Archives for the ‘Software’ Category

What would you do if you lost your cell phone?

Many of us have smartphones these days that hold substantial quantities and varieties of data. What happens to that data and how you replace it are two key questions to consider in the event that a mobile telephone is lost.
If you haven’t thought about it much before, why not take a few moments to consider the factors involved and any changes you might want to make to help minimize the stress from such an event.

Smooth out the bumps in your workflow with desktop scripting tools

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

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 [...]

Cut down on the cruft when you print web pages

You know all of those useless ad-filled pages that come out along with the one sheet you really needed? How about that last page that has nothing but the web site’s copyright statement or FAQ links? I just took a look at a product called GreenPrint that helps you print exactly the pages you want [...]

One step closer to sleeping well at night

My second pocket hard drive finally arrived from Amazon, and I have reached a milestone in my digital life: I now have two complete backups on portable media that will never be in the same place at the same time. Are those little drives different? I’m fairly certain that those pocket drives are all the [...]

Tagging my photos just got a little bit easier on the Mac

Last week I received my shiny new copy of iLife ’09 in the mail, and I found that the new Faces feature of iPhoto has turned out to be far more interesting than I had imagined based on the reviews. Once the application had finished searching through my library of thousands of family snapshots, I [...]

What should you have in your toolbox?

  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 [...]

What would happen if that thumb drive slipped out of your pocket?

Those tiny USB drives we so casually toss about are convenient and easy to lose. Here’s some thoughts on making sure you don’t lose your secrets to strangers. While my family was on vacation over the holidays, I managed to calmly back our rental car into a concrete column in a parking garage, denting the [...]

New life for an old clunker: How to set up a simple Linux file server

Do you have an aging machine gathering dust in the corner of your closet? Why not give that machine new life as a Network Attached Storage device, providing a central disk drive that everyone in your house can access. What does this have to do with going paperless? Sooner or later as you go down [...]

ShoveBox, a handy little virtual shoebox for gathering ideas

There are many large content-management tools out there that provide similar drop-box functionality, but this one seems to have a sweet spot for simplicity.