e-Tip #80 - August 2008 - Text-Only Version <> Keith Vincent - Your Favorite Image on the Eclipse Desktop This month’s e-Tip comes at the end of the month. I’ve been moving to a new house, just 1 mile from my old one, but it’s kept me very busy for several weeks. Better late than never! __________ If you’ve got a photo of kids or critters on your Windows desktop, you’re not alone. Well, you can display a favorite image on your Eclipse desktop, too, and it will be visible anytime there’s not an open text file or dictionary or notes file in the foreground. Splash.jpg is the name of the image file that is displayed on the Eclipse desktop. The standard Splash file displays the Eclipse diamond logo, but you can substitute a different JPEG file. It’s easy. Here’s how to do it. In the C: drive of your computer, open the “Program Files” folder. There you should find the “Advantage Software” folder. Open that folder and you should find the “EclipseNT” folder. That is the folder that you want to open to make a small change. Once you’ve opened the “EclipseNT” folder, you can find the Splash.jpg file. Don’t delete that file, but just go ahead and rename it as “Old Splash.jpg.” Now copy your favorite JPEG image file and paste it into the EclipseNT folder. Then right-click on the name of that image file and you should see a context menu that offers the option to “Rename.” You want to give your favorite image file the name “Splash.jpg.” Once the EclipseNT folder contains your favorite image file and that file is called “Splash.jpg,” then Eclipse will display that instead of the familiar diamond logo. <> Wil Wilcox: SugarSync Online Backup and File Synchronization If you have ever lost the files for a court reporting job, you know about the five stages of grieving: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Skipping Town. There is nothing more secure for backing up your files than an automatic backup system. SugarSync, an automated Internet backup and synchronization service, is my favorite online backup solution. In addition to SugarSync online backup, I still back up to external USB hard drives and CDs or DVDs. This way, no matter what happens, I should be able to recover any lost files. Since all you have to do is be connected to the Internet for SugarSync to be backing up your files, it’s one of the easiest methods of backing up I’ve found. I had initially been using Mozy for online backups but did not feel it was easy enough to work with to recommend it to our readers, although I’ve had no problems with it. Mozy also backs your computer up automatically, and that part is simple, but restoring files is not so easy to figure out. SugarSync is more expensive than Mozy, but in my opinion is well worth it, if anything for its simplicity and ease of use alone. Either Mozy or SugarSync would be a fine choice for your online backups. To get started, I recommend that you go to www.sugarsync.com and download and install the SugarSync Manager on your primary court reporting computer, the one on which you take your jobs and use to connect to the Internet. Select your Eclipse folder as one of the folders to be backed up by SugarSync, and then perhaps My Documents, My Pictures, etc. From that point on, whenever you are online and editing transcripts, every time you edit a file or add a new file to your computer, it will be backed up online to the SugarSync server. Whenever you do any further editing with that file later on, once you close it, it will immediately be backed up online by SugarSync. If you are not online at any given time, when you connect to the Internet later on, it will synchronize the files on your computer to your SugarSync online storage at that time. This also works for your master and job dictionaries the same way as it does your transcript files, so you will always have your master dictionary backed up. There is one little quirky thing you may encounter that I’d like to explain. Because SugarSync immediately backs up any file that you’ve just closed, if you try to immediately reopen the file you may get a very scary Windows message that your document “was not found.” The first time this happened to me, I was quite upset and thought my file had been deleted. This “file not found” message is simply because SugarSync immediately uploads that file to the SugarSync server and until it’s done, perhaps a minute or so, the file is unavailable to open again. If you simply must open up that file again and don’t want to wait a minute, simply right click on the little SugarSync icon in the system tray on the Windows taskbar and select “Quit.” SugarSync will not begin backing up your file again until the SugarSync manager is reopened but you can immediately resume editing that file. Now that you've got that new mini-notebook computer you just couldn't resist, you may be looking for a convenient way to copy files from your main notebook to the mini and vice versa. SugarSync is great for this too. I don't recommend installing SugarSync on your secondary computer, especially if it has a much smaller hard drive, and trying to synchronize the files on both computers automatically. This is a little bit geeky to understand and comes with some risks such as accidentally deleting a file because if you delete it from one computer it will delete it from both computers. Then you're back to skipping town once again. There’s a manual way to do this that is safer. What I do is if I leave the office and forget to copy to a thumb drive a file from my notebook that I want to edit on my mini-notebook, I simply log onto the SugarSync website from my other computer and and manually download the file I need from there. Just click on the file you want to download and select "save file." It will then download for you. Once you've made changes using the mini-notebook and you want them synchronized with your primary computer, just log onto the SugarSync Website and click on the file manager folder, click "Upload files," and select the file you want to upload. It’s as easy as that. SugarSync also keeps 5 previous versions of files that have been synchronized. So if you have a problem with one of the jobs you're working on or somehow you end up with an older version without all of the changes, you can right-click on the file in SugarSync Manager and select "Versions" and you're problem is solved. Thus, if you ever get an “Optimize File” message in Eclipse, you can easily roll back to a previous version. SugarSync offers a 45-day free trial with 10GBs of space, so you can test drive it before signing up. Then monthly plans start at $4.99, depending on how much space you require. The peace of mind that having an automatic online backup will give you is worth the price. SugarSync does so many things that this hardly even scratches the surface. For photo buffs, it makes backing up and sharing pictures with family and friends a breeze. This is an excellent online backup program and much, much more. One of its biggest strengths is how easy it is to set up and use, plus the fact that after you install it and set it up, it's automatically backing your computer up from then on. Now you can forget about skipping town unless you’re going on vacation. Note: In e-Tip 60 I recommended an online backup service from America Online called XDrive that offered 5 GBs of online storage space at no charge. This hasn’t turned out to be so profitable for AOL so they are trying to sell Xdrive and it may even be closed. I guess you really do get what you pay for. There just wasn’t enough people willing to pay AOL for greater storage space on XDrive. If you were using XDrive for backups, be sure to download any files you may need, in case it gets shut down. They will be e-mailing people with notification regarding this. <> Keith Vincent - Bridge Protocol: Progress at NCRA 2008 At the July 2008 National Court Reporters Association convention in Anaheim, California, the Bridge protocol achieved greater acceptance. Let me be specific. I spoke to Johnny Jackson, head of Stenovations. He indicated that the DigitalCAT programmers were already working on implementing support for the Bridge auto-refresh protocol. I spoke to Larry Hunt, head of AristoCAT. He, too, agreed to implement support for the Bridge auto-fresh protocol. At the ProCAT booth, I spoke to Debbie Owens and confirmed their desire to exchange protocols. Eclipse would implement support for ProCAT’s Denoto refresh protocol, and ProCAT would implement support for the Bridge protocol. Finally, I spoke to Jason Primuth at the LiveNote booth and was told that they, too, wish to implement support for the Bridge auto-refresh protocol. As I’ve mentioned many times in these e-Tips, Advantage Software has freely offered the interface information for the Bridge protocol to the entire industry. It is my sincere hope that Stenograph will implement the Bridge protocol and, in turn, make the interface info for its CaseViewNet software available to the entire industry. Of course, it’s one thing to promise and another thing to deliver. As soon as each company has actually implemented support for the Bridge protocol, I will be happy to help spread the word here. <> Video Update: 3rd Edition, "Interactive Realtime Transcription" A 3rd Edition of the popular "Interactive Realtime Transcription" tutorial is now being released. This latest version features Bridge 2.0 by Advantage Software, but it also covers other new realtime viewing programs. For a complete list of topics, go to the Tutorials page of www.KVincent.com. "Interactive Realtime Transcription" contains more than 3 hours of video presentations. Looking for continuing education units? This tutorial has been approved by the National Court Reporters Association; it offers .4 CEU. If you've already purchased the 1st or 2nd edition of this tutorial, you can trade in your current disk for an updated one. See this month's e-Tip special. If ordering an update disk, send in your current tutorial disk. (Keep your case and your installation code for use with the new disk.) __________ In last month's e-Tip, we mentioned that Bridge 2.0 could be run from a flash drive. That really helps if an attorney's computer has been locked down to prevent the installation of new programs. For your convenience, Advantage Software will offer flash drives containing the Bridge program as well as a number of helpful video demonstrations. The cost is just $10 to $15 each, depending on how many you purchase. The flash drives also contain BridgeDistSetup.exe. This lets you personalize copies of Bridge that you give out. Just another way to help you market your realtime transcription services!