Archives for the ‘Paperless Life’ Category

Don’t worry if you didn’t sanitize your documents—even the TSA forgets occasionally

It’s too comical to be true. A few months back, when I wrote an article warning about inadequate attempts at sanitizing PDF documents, I thought that any organization serious about censoring documents would not make such a basic error. Especially not a government agency, after the military had been caught by this pitfall.
Apparently this is [...]

Why not try a personal Wiki for some of your more amorphous notes?

In my evenings, I sometimes find myself performing the role of “Resident Geek” at my nephew’s school, tending to network issues, computer problems, and my favorite, “The Internet is down!”
Over the past couple of years I have considered several different approaches for keeping a grip on which computers had which service patch, which router is [...]

Are your Portable Document Format files all that?

Like most people who are trying to archive reams of paper, the one reliable tool I always turn to is Adobe Portable Document Format.
I trust my digital life to PDF. Almost everything I scan and most documents I write eventually end up squirreled away somewhere as PDF documents.
Have you ever considered just how portable those [...]

My Kindle is effective in taking paper out of my home—and my wallet!

After a short vacation on the road with my family, I have come to the conclusion that Kindle is my new favorite gadget. Sadly, I have also found that the Kindle Store is far too easy to use, even when you are on the Interstate in some far corner of Georgia.
When the original Kindle was [...]

Keeping Your Documents Readable for Years to Come

Whether you are a cube dweller sharing an electronic document with your next door neighbor or a homeowner attempting to catalogue your digital life, you will soon encounter resistance in the form of document incompatibility. What good is a byte-for-byte perfect duplicate of the original if you cannot open it in an application?
My own choice [...]

HowStuffWorks — How Paperless Offices Work

I have always been a big fan of HowStuffWorks, with their detailed in-depth articles describing such disparate topics as manual transmissions and money laundering.
Anyway, author Diane Dannenfeldt has written a lengthy article on How Paperless Offices Work, giving ample coverage to myriad aspects of the topic:

Introduction to How Paperless Offices Work
Benefits of a Paperless Office
Transitioning [...]

PDF is green tech for your office

The basic tool required to bridge the gap between the carbon-intensive paper document present and the greener electronic document future was invented in 1993 as a way to streamline communications between publishers and printers.
Today, the humble PDF file is the file format of choice for “final” electronic documents. Properly created and deployed, PDF alone serves [...]

How to simplify your tech life

23 tips for getting organized, streamlining your online time, managing your media and more
In this Computerworld article, the writer gives several great tips on getting your geeky side in order. I’m happy to note that procurement of a Fujitsu ScanSnap and scanning your life to PDF made number 4 on his list.
Other useful tips include [...]

A cheap and cheerful way to reduce Internet surprises

Anyone who has kids in their home worries about how easy it is to access the seamier side of the Internet, even if by accident. Indeed, it is thrust upon us in our email in-boxes daily in the form of misspelled spam with links that only a fool would click.
Another issue altogether is the spam [...]

Why you should digitize ‘everything’

“How a lifestyle experiment and a disaster made me realize the value of turning atoms into bits” — Mike Elgin

A couple of months back, Mike Elgin of Computerworld posted an article on his foray into the paperless world: Paperless office? Ha! How about a paperless life?
In this followup article, he considers how lifestyle changes and the raging [...]