I have tons of old photos that I am always in the process of scanning in. Some are pictures from childhood, others are from my time in the Navy, and still others are from family life before digital photography (somewhere around the end of 2000 I bought my first digital camera, a Canon G1). I [...]

Show me a musician and I’ll show you someone who has at least a three foot stack of sheet music squirreled away somewhere. My situation is worse—both my wife and I are musicians, to one degree or another. Throw in the fact that she is a music teacher and you can imagine just how many [...]

This evening I opened my email and found a most welcome message: Fujitsu has released their patched version of the ScanSnap software for Snow Leopard. [UPDATE: I spoke too soon—they only delivered half of the goods. See below.] [UPDATE 2: Hurray! It's fixed! The birds are chirping and the sun is shining and life is [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

“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 [...]

This afternoon was kind of lazy and rainy, and I found myself sifting through stacks of CD cases again, full of enthusiasm as I discovered some lost Rolling Stones and David Bowie albums, imagining how few discs remained before I could declare victory. But then I stumbled across a huge cache of classical music discs [...]

Do you ever send documents to other people that might have … sensitive information embedded in them? Not everyone who works with documents in the home will run into this problem, but sooner or later you are probably going to find yourself in a situation where you would like to email someone a useful document [...]

Work flow is inherent in the kind of work that we do when scanning, indexing, searching, filing, tagging, and backing up all of our documents, photos, music, and video. Once you are committed to digital media, you will find that you often need to cobble together different programs in order to do away with some of the tedious manual labor.

Organize Your Digital Life: How to Store Your Photographs, Music, Videos, and Personal Documents in a Digital World by Aimee Baldridge If you are looking for step-by-step checklists and good solid advice about putting your digital life in order, then this book is for you. The author covers a very broad swath of digital media, discussing [...]