Among other things he discusses options for prioritizing and cutting down on the total volume of stuff you plan on keeping, digital or otherwise.

“Backup, backup, backup” made number four on his list.

And finally, he provides a few notes on some helpful free organizing software. I think I’m going to check out that Know Your Stuff application he mentioned.

Five Tips to Paperless Finances (moneytalksnews.com)

What do you do with 1,500 photographs?

In hope of sparing some folks hours of boredom I’d like to share my ideas on this topic here.

The Endless Stack of Photos

We have all been there. A friend or family member brandishes a stack of photos, saying “Let me show you photos of our trip to Ecuador…” (oh no… here it comes…). At this point, you reach for the photographs, but they hold the stack out of reach. They then turn each one over slowly, telling a long tale about every single image. “Oh, look at this monkey, it was so cute when he stole the candy out of little Billy’s hand and spit it into Aunt Sally’s hair.” and so on and so on.

You begin to look at the size of the stack and estimate how long this process will take.

Everyone has been on the receiving end of this treatment, but have you ever been the perpetrator?

It’s an easy trap to fall in to. To be honest, when you are showing photos to a friend, each image brings back a wave of pleasant memories and it is tempting to bask in the enjoyment of the memory, talking about how you felt at the time, as your friend’s eyes begin to aquire a glossy sheen.

Don’t Be That Person

Remember how it felt the last time you endured a four hour photo flipping marathon and have pity on those around you.

Here’s my strategy for pleasant photo sharing:

• Pare down the photo collection. Substantially.
• Create an attractive photo album with the finest photos of the lot.
• Hand the album to your friend and let them turn the pages.

Back to those 1,500 photos from India…

Here is one of the pages from the album I made from that trip.

As you can see, the end result is fairly simplistic, with a few very nice photos.

Paring Down the Stack

Even the most avid photographer understands that nobody wants to see a thousand photos. And don’t think that just because you made a slideshow with music instead of printing the photos that you are exempt. You can afford to cut the number down quite a bit.

Consider that a typical Hollywood motion picture contains less than 10 percent of the total footage filmed. Stanley Kubrick, ever the perfectionist, took this to the extreme with shooting ratios around 100 to 1. Following the analogy, in photography, it is quite reasonable to take dozens of photos for every single picture that you might share to others.

The real trick is deciding exactly how far to go with the selection process.

In my experience, you can weed out the bad photos for hours, and when you think the job is done, you can still go back and toss out a few dozen more.

I filter my photos in three major phases, using the five-star rating tool of my photo library software to help keep things in order. I personally use iPhoto, but any other good photo library suite should offer ratings and smart folders.

Phase 1: Removing obviously bad photos

This is a very quick pass through the whole collection. I start by selecting everything and marking all photos with a neutral rating of three stars.

I then find any photos that are underexposed or are blurry and give them one single star. Along the way, any photos that obviously have no useful content get the same treatment.

Phase 2: Identifying decent photos

I use a smart folder to show all photos with three stars or greater. This hides all of the junk from the first pass.

Now, I go through each photo and give it a deeper look. I sort them into three different stacks, giving two stars to anything that has useless or boring content and giving four stars to photos that I think are worth showing to people. Photos that don’t fit either description retain the neutral three-star rating. These are often repeats of the one good photo I tossed in the four-star stack.

Phase 3: Identifying the best of the best

I use a new smart folder to show only photos with four stars or better.

This is the hardest part. I go through the photos and try to find the absolutely best photo that expresses each experience or thought.

• If the photos are of places, then it makes sense to check that you have at least one photo of each important place you visited.
• If these are shapshots of friends and family, then you probably should verify that each person shows up in at least one of the pictures.

I often have a difficult time working through photo collections from visits to my wife’s family in Brazil: there are hundreds of people in the pictures and I often have doubts over who is family and who isn’t. Fortunately, my wife sits patiently with me and helps at this stage.

Look again at the photos of the elephant ride and the snake charmer. I probably have two dozen different shots of the snake charmers, while the elephant shot was a single dodgy photo taken by the tour guide. I was able to pick the very best snake charmer photo, but I had little choice with the other—there was no way I was going to omit a picture of me on an elephant so I used it. These are the kinds of tradeoffs we are dealing with.

You can see in this screenshot how I flagged most of the photos as three stars (I have already hidden all of the one-star dreck). There is one photo that has four stars, while the one next to it had an unappealing composition in my opinion, so it got two.

How far should you go?

I suppose this comes down to personal preference, but I like to keep things down to thirty or forty photos—from a starting point in the thousands. In a photo album, you can represent your whole trip in fifteen or twenty pages. This is far less intimidating than a big thick stack of photographs.

Of course, context is important. I will go out on a limb here and say that a new baby can be shown to co-workers in five photos.

In the end, I create a smart folder that shows only photos with five stars. And boy do they look good!

Tweak the best photos

My favorite tool of all for tweaking photos is the crop tool. A good crop can dramatically change the composition of a shot while still retaining the purity of the photo.

I will also straighten any slanting horizons and possibly fix funky light balance at this point. The tool set provided in iPhoto is quite adequate for these simple tasks.

Now create a slick photo album using any of the great tools available online.

Make the Photo Album

Again, I like using iPhoto. It allows you to easily create fancy albums using templates and so forth. Once you are done, you can buy a finished album with a few clicks.

Once you have your short list of photos, use a five-star smart folder as the source for the photo album. You can then spend a pleasant evening or two playing around with the layouts and composition and adding captions to your photos.

• Create a smart folder that shows only five-star photos
• Create a new photo album based on that smart folder
• Choose a pleasing layout
• Add your photos in varying page styles to the book
• Write some informative and/or witty captions for the photos

This is a screenshot of the iPhoto application, with the A-list photos along the top and the snake charmer page in the editing window.

You can even make albums like this online, without any editing software whatsoever…

This is a similar photo album creation tool that is run completely from the Winkflash website.

Now, finish picking out the features you want on your album (e.g. cover style) and place your order.
In my opinion, these albums come with the optimal number of pages (usually 20). Any more pages could make it tedious and boring. Fit your vacation into those 20 pages.

These books usually cost around forty bucks, but they are worth every penny.

The Finished Product

When everything is done, you will have a beautiful printed photo album that looks like you bought it at a book store.

I have seen photo albums from three different outfits up close.

MyPublisher

I have a couple of albums from these guys and they are near perfect. The pages look like thick magazine pages, with magazine-quality photos. I found that my white-on-black text bled a little.
Note that the leather used on the leather-bound books is paper thin.

These folks are always sending me coupons for 40% off, so it seems that you really don’t ever have to pay full price for their wares.

Apple iPhoto

These are identical to the MyPublisher books. Indeed, at one time iPhoto could send its output to either MyPublisher or Apple. I heard a rumor that MyPublisher did the books for Apple at one point.

The only down side to the Apple books is that you pay high shipping costs. Otherwise, the books are perfect.

Winkflash

A friend shared one of these with me. I happened to have my India album nearby, so we compared them. On the one hand, Winkflash is much cheaper; however, the image quality is not nearly as nice as the other books. Perhaps I was looking at a lower-end book from them, but the ink dots were a little coarse for my taste.

Summary

By putting a little effort in aggressive photo selection, basic image tweaks, and then taking advantage of the many photo book tools out there you can create a beautiful album that is a pleasure to leaf through.

These books have been available for several years; even so, whenever I hand one to a friend, they page through it, transfixed. People really love these albums and they actually enjoy looking through them.

Oh, and they make great gift ideas too!

What does this topic have to do with reducing paper in our lives? Believe me, printing one of these books is so much neater and cleaner than printing hundreds of loose photos. And you will enjoy them more.

Recently I have been mulling over the possibility of commuting to New York—owing to a hazy future at my current employer. Whether or not I am ready to trudge there and back every day of the week is still an open question, but the siren song of the city has its draw.

With such a fine commute comes an interesting problem: one needs to cart lots of stuff to and from, especially a laptop and possibly a Kindle for the train ride, but no one wants to lug huge bags throughout the subways of Manhattan.

Anyway, here’s the article from Wired Magazine’s How-To Wiki on how to Travel Light Without Leaving Your Laptop Behind.

Got any ideas? It’s a Wiki, so go ahead and contribute yours.

One point that I don’t think they mention: I want a bag or backpack that looks nothing like a laptop bag. I really don’t care to walk around with a neon sign on my back saying “I’m carrying $3000 in electronics!”

I’m still looking for that perfect gruffy looking bag.

And the bits of the search string I saw had nothing to do with what I had copied. Clearly my Control-C did not “take” and I had pasted whatever stuff had been hanging around from the prior user.
My curiosity got the better of me and I opened Notepad and did a quick Control-V and watched in amazement as a young girl’s secrets were exposed before my eyes.

She is clearly struggling in her relationship with her boyfriend, because she had listed about fifty bad points about him in detail—and some were pretty bad. She then listed a dozen or so good points at the bottom. And I must admit that I read the whole story…and felt a voyeuristic guilt with each word.

I then closed Notepad and purged the clipboard and felt much better.
Of course, that doesn’t change the fact that I will feel uncomfortable the next time I see her. I feel like I snuck into her room and read her diary.

This is what she had done: She had written her personal note in Word or some other tool and then likely decided to email it to herself, so she copied and pasted the sordid details of her love life into Gmail, forgetting to purge the clipboard before going home.

And I, with no malice or intent, bumbled into her secrets.

Learn from the mistakes of others!

When was the last time you used a public computer at the library or worked on a common computer at school or work? Did you leave anything behind?

I am of the opinion that rather than allowing an application to shuffle your life randomly, why not do it the old fashioned way and move your documents into folders of your choosing?

This article discusses some of the advantages of old-school folder management and gives a few hints along the way.

Why bother?

By creating your own well thought out folder structure, you gain the following advantages:

• You can find something fairly easily without needing to launch the special app.
• You can copy reasonable subsets of your document sets to friends or for backups.
• Someone else can find something without needing the special app.
• You can place files in a common network drive that others can see, from PC, Linux, or Mac.
• You do not lose all of the metadata about your files if the document management app ceases to exist.

People have been managing their documents this way for decades, so this is not anything new. What is new, however, is that folks don’t necessarily see what flexibility they give up when they allow the computer to squirrel things away on their behalf.

What kind of folders?

In short, pick some categories of documents that you will be filing, and optionally pick a timeframe which to partition the folders. This mirrors what we do with paper folders, doesn’t it? We create dozens of manila folders with tabs, and optionally create subsets of these files by date (e.g. Receipts, 2009).

One key difference helps us: Computer folders enjoy one feature that their physical counterparts lack—they can be nested several layers deep.

A few examples are probably in order…

I like to keep several kinds of scanned documents relating to day to day home paperwork. Over time, it has become clear that I scan lots of receipts, health insurance papers, banking papers, bills, and … everything else.

As such, I created the following top-level folders: Banking, Bills, Health Insurance, Receipts, and Miscellaneous.

Over time, they start to get stuffed to the gills with things, especially the Bills and the Receipts folders. My answer to this was to split them out by date. Within each category folder I have subfolders by date. This is because some categories need lots of years, while others might not need to be broken down by date at all.

Digital photos are a different creature: I feel that the date of the photo is the most important piece of information, and subject matter is secondary. For this reason, I store my photos in a series of top-level folders labeled with the years.

With photos I have a three-level system: Year, Month, and Subject. For example, within the Photos folder there is a 2009 folder. That contains a 2009-02 folder, and that one contains a folder called Cats. There are many ways to arrange these, I have chosen this approach.

I like iPhoto as much as anyone, and I use it for my photos. The difference is that, for me, iPhoto only holds a copy of each photo—the original photos are all stored on a NAS using the file structure I describe above.

Put a little thought into it and come up with a system that works for you.

Closing thoughts

We are looking for ease of use here, as well as avoiding lock-in to some proprietary app. We also want it to be easy to back up specific bits of the data and share specific bits.

By looking at my example above, you can see how easy it would be to find a bill from 2009. By following a specific naming convention, you can see that each document is fairly descriptive as well. You don’t need DEVONthink or its brethren to tell you how to find the Allstate bill from June of 2009. In addition, the folder names are now easily searchable by my operating system, as are the filenames.

This might create extra work for you in the beginning, but do you really want to be at the mercy of someone else’s application?

Oh, and about making those folders? There are applications out there that can generate a bunch of folders for you following your own chosen rules. One I use is The Big Mean Folder Machine.  I wouldn’t want to depend on an automatic system for daily use, but as a one-time jump start, tools like this can work wonders.

Don’t forget to back up your files!

Imagine that you were to become temporarily incapacitated for whatever reason…

• Can a family member log in to your computer, as yourself, in order to access your files?
• Can your spouse access your online banking details so the bills can be paid?
• Can your family find your insurance information that you scanned and filed away?
• Is there someone who can log in to any online accounts that need care and feeding?

Not a pleasant subject, indeed, but one that worries me from time to time.

One way to address these needs is to keep all of your passwords and so forth in one special place, using a password safe application, and make sure someone else has the access code. For example, you can use a tool such as 1Password or SplashId to store hundreds of secret bits that you use all the time, and your family might need.

You might consider writing down the master passwords that control your life and sealing them in an envelope that you provide to a trusted family member. Since this is such a great security risk if found by the enemy, you might want to omit any identifying information from the note. Impress upon them the need to secure the document very well.

Perhaps you can choose the same master password with your spouse, with one relatively short password locking your computer and a long secure password locking your password safe application.

Regardless of how you address these issues, sit down with your better half (or trusted family member) and review where documents are and how to access them.

As it turns out, my original script does not work in Snow Leopard, and I promised that I would one day clean up and publish my new and improved version.

Chris posted a comment today as a gentle reminder, so here is the new and improved version without further delay…

The Details

Unfortunately, Snow Leopard came around and caused some indigestion. For starters, the ScanSnap Manager didn’t work correctly and Abbyy Finereader would not process anything made by the ScanSnap. A couple of months later they got everything straightened out and delivered new versions of each product.

The new version of the Abbyy Finereader product does not play well with my original script.

Since I cannot do without this important functionality, I rolled up my sleeves and rewrote most of the script. The new version works in Snow Leopard quite nicely with one small annoyance: you really don’t want to try to use the machine for anything other than scanning or OCR while it is going because the new Finereader version keeps bouncing the darned icon all the time it is running and that is quite annoying to watch.

Fortunately, I really don’t need to use my machine for anything else while it is chewing on the docs; I just wanted to be able to continue scanning at the same time!

Note: Before going forward, note that you will need to upgrade the ScanSnap Manager and Abbyy Finereader to the Snow Leopard versions first! Get the files here.

Here is a link to the new script…

And here’s the code itself:

Installation

• Use the Script Editor to save this script as Run OCR on New Folder Items under User Home/Library/Scripts/Folder Action Scripts
  You may have to create the Folder Action Scripts folder.
• Now open a Finder window and navigate to the parent folder of your scanned documents folder.
• Right click (control-click) the scanned documents folder and choose Folder Actions Setup…
• At this point if folder actions are not enabled, you will likely have to enable them and add the script manually.
  • Check Enable Folder Actions
  • Use the “+” buttons on the left and right sides to add the scan folder and then this script.
• Otherwise, a list of scripts will come up. Choose this script from the Choose a Script to Attach dialog.
• Close all windows.

That’s it! The script will be invoked automatically every time a new file appears in your scanned documents folder.

Please let me know if you have any ideas that can improve this script. I’m not an AppleScript guru, so someone might just know how to keep that annoying Finereader icon from jumping.

I never really considered that this book might raise eyebrows until some years later when I was in the Navy. We had just come back from a cruise and everyone was heading out to their dormant cars to go off base. One of my shipmates was quite surprised to find police surrounding his vehicle when he reached the parking lot. It seems that a few weeks prior, some night watchman had seen two curious items in the back seat with his flashlight: the butt of a BB pistol and … The Anarchist Cookbook. He sure had some ’splainin’ to do about that one. They were more interested in the book than the pistol.

What about today? Do we have to worry if our reading habits are known to others?

Though I chuckle at the thought that anyone would care that I have Clive Cussler in my Kindle, it’s not difficult to imagine situations where one might not want Kindle searches or eBook library contents known:

• People reading hotly political materials that might attract unwanted government attention.
• Folks who are reading materials that hint at their sexual orientation, a fact they might wish to keep private.
• Readers who are searching for materials on one of many different illnesses, that they might not want potential employers and insurers to know about.

Want to know how eBook vendors are treating your privacy? Here’s an article on the subject by Ed Bayley on the Deeplinks Blog:

An E-Book Buyer’s Guide to Privacy

This article provides a table with five key e-reader technologies—Google Books, Amazon Kindle, B&N Nook, Sony Reader, and FBReader—and provides answers to several key privacy questions for each product.

Even if you have nothing to hide, think about this: Considering how poorly Amazon chooses recommendations for me, I wonder how poorly our government might pigeonhole me based on my book collection. One thing is certain: somewhere in that list is one ancient copy of The Anarchist Cookbook!

Soon after returning from that trip I wrote a review of my Kindle experience. Now some time has passed and I am coming back to relate the Kindle experience over time.

The novelty hasn’t worn off!

I’ll admit it: I’m a gadget geek and I’m afraid to imagine how much hard-earned income I have frittered away on pretty devices that I really don’t need and that often get tossed to the back of some gadget drawer.

My fear with the Kindle was that it would fall into this category: I would read a few books on it and then it would slowly find its way deeper under piles of other stuff—papers waiting to be scanned and guitar music that never will be learned. Eventually, it would be charged up once a year to avoid feeling guilty for not using it.

The reality is that I use the Kindle today almost as much as when it first arrived. Though my reading has not picked up nearly as much as I would like it to, whenever I do have a chance to read, I pick up the Kindle.

One thing that has remained constant: I can hold the device for hours, reading peacefully, and it still “disappears in my hands” as promised. The text is still as enjoyable and crisp.

Newspapers still aren’t for me

Many years ago the local paper would have a regular promotion where they all but gave away the paper for six months. I would try it, and then regret it as I found myself tossing unread paper after unread paper into the recycle bin. I just am not a newspaper kind of guy: As much as I like reading the paper, and I would like to be tuned in to world events and enjoying my favorite columnists, I don’t seem to ever sit down to read the paper.

One thing has become clear over the past few months: it’s just as easy for unread electronic newspapers to collect in a pile as their paper counterparts. I have a subscription to USA Today, but I might actually only read it once or twice a month. I am probably going to end up canceling that subscription. Reader’s Digest, on the other hand, makes a welcome appearance once a month and I enjoy reading it.

Perhaps the greatest testament to the usability of the Kindle came from my wife. She was telling me about some story she had started reading in Reader’s Digest at the doctor’s office, only to be interrupted by the nurse calling her. I handed her the wonder gadget and showed her how to read Reader’s Digest. She had no problem whatsoever working her way through several back issues.

My wife hates technology. She likes the Kindle.

Lame Recommendations

One area where I have been somewhat disappointed is in the recommendations from the online bookstore. I just don’t understand Amazon’s algorithm for determining which books to recommend.

It is clear that your entire Amazon book purchasing history is used, but it is not clear how.

For example, in the past several months I have purchased exactly two books by Joseph Wambaugh and two by Kurt Vonnegut. Why, then, does my recommendation list always contain these two authors in the top slots? I have bought dozens and dozens of books from Amazon, often multiple from an author. I would hope that their recommendation would be a little better than that.

One book I bought on the Kindle recently was The Help by Kathryn Stockett. I also have two by Kim Edwards, the author of The Memory Keeper’s Daughter. These, and several like them, though they might place my Man Card at risk, are evidence of a genre of books that I hope Amazon would detect and use to better choose my recommendations. No, I’m stuck looking at Wambaugh and Vonnegut forever I guess.

Last week I sent an order with several children’s books out west for my cousin’s three-year-old. Guess what appeared before Kurt in the list: a recommendation for a children’s book, Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes.

In the area of book recommendations, I have been quite disappointed.

Questionable Top Seller List

There are three lists of books provided at the home page of the store: New York Times Best Sellers, Kindle Top Sellers, and New & Noteworthy Books. I guess the first list speaks for itself.

The Kindle Top Sellers list, though, has a glaring defect that really limits its usefulness in my opinion: many Kindle books are free or very cheap, and therefore might be overrepresented in the top seller list. As an example of this problem, I quickly opened the list right now and found a book called Weaving Words ranked #5. There are exactly two customer reviews of this book and the average rating is a pitiful 1-1/2 stars. The key to success? It’s free.

I would rather pay $9.99 for an absolutely awesome read than slog through a free book.

It’s not all bad in the Book Store

To be fair, there are definitely good parts about the book store. As I said last time, the free chapters are unbelievably handy. I have already read and dumped several boring first-parts of books. If there is a complaint about that, it is that often books come loaded with so much frufru before the first real chapter that the “first three chapters” you download really only include fifty pages of cruft, followed by ten pages of actual book.

On multiple occasions I have heard about a book from some other source and then hopped on to the Kindle Store. I then read a few reviews, read the first chapters, and then bought the book. This is a convenience that must be experienced.

The Record Club Blues

Remember a long time ago, when we rode our dinosaurs to school (my brother an I had to share one) and we did our homework on stone tablets? People were members of record clubs such as BMG or Columbia House. These were an awesome bargain, as long as you could negotiate the tricks and traps they used to induce you to buy records you never wanted.

The one real down side to a record club was that their catalog was always incomplete. I remember wishing I could find Pink Floyd at BMG and realizing that it probably was never going to happen. Different artists were often available from one club or another but not both.

Sadly, this phenomenon endures today in digital form. There are no sources of digital media that sell everything. The iTunes store and Amazon have different MP3 catalogs, and Barnes & Noble and Amazon have different eBook catalogs.

The limited catalog can be blamed in part to the need to prioritize which books to digitize: though I might want to read a particular Clive Cussler novel from 1975, Amazon might have put that on the back burner while they digitize more recent works.

Unfortunately, I imagine that the majority of the limited catalog is due to licensing, copyrights, and lawyers, as well as a desire to compete by not allowing your competitors to sell your best selection—a balkanization of authors that helps the book sellers more than the customers.

The fact that these eReader devices come hooked up to a book store and have built-in DRM means that the market is not open. I cannot browse the Barnes & Noble catalog from my Kindle and buy books there; likewise, a Nook user cannot buy from the Kindle store. This does not help us as consumers, as there is little chance that anyone will buy two of these expensive devices so they can access two catalogs.

Another problem that is caused by this nontransferable content is that you are now married to the product line. My Kindle book collection is worth more than the Kindle itself. Do I want to jump shop and move to a better device sold by a competitor in the future? No, and that’s exactly what Amazon wants. There is no incentive for any of the eBook manufacturers to make it easy for you to switch devices.

Final Thoughts

Given the state of the eBook market, it makes sense to choose a good device that has a predictable long future. Amazon is the online book powerhouse and is a safe bet for longevity. Reviewers are constantly singing the praises of the Kindle, and any new eReader review contains the obligatory comparison to Kindle.

I would heartily recommend this device to any avid reader. Indeed, a couple of weeks ago I was online with AppleCare working out the replacement of a problematic iPhone. We chatted a bit while waiting for reboots and such, and I’m fairly certain that I convinced the nice AppleCare woman that the Kindle is exactly what she needed in her life.

The key was that she said that she likes reading more than anything. If reading is what you live for, don’t delay. It’s not like “reading from a computer” and it’s far more convenient than a suitcase full of books.

Apparently this is not the case

It seems that the TSA has leaked their official document of airport security guidelines. ABC News says Online Posting Reveals a “How To” for Terrorists to Get Through Airport Security

A Rookie Mistake

Look at the screenshot of the document at the top of this post. Even though a certain part of the document has been blacked out, it is possible to select the text and copy/paste to find out what is hidden behind the black text.

What kinds of things are listed in this document?

• Photographs of all kinds of official ID cards. Ever wondered what a U.S. Senator’s ID card looks like?
• Procedures for calibrating equipment, such as where guns should be hidden for the testing and such.
• Guidelines for who gets searched and who doesn’t.
• Guidelines for what objects get searched and which don’t.
• And much much more!

In other words, this was a most unfortunate event.

See for yourself—ABC News (and others) have posted the document with redactions removed.

Easy as Pie

Here’s a screenshot of the original document, opened in Adobe Acrobat Professional.

As you can see, it was a trivial matter to use the TouchUp Object tool to gently slide the black rectangle off of the secret stuff (I have blurred the text here, though you can read it from ABC News if you wish).

If you are working with confidential documents that could potentially cause disaster if leaked, please learn how to redact your documents correctly!