neuesFax (new Fax)

What’s the Program for?

 The new Firmware for AVM’s FRITZ!Box makes it possible, to receive Faxes and store them on an USB-stick attached to the Box. But at the moment the only way to announce the user that a new Fax has arrived is to set the Info-LED accordingly. But for one this LED has many other uses and not everybody has it mounted so that this LED is visible. So I preferred a way to announce the new Fax through the attached computer. I’am sure, that AVM will add this feature soon, but until then I needed a solution, so I wrote this program.

Usage

First of course you need to configure the FRITZ!Box, To find out how make the Box save faxes on an USB-stick look here, and to use the USB-stick as a network-drive under Windows. For the later I only found the German explanation on the AVM-site. If someone has problems connect the AVM-support or ask me. I added the USB-stick as drive U, so faxes are stored in U:\FRITZ\faxbox.

Now unzip the program to any place and set a link to the program from the Startup-folder, it should be something like:

    C:\Documents and Settings\[User]\Start Menu\Programs\Startup

Instead of [User] use either a particular user or “All Users”.

Do not copy the program into the Startup folder, just set a link! This is because the configuration file has to be in the same folder as the program, and if you copy that file there too, Windows will try to execute that program, nobody knows what might happen. Now you have to configure the program. It has to know where to look for new faxes, how often to do that and the date/ time of the last fax. The easiest way to do that is to drop the newest file in the fax-folder on the program. That way neuesFax can extract the folder and the date/time of that file. And it will check every 30s if there are new files in this folder. If you want to change that you’ll have to edit the neuesFax.xnf file by hand. It is a XML-File. Here a example:

    <?xml version="1.0"?>
      <neuesFax>
      <!-- Time of last Fax, Path and how often the program should check for new faxes -->
       <Dir>U:\FRITZ\faxbox\</Dir>
       <LastTime>1230299594</LastTime>
       <CheckTime>30</CheckTime>
      </neuesFax>

The timestamp is not easy for humans to read, so leave it. If you start windows for the next time with this configuration-file the program will check every 30s if there are any files in U:\FRITZ\faxbox\ newer than 1230299594, If so it will ask you to display it. If a fax arrives while the computer is off when the fax arrives, it will be announced after the next start.

Other uses

I always wrote about faxes, but actually the program knows nothing about faxes. it just check’s if there are any new files. So if you want to know if there are any new files in an folder you can use this program.

Legal matters

The program is under the GPL V3

Download

To download the program and it’s source code go to my software page