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Hunter and Clark use Picnam to manage scanned invoices and timesheets.
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"What a great program! I've been goofing off for months with other programs and this is the easiest to use and simple to boot."
Bernhard R.
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Information
Installation Instructions
Online Documentation
Managing Scanned Documents
Picnam contains features to make working with scanned documents easier.
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Why Text Files?
The most common question people ask about Picnam is "Why did you choose to use text files for comments?" This article gives some of the reasons you might prefer to use text files rather than metadata to store information about your pictures.
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Recording Information About Genealogy and Family History Photos
Picnam is ideal for making notes about scanned documents and photos for family history or genealogy.
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Preserving Digital Photos
Digital photography makes it easy to take lots of photos, but they are very easily lost. What can you do to make sure your photos survive for years to come?
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Broadband excess usage charges
Broadband Internet plans are now very affordable, available from as little as $30 per month, but there are hidden traps in some plans that mean the actual bill could be much higher - even thousands of dollars. While most companies have sensible plans without excess usage charges, there are a few plans where low download limits, high speed and excess usage charges make a combination that almost seems designed to part unwary users from their money.
The problem plans are ADSL and cable plans with low download limits and per megabyte charges for excess data. Some of these plans are very cheap, but it is easy to rack up big excess usage charges. These plans seem to be targeted at people who are new to the Internet or broadband, who want to try it out without spending a lot of money. However these are the people who are least likely to be able to estimate their requirements, and the most likely to inadvertently go over their allowance. One user on the Whirlpool forums (Australian broadband discussion forums) received a bill for $7000 from Bigpond.
A large part of the problem is the fact that not many people realize exactly how fast cable broadband is, and how fast you could use up your allowance. Bigpond's cheapest plan is 200 MB, plus 15 cents per megabyte excess data usage. 200 MB is a lot of data at dial up speeds. With a fast dial up connection, it might take 10 hours nonstop to download 200 MB. However 200MB is a very small allowance for broadband. Bigpond quote "up to 5 Mb/s" as the speed of cable, which means you could theoretically download the entire 200 MB monthly allowance in about 6 minutes. After your allowance is used up, you could download about $5 worth of data per minute or $300 per hour.
Of course normally you don't use the full capacity of your Internet connection. Most of the time a high speed connection is idle, with short bursts of activity as you load web pages or download email. Many people don't download much data and 200 MB may be completely adequate for them. However the problem is not necessarily with a normal month's usage - it is the largest month's usage that you need to be careful of. You could be on this type of plan for months with no problems, but all you need to do is to accidentally download a huge file from a fast site and you could rack up a bill of hundreds of dollars in a couple of hours. People might install some sort of file sharing software without understanding exactly what it does, watch some streaming video or install a trojan that uses their Internet connection for its own purposes. It is very difficult to pick an allowance which you know you would never exceed. Once you exceed the allowance costs can mount very quickly.
The other part of the problem is that a lot of people only have a vague understanding of how big their allowance actually is. The allowances are invariably expressed in megabytes or gigabytes. However it is very difficult to give these a meaning in a real world context. 1 MB means a million bytes, but how much is that? It wasn't that long ago that 32 MB was a huge amount of hard disk space, maybe 100 times bigger than disks people were used to. It was hard to imagine having that much RAM. Now hard drives are several thousand times bigger again and systems routinely have 1000 MB of RAM. A MB has changed from being a huge amount of storage to almost the smallest unit worth thinking about.
This means that it is difficult even for computer experts to describe how much a MB is in practical terms - it's value is constantly changing. People have tried to translate it to more concrete terms like how many emails or how many digital photos it represents. However that depends on how big the email or photos are. Digital photos may be as small as 30 KB or as large as several megabytes, depending on where they came from and how they were resized. They can vary by a factor of 100 or even 1000. As soon as you add "it depends" to these calculations you have failed, because it means you are not giving a concrete answer.
The majority of people probably don't have an accurate idea of what they need. The only way to even get a vague idea of how much you need is to look at your actual usage over a few months. Even long time Internet users probably just pick a number that sounds about right. That's OK if you pick a number that is enough for the largest months usage, or if you don't pay for excess usage, but if you pay excess usage charges it can be a disaster.
ISPs normally send an email warning you that you have used up your allowance, but if you are new to the Internet you probably don't get much email, so you may not check it regularly. Many people use one of the free email services like Hotmail or Gmail rather than their ISP, and again may not check their ISP account regularly. Even if you do check your email regularly, you can still generate a huge bill at $300 per hour.
Internet access is becoming a commodity, and people shouldn't have to be a computer expert, able to decipher MB, Mb/s and the requirements of their software to avoid a huge bill. At a minimum, a plan should allow you to use the Internet confident that it is impossible to receive an unexpectedly high bill.
The good news is that most Internet plans are structured so that you can't generate unexpectedly large bills. Normally they reduce the speed of the connection instead of charging excess usage fees. I suspect most companies feel that unreasonably large bills and the disputes that inevitably come with them are not good for their business. There are only a few plans from a few companies that charge per MB after your allowance is used up. However I believe they need to be phased out completely - per MB charges and a high speed Internet connection is a dangerous combination, particularly when they are marketed as introductory Internet plans.