Chris Nelms

As a fan of the BBC 2 television programme Dragons’ Den I well remember the episode in which the inventor James Halliburton demonstrated his WaterBuoy, a keyfob that, when dropped into water, inflates an orange balloon and turns on a flashing LED so that keys or small items (e.g. a mobile phone) dropped off a boat into the water will float to the surface for retrieval. It is a very clever idea. The keyfob is only about 7cm long x 3 cm wide x 1cm deep, little more than some car central-locking keyfobs. Every boat user recognises the risk of dropping their keys overboard. On the WaterBuoy website (www.water-buoy.com) Halliburton describes how, although he was offered financial backing by the ‘dragons’ on the TV programme, he subsequently declined because he decided that illuminated party balloons using the same technology could be even more profitable than the WaterBuoy.

Until the WaterBuoy came along boaters have usually attached a cork float to their keys. It’s a low-tech, rather bulky solution. Pictured here is a traditional cork float keyring (price £2.25) alongside the WaterBuoy (price £11.70). At first glance it’s a no-brainer. Why carry the bulky cork float around when you could have the compact WaterBuoy? The WaterBuoy has the added advantage of being visible at night which could be important if the keys are dropped into a moving current of water and won’t remain where they were dropped for long. Despite this, in my opinion using the WaterBuoy carries an unacceptable risk and I wouldn’t trust it to look after my keys or small valuables.

A cork ball may be bulky but it can be tested. If, at any time, I wish to verify that my cork float still works, I can drop it into a filled bathtub, swimming pool, or other controlled environment and satisfy myself that it floats. I know that even with rough handling over several years the properties of my cork float that make it less dense than water won’t deteriorate. Therefore I can say with confidence that in ten or even twenty years’ time if I drop my keys attached to the cork float into the water, they will float. It requires no maintenance.

Contrast this with the WaterBuoy. Mine arrived a few days ago (January 2009) but the bottom of the box carries the tiny legend: ‘Production Date 01.2008 Made in China’. So my WaterBuoy is already a year old. Inside the box the printed warranty tells me they will replace any WaterBuoy with a manufacturing defect for a period of 6 months after purchase, and refund the purchase price for a period of 3 years from the production date shown on the packaging (my italics) if the device fails to work. So my 3 year warranty has already decayed to two years before I even obtained the WaterBuoy! Furthermore, if I drop my keys overboard and the WaterBuoy fails to operate, in the event that I manage to get my key-less craft back to the shore they will give me my money back. Big deal. How could I ever prove that the WaterBuoy didn’t work? The defective unit would be conveniently lying on the bottom of the ocean or river or canal, safe from lawyers, courts, and technical specialists. It would be just my word that it didn’t work. So this lack of apparent confidence in their own product by the manufacturer is my first objection.

Secondly, how long will it last? Who can say? We know it contains a battery, an LED, a folded balloon, a container of pressurised gas, and a means of releasing that gas and switching on the light when immersed in water. What is the reliable life-expectancy of those components? My warranty lasts for 2 years. Will I have to buy another WaterBuoy in two years’ time to have complete confidence that my keys will float? If I don’t replace it, will it still work in five years? Ten? I’ve no idea. And this brings me to my final objection, the fact that it cannot be tested.

Unlike the cork float I have no idea if my WaterBuoy will work when required. Probably nearly all WaterBuoys will do what they claim but what if one in a thousand, or one in ten thousand, or even fewer, is defective? I cannot find out if mine is the defective one. I could carry it around for years and only learn that it was defective as I watch my keys sink into the water, never to re-emerge. A brilliant invention, but why risk it?

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Like all would-be record-keeping obsessives, I aspire to having an office devoid of papers and filing cabinets but with all my records at my fingertips on the computer, carefully filed by subject and date, and with metadata that allows me to locate it instantly during any relevant search. Of course this aspiration has yet to materialise; my desire to keep all documents (letters, bills, statements, drawings, ideas, pieces torn from newspapers and magazines, etc) means that the piles of paper awaiting scanning constantly dominate my desk. For the last ten years I have used a series of Hewlett Packard flatbed scanners with an ADF (automatic document feeder) built into the lid. HP make good hardware and the image quality is usually excellent, but I’ve always had the feeling that the ADF in the lid was an afterthought, a means of getting the scanner to do something it wasn’t originally intended to do. The first photo here shows my HP Scanjet 5590, purchased in around 2003. In theory I should be able to drop a stack of documents into the feeder tray, press a button, and then do something else. The reality is different. Documents that have previously been folded frequently misfeed or jam, or two sheets are dragged in together. This 5590 supports duplex scanning whereby both sides of the page are scanned but this process involves three slow passes of the paper through the feeder, any of which may result in a paper jam. Each pass requires the document to make a 180 degree U-turn around a roller. If the paper becomes jammed there is no easy way to expose the paper path to retrieve it. Even if the paper doesn’t jam, the scan rate is s-l-o-w. Working through piles of paper documents is a tedious process, mainly waiting for the scanner and checking for misfeeds.

For most of the last decade in which I have digitized my paper documents I have used a Windows PC, and my document management software was ScanSoft PaperPort. Like most applications it has features that are really cool and others that are frustrating. On the whole it was fit for my purposes and enabled me easily to scan my documents into PDFs and store those PDFs in a deep hierarchical arrangement of folders. ScanSoft is a PC-only application so when I migrated to the Apple Mac I looked for an alternative. I settled upon Yep, which describes itself as iPhoto for PDFs (iPhoto is the Mac’s built-in repository for photographs). I may post a separate article devoted to Yep because it is a really nice application. Suffice to say that Yep enables me to scan, organise, and later find, the PDFs that encapsulate my life. Browsing the Yep support forum the subject of scanners has been raised several times, and the model that received repeated praise was the Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M (the M suffix denotes the Mac-specific variant of the scanner that is also available for the PC). After a particularly frustrating afternoon with my HP ScanJet I decided I would never conquer the rising piles of paper documents unless I used a better scanner.

It’s pleasing and easy to do research on the ScanSnap S510M scanner because nobody seems to have much bad to say about it. It seems to provide the features that everyone wants from a document scanner: speed, reliability, and simplicity. The online reviews, plus comments in forums and websites such as Amazon were all positive. One of the strong themes that came through was the inclusion of bundled software that integrated well with the scanner and the Mac. This clinched it. I placed my order and it was delivered the following day.

The Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M scanner is one of those pleasing items, like the iMac, where the act of unpacking its box and setting it up, is a pleasure. Everything is neatly packed, there’s a printed list of what to expect in the box, and there’s even a paper quick-start guide, a rarity these days when a PDF is usually included on the installation CD.

With the ScanSnap there are three CDs to install: Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional, Abyy Fine Reader for ScanSnap (a special version of the OCR program especially for this scanner), and finally the ScanSnap Manager, the software that controls the scanning process from the Mac. My one disappointment was that all the documentation only refers to compatibility with OS/X version 10.4, aka Tiger, whereas I have been running version 10.5 (Leopard) for over a year. I needn’t have worried. Everything worked perfectly. I knew the S510M was slightly out of date, its case colour having been intended to harmonise with the older white Mac whereas my more recent iMac is grey aluminium rather than white. No matter. The ScanSnap still looks pleasing enough sitting on the desk beside my iMac. My first thought was how small it is. The ScanSnap is tiny compared with my HP ScanJet flatbed, and the photographs on this page don’t adequately convey that. The ScanSnap is about the size of a loaf of bread; certainly smaller than our electric toaster. The outer lid hinges up to become the document feeder tray, and opening this automatically turns the power on, a blue LED clearly showing when it’s powered up. Inside is a separate articulated flap that folds out to form the paper catcher, although this is arguably unnecessary when the scanner sits on the desk; the two control buttons (power and scan) have been cleverly positioned to be easily operable when the catch tray is still folded closed.

In use, everything about the ScanSnap is exactly what I’ve always wanted. It works just like I want my document scanner to work. The warm-up time is negligible, barely noticeable at all, maybe a second or two. The speed of document feeding is impressive; I never have the feeling that I’m waiting for the scanner in the way I did with the ScanJet. There’s an option for the scanner to ignore blank pages. By default both sides of the page are scanned simultaneously (although you can turn this off if you wish). Documents can be saved as JPGs or PDFs, although the PDFs at this stage are strictly images; you can choose whether every page (or n pages) are saved as separate PDF files, or whether a batch of pages is saved in a single PDF file.  The ScanSnap Manager software offers to process each file using the Abyy Fine Reader OCR application which turns the PDF into one with text content that can be searched.  Alternatively, scanned PDFs can be dragged onto the Abyy icon in the dock for processing at a later time.  With auto-sizing every document, from a business card to a full letter or A4 page is scanned precisely.  Because there may be many different sized documents in a batch placed into the feeder tray I’ve noticed that smaller documents (e.g. till receipts or snippets torn from a newspaper) twist diagonally as they are scanned.  No problem, the ScanSnap’s software automatically recognises this and corrects the resulting image.  Very impressive.  In the very rare event of a misfeed, the cover of the scanner can be flipped open to reveal the entire paper path.  No more poking about with a letter knife as I used to have to do with the HP ScanJet’s document feeder.

 Drawbacks?  Well arguably I’ll still need to keep a flatbad scanner for the rare times when I want to scan from a book or magazine but I can envisage the ScanJet gathering dust while the ScanSnap sees daily use.  Cost is another; the ScanSnap wasn’t cheap but good tools often aren’t.  Despite the price I wish I’d bought a ScanSnap ages ago.

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Here’s a neat tool that I’ve found very useful since I bought it around a year ago. It plugs into a mains wall socket, then you plug into its socket the mains appliance you wish to monitor. The LCD display shows the voltage, current (amps), power consumption (in either watts for active power or VA for apparent power), frequency (in hertz - and also the power factor) , and finally the power consumption over time (i.e. kWh).

Don’t be put off if some of these terms are meaningless to you. You don’t need to be a physicist to use it. The most relevant measure for most of us is the power consumption so plug it in, press the Watt button once, and the display will show the power consumption in watts (this is basically the amount of electricity you’re paying for). This meter can help to identify which appliances consume most of the power that makes your electricity bill so expensive. For example a lamp with a 100W light bulb should show a consumption of around 100 watts (give or take a watt or two). However a small table lamp we have with an energy-saving bulb consumes just 8W. By comparison, our tiny Christmas tree lights consume 30W yet give out less light.

Where this gets interesting is when measuring appliances that are often left switched on all the time. Our digital terrestrial TV decoder ’set top box’ consumes 9W when in use, but switch it to standby using the remote control and its consumption drops by a measly 2W to 7W. There is no on/off switch on this box so we have left it on standby round the clock for years, consuming a steady 7W! Okay so switching it off at the wall won’t save the planet or a fortune on our electricity bill, but installing a simple timeswitch that turns it off at night will pay for itself within a few months. If nothing else at least we can make an informed decision about whether to leave an appliance switched on or not.

I paid £9.99 for this monitor in a Maplin Electronics sale. As I type this they are offering it for £14.99. You can view a PDF of the instruction sheet by clicking here. Why have I classified this post under ‘being prepared’? Well having just a 2.6kVA generator, (see Generator) when the lights go out in a power cut (or preferably before!) it’s vital to know which appliances can be operated on generator power.

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