Why didn’t anyone tell me…

I live in a house that is smaller than I like. But I work with computers, and I understand them to a point. Computers take things and make them smaller and faster to find. The three boxes of paper plus two filing cabinet drawers plus filing boxes in the garage plus boxes of negatives plus… plus… plus… are a lot of places to look for that particular thing you were looking for all that time ago.

Music

Most people are familiar with (if not actively using) a digital music library (cough – iTunes). This lets them put the music in from CD, files, downloads, whatever, and get the music out of either the computer or something with headphones you can carry. Okay, I can live with that. People are comfortable with this. I can’t think of the last time I had to go rooting around for a particular CD because I wanted to hear it. To me, this is good. It’s indexed, portable, and ready. And I’m doing this.

Video

I even went another notch in this direction and got video players for the living room from Sony and from Tvix.

My videos now live inside the ottoman, never seeing the light of day. It cost me a bit to gain back that floorspace and shelfspace, but it’s done. And I think it’s going to become much more common. The conversion of DVDs to a format that they can read was a study itself, see the from Sony link for details. But now with just the remote I can watch anything in my video library. The TViX is for complete unmodified DVDs, the Sony plays “main title only” or single TV shows from the RAID in the basement. Both are HD ready when we can go that direction.

Photos

More and more people are doing this now because of the digital camera revolution. But many many people are still just doing what I was doing 10 years ago: save to folder, maybe burn to CD, and done. I came to the conclusion a long time ago that this is not nearly enough. I want to have at least a thumbnail of most (if not all) my images ready on hand at my workstation. I want to be able to find that picture of me and my wife at the beach that I took with this lens on that camera. The information is there, how hard can this possibly be? I mean, really.

Well, I set out to figure out what was available last summer and came up with a list of software that did something like what I wanted to do. I’ll have to convert the formatting and get the results up here, because it was informative and time consuming. Today I’ll just say for my uses, I chose Apple’s Aperture. I can’t say I’m thrilled with it overmuch, but it was the best thing available, and I still think it’s the best thing going. I have my wish-list, which we can get to later.

What using a photo cataloger has done for me is quite incredible. I had originally written something I called PicFiler, before Aperture and it’s cohorts were available, and it did probably the most useful thing I needed at the time – keep the files organized by date and get rid of duplicates (duplicates being byte size and date/time exact matches). I still use it as a pre-import step for Aperture because as far as I can see, Aperture doesn’t recognize duplicate images with unique names.

Paper

Another big one that people don’t make use of enough is digitizing the actual paper filing cabinets. For instance, when you get a new Sony alarm clock, do you keep that foldout sheet they send you? Or how about your universal remote? Can you lay your hands on it the next time the kids mess it up? I have the PDF, downloaded from Sony, text indexed, in a database on my computer. The last time the kids messed up the remote, I had the instructions in about 20 seconds.

What is amazing is how many companies have wised up to digital manuals. I even got manuals for my Amana refrigerator bought some 11 years ago as PDFs without having to scan the paper ones I had. Coleman and Sears were ones I had to scan – they were trying to resell manuals, but I cleared out 2 boxes of just manuals between the internet and my Fujitsu scanner.

Part of this project was the purchase of a speedy Fujitsu ScanSnap sheetfed scanner. I do have a flatbed scanner, but it’s hardly the kind of thing for keeping this type of library. The Fujitsu is perfect for what I need to do. Imagine a printer sheetfeeder that scans on its way through. That’s it. It scans both sides, at once, at incredible speed. In the first 2 weeks I had it, I scanned all my taxes before 2000, 6 house closings, and 2 other filing cabinet drawers of old files that I probably don’t really need, but now have accessible anyway, plus all the manuals that didn’t have PDFs. Total drive space? 2GB. That’s it. 2GB. The pile of paper and shredded tax confetti overflowed my recycle bin and I had to take some of it to work each day for a week. Complete win in my opinion.

Once I had it in the computer, a new but familiar problem surfaced – how do I keep them available and easy to find on short notice? Well, Yep turned out to be the one I liked best. It’s simple, fast, and makes sense. It’s not without flaws entirely, but it does exactly what I want it to do without giving me fits about it. I’d be curious to see what people from Windows doing this suggest.

Do check back on this page, I plan to document more of my decision making process here.