been working on the 2012 taxes. It's always a huge slog to make sure that we've gotten everything squared away correctly. I'm exhausted and there is still so much that needs to be done before my Noon meeting with the accountant on Wednesday.

I've hit my first dry period.

February. The month that freelancers hate.