A list of several useful hardware and software tools with which to arm yourself before you attack the file cabinet. When I first became interested in woodworking, I checked out several books on the subject from the library. Invariably, within the first two or three chapters, there was an illustrated list of desirable hand [...]

How does one go about making nice pretty scans of sheets of paper that happen to be so inconveniently bound in a book? I’m not kidding about the saw. Last Sunday I decided to scan in some aging technical manuals, but they were at least an inch thick each, and there was absolutely no way [...]

Brad Templeton recently posted his idea of how all of our manuals and documentation should be easily downloadable from a reliable site based on the UPC of the product. Since not all companies last forever, a sort of online escrow repository would make things even better. See: Going paperless by making manuals easier to find I [...]

Today I sat down to scan in a few lengthy documents, on the order of hundreds of pages. I carefully riffled them to avoid stuck sheets, dropped them in the scanner, and pressed the button. After the scanning was complete, I combined the resulting files into one and prepared to run OCR on the whole [...]

The central tool to any paperless home is the scanner, and here are a few thoughts on what I was looking for when I found the right tool for the job.

Is your house like mine, with a few magazines scattered here and there, some in tidy magazine boxes on shelves, and many in a box or two somewhere in the basement? The reality is that we are probably never going to read them again, but no one can bear to throw them out. Occasionally I [...]