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)

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.

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.

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.

When the original Kindle was announced, I was skeptical of its utility and I just couldn’t see myself using one. In the year or two since it was released, I have occasionally dreamed of buying one, but balked at its steep price. The combination of a new version (Kindle 2), a price cut, and a vacation was all it took.

In short, I love it, and it is the perfect companion for a long lazy vacation. In this article, I’ll cover several of the high points as well as a few of its shortcomings.

A Display (almost) like Real Paper

As far as I’m concerned, this is the only feature that really matters. Most will agree that reading from a screen is unpleasant. I have read books on a wide variety of sub-par screens such as laptops, Palm devices, and my iPhone—they are all pretty bad. Why is this screen so special?

To be honest, you really must see one of these e-ink devices in person to fully appreciate the difference between Kindle and a netbook display. I saw my first e-ink device in a Borders book store—they had the Sony Reader on display. If you are in a Borders, you might want to see if they have any on hand. If you have any gadget-geek friends, ask around to see if one has a Kindle you can hold in your hands.

The first time you see the display, you will be surprised at its paper-like qualities.

To show this, take a look at this close-up of the screen:

• It works by reflected light, like paper. There is no backlight.
• The letters appear to be printed right on the surface—look at the text around the coins to see what I mean.
• You can read in direct sunlight with no loss in quality. Indeed, I took the photo in sunlight to show this.
• The display consumes no energy unless it is changing pages. In fact, when you put the device in sleep mode, it displays one of several images of literary figures until you wake it up again.
• The display is just as crisp at any angle:

In this image, not only do you see the effects of an amazingly thin depth of field from my lens (a bit more than I expected), but you can see that even at a very flat angle, the screen looks pretty much the same.

The only shortcomings I can think of are that it isn’t color (no big deal), and the contrast still isn’t exactly like a printed book—it’s more like the black-on-grey of a cheap newspaper.

Some may find the page-change flash annoying: when you change pages, the display flashes black for a split second in order to clear the prior page.

The Reading Experience

With a display like that, it’s hard to go wrong.

One of the main complaints of the original Kindle was that it was too easy to accidentally turn pages. They have fixed this problem, and now you can easily turn the page from either side, while avoiding accidental page turns. It feels quite natural, and the paperback-sized screen is just big enough to feel like you are really reading a book.

The device is very small, so you can carry it anywhere (please buy a cover, though). There is no longer any need to fold the newspaper fifteen times to avoid encroaching on the personal space of your fellow commuters.

Over my vacation, I read several books with ease. Amazon says that they want the Kindle to “disappear” in your hands, so as to not distract from your reading enjoyment. They have achieved this goal.

The Kindle Store

All things considered, this was the deal maker for me. The fact that I can go to the Kindle Store wherever I am and buy a new book is unbelievably cool. To sweeten the pot, Amazon allows you to download the first few chapters of any book for free. That way, you can decide before paying if the book is going to be a good read. This ability to download free samples was what sold the device for me.

For example, while we were driving through South Carolina the other day, I suddenly developed a hankering for a good first-person WWII book. After a few minutes of figuring out how to find WWII materials, I started paging through dozens of interesting possibilities and finally settled on Iron Coffins: A Personal Account of the German U-Boat Battles of World War II by Herbert A Werner. How neat! I was looking for yet another memoir of D-Day battles from an American author and stumbled on a German’s first-person account of his U-boat experience.

Periodicals

Amazon provides a relatively short list of newspapers and magazines that you can subscribe to, including the New York Times, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and others. There are also a few magazines to choose from (33, to be exact).

As with books, you can sample the wares before buying. You can have one 14-day subscription to any periodical for free.

I subscribed to Reader’s Digest and USA TODAY. Both of these seem to have been well adapted to the device. Every morning when I turn on my Kindle, the day’s edition of USA TODAY automatically comes down over the air.

Built-in Internet

I’ll be brutally honest here: you really don’t want to surf the net with this device. The Internet connection exists mainly as a means of connecting to the Kindle store. If you are the kind who likes surfing the ‘Net using the text-only Lynx browser, on an actual vintage VT-100 terminal over an acoustic coupler modem, then this might fit your style.

In a pinch, you can zip to Wikipedia, but don’t expect to use it to manage your eBay auctions or watch YouTube.

The image at right is a screenshot generated right from the device. Trust me—even browsing a Wikipedia article is a painful experience.

What’s Wrong with Kindle?

Any complaints I have about Kindle are minimal, bordering on nipickery, but you should know of some of the minor annoyances.

• Any navigation and pointing and clicking is clunky and slow. It really does remind me of typing on an old-school terminal over a 300 baud modem, where it was quite common to accidentally type in several characters before the computer caught up and started displaying them.
  Sometimes you move the “mouse pointer” down to an item you want to click on, but it lags and you click once too many times, and then the final button press clicks the wrong thing. I managed to accidentally buy a book this way—fortunately, Amazon provides a “I made a mistake” link.
• No touch screen. While struggling with the navigation, it is so tempting to just poke at it. At the moment, this is likely a blessing: the Sony Reader has a touch screen, at the cost of a substantially muddled display.
• The book prices are a little steep. I’m certain that the publishers are partly to blame on this, but it is hard to accept that a dead-tree edition only costs a few bucks more than an electronic edition. There are none of the losses associated with publishing, stocking, shipping, and then handling returns on these books, but they still cost almost as much.
• Come on, only 33 magazines? I know that many magazines are glossy and colorful, but I wouldn’t mind a reduced-cost version of Wired, for example.
• They don’t give you any kind of case. You are spending $300 on this fine device and the least they could do is give you a cotton slip cover!
• You can’t replace the battery. This is no big deal for me, since I am already on my second iPhone: the technology advances fast enough for me that I buy the latest gadget before the battery in the last one dies.
• They aren’t even close to reaching the full potential as a book reader, and likely won’t. Since Kindle supports DRM content, why can’t we have an online digital library where we can check out books for a week and return them? Why can’t an outfit like books24×7 allow me to download a full book to my one registered Kindle?
  Certainly, these uses would conflict with Amazon’s business model, but it is a shame to see this unused potential.

The ugly specter of Digital Rights Management

One particularly troubling concern is with the Amazon DRM model in general. On the one hand, it seems that Amazon wants you to treat the Kindle and its content as a service. You are paying a substantial sum for a service. Since there is DRM involved, you really don’t own the content in the true sense of the word. You can’t give a book to someone else. Much of the value of Kindle is derived from the permanent connection to the Kindle Store, and your online bookshelf. Unfortunately, many customers have found that when they fell out of Amazon’s good graces, by returning too many purchases, they were shown the door quite rudely and locked out of their Kindle accounts forever. It seems that Amazon would like to have their cake and eat it too; treat their product as a service, but then tell you it is useful as a standalone product once you are left out in the cold.

And who can ignore the irony of the whole 1984 debacle, where books were yanked out of customer’s Kindles as they slept?

To be sure, most Kindle customers are not recklessly returning big-screen TVs after Super Bowl Weekend and returning GPS units after their summer vacations, so the whole Amazon lockout issue is probably not a concern for most. Likewise, Amazon should have learned their lesson from 1984. Forewarned is forearmed. Make sure that you understand the risks and limitations before you dive in.

What’s Right with Kindle?

• The display is beautiful.
• The battery lasts several days, as long as you turn off wireless.
• It really does disappear in your hands, as promised.
• It will hold every book I ever plan on purchasing.
• The online store is almost perfectly implemented—it’s extremely easy to purchase new books anywhere.
• Those free samples are the best.
• The free iPhone companion app lets me see my Kindle books on my iPhone too, and it keeps my current page in sync between the devices.
• It’s Paperless!

My Conclusion

There are tons of features that I haven’t covered, such as the built-in dictionary, the “read-to-me” text-to-speech feature, and the MP3 player features. I hopefully have covered the key features that really matter for an eBook reader.

For me, the fact that I can carry a ton of books in my hand without involving dead trees is great.

If you are an avid reader, but you are not a starving college student living on ramen, order one. You will not be disappointed.

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 to a Paperless Office
• Managing Digital Documents
• Going Paperless at Home
• Paperless Office Solutions

Take a look at the full article here: How Paperless Offices Work (howstuffworks.com)

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 a critical need in reducing both business costs and environmental impacts.

Duff Johnson of Planet PDF wrote an article about two of my favorite topics: PDF Documents and Paperless Offices.

In the article, he discusses several key motivating factors for fitting PDF into your own workflow, with the underlying goal of making your office a little bit greener.

Read it all here: PDF is green tech for your office

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 topics such as cable management solutions (for that rat’s nest of wires), Google Desktop search and Google Sync, online identity management, and protecting your children online.

Check it out: How to simplify your tech life (Computerworld)

On my last birthday, I received one of the coolest cards from the kids. It was one of those cute cards that people give that are “from the cat.” In this case, however, they had chased down each one of our felines and subjected them to a forced paw-printing exercise, which you can see at the right, complete with each cat’s name.

Now that’s just too cute for words. Who can imagine ever throwing out such a neat card?

How about the card that my wife slipped in my luggage last October when I went to India on business? That really warmed my heart to read while I was unpacking my luggage in a Bangalore hotel. That one’s a keeper too.

The problem is not one individual card; as the saying goes, “No single snowflake feels responsible for the avalanche.”

Besides the sentimental value, quite often cards hold important information: names and addresses. In the treeware world, people have been saving the corners of envelopes for years in an effort to keep the important bits while tossing the rest.

You know where this is going, don’t you?

Scan it all in

Once you have accepted the fact that you have never actually sat down with your shoebox to read twenty years of cards, and that no one will be hurt at their loss, you can calmly sit down and begin scanning them in, so that you always remember them.

I found that a sheet-fed scanner works wonders, but I often have to snip on the fold lines and feed in the individual pieces, assembling the whole lot into a multi-page PDF when I’m done.

Some kinds of cards just don’t work in a sheet-fed scanner: lumpy cards covered in glitter with popups and stuff. I use my flatbed scanner for those.

No matter how I do it, I make sure that in the end I have a single PDF that contains the whole card, and no blank pages. I try to make the pretty part of the card be the first page, so in any thumbnail view I will see the card.

If the envelope has useful information, such as a return address, just scan it in as well and attach it as another page to the PDF.

Make sure to pick a good name for the file; I choose to use the date of the event followed by the type of card and maybe some special info about the event. Such as 20081225 Christmas card from Mom.pdf. That’s unambiguous and can be found regardless of what kind of document management system you use (if any).

Not just greeting cards

I’m certain that your shoebox has other flat paper items that aren’t greeting cards. Some are letters that you exchanged with your spouse when you were dating, perhaps others are letters from distant family members. Maybe someone sent you a copy of a photo of the eight of you on that fun rafting trip back in ‘92. The point is, you can go through all of this and handle it accordingly:

• Set aside anything that must be kept—things like stray automotive titles and precious letters from deceased family members.
• Scan in all the rest, creating PDF files that contain exactly one letter, in its entirety, with envelope.
• Don’t bother running OCR on it unless it is typewritten or the address is a printed label.
• You may wish to scan in any photos at higher resolution in your photo management software (such as iPhoto or Picasa).

Once you have everything checked and safely backed up, you can recycle all of that paper and use the shoebox for something useful like network cables and power supplies.

When you are all done, you will have plenty of beautiful memories on your computer (and backed up!) that you can.

[Update]

Last weekend, a friend mentioned that her mom taught her to always keep the most recent letter from a family member. This way, if the person dies, you will have the last letter they sent to you.

She still has the last letter her mother wrote before she passed away.

The message is clear: Don’t be a fool. Keep precious letters that have great sentimental value. You probably do want to scan them in, so that even if they are lost in a fire, you still have the scan.

But think very carefully before taking anything to the shredder.

I just took a look at a product called GreenPrint that helps you print exactly the pages you want and skip the junk with little effort.

There are many times when you still need a printout, such as when printing driving directions, but by using this tool you can cut out a third of the sheets you generate.

(This was one of the items on Julie Urlaub’s 19 Tips to go Paperless at Home)

Here’s how it works

GreenPrint installs itself as a new printer on your machine—sort of a virtual printer, similar to products such as Adobe Distiller and PDF Creator.

Just select the GreenPrint printer from the printer dialog and print to it as if it were an ordinary printer. You probably will want to make it your default printer.

The GreenPrint tool then gives you a preview of the print job and shows you what parts of your document it thinks are junk.

For example, I printed this web site:

All of the pages that are in red will be suppressed. You can see here that the very last page was automatically flagged as junk because it only has a line or two of text.

I noticed that the second-to-last page was just the page navigation bar, a fairly useless thing to print, so I double-clicked sheet 6 to exclude it.

You can change whether a sheet is included or excluded by double-clicking it. When you are ready, just click Print in the top-left corner.

Other features

The product provides print-to-PDF capability, an always-welcome feature for the paperless warrior. You can also select destination printers from the dropdown box in the top-right corner and modify the view.

You can also turn off images on any page. For example, if you are printing mainly text, and there are a dozen advertisements on the page, just turn them off with a click.

Free and Paid versions available

The version I tested is GreenPrint World, available for free for Win2K/XP/Vista. This version is supported by ads (in the right bar).

They offer a payware version called GreenPrint Home Premium, and there is a Mac version called GreenPrint Mac. Both versions cost $29.

The difference between the two is that the paid version has no ads and claims the dubious “feature” of quick loading preview, which gives one the feel that they slipped an intentional secret delay in the free version, which you pay to remove.

I like products that do one thing very well, and this appears to be one of them. I usually don’t bother using ad-supported versions, preferring ad-free use and the warm fuzzy feeling one gets from buying a license.

Of course, if they offered a $39 “Family” license that would allow me to install PrintGreen on multiple Macs and PCs in my house, I would buy it in a New York minute!