If you live in a slightly older home, such as mine, you occasionally might want to know which circuit breaker or fuse controls a particular outlet. Besides making it more convenient to disable the power for repairs, some of us have to deal with easily overloaded circuits that weren’t meant for all of the modern gadgetry we depend on.

Every homeowner can benefit from having a good map to their home outlets and circuit breakers, and a PDF scan of this map can make it extremely convenient to find two years later when you forgot you ever made it.

My Map

Last week my wife was asking if she could run her Jiffy Steamer in the bathroom, or if it would trip the breaker. I remembered making my cheat sheet, so I simply brought up Spotlight on my Mac and typed in “home circuit” and was rewarded with this document:

It’s nothing fancy, but it gets the job done. I quickly scrolled to the bathroom and identified the circuit that she was using. A quick scroll through the other rooms showed that she would be safe as long as she turned off the air conditioner in the bedroom.

Making a Circuit Map

There’s a little bit of process involved here, and it helps if you have someone else to help you.

Get a notepad and scrawl a rough sketch of each room in your house that has electrical outlets, switches, and lights. Don’t forget the basement, garage, and attic. Draw a rough sketch of each electrical outlet/switch on the maps. You can see in the image above that I simply drew a little box for each outlet and a box with bumps on it for a set of switches.

Then, shut off a single breaker and go around the house to see everything that lost power. Take a small desk lamp with you or, better yet, a proper line voltage test light, and test every single outlet until you identify the ones that are off.

Every time you find an outlet or switch that is off, write the breaker number on its spot on your map. You can see that breaker 19a and breaker 7 both control the living room in my house.

Now turn that breaker on and then turn off the next breaker and repeat the whole process.

It may take ten or fifteen minutes to make the first round-trip, but with each new breaker you have fewer things to test. You really only need to test outlets or switches that have not been identified yet.

When you are done, scan in everything and give the file a nice long descriptive name. Throw in some keywords if you are indexing your files in some application.

Using the Circuit Map

If you are concerned about the load on a given circuit, you can go through the whole document and look for every matching number (such as the “19a” from my living room) to see how many devices are on that circuit.

If you need to shut down power to a switch or outlet for any reason, find its breaker on your map, shut off the breaker, and then test the outlet with your line voltage tester before you do anything else. Even though you know the right breaker, you must always double-check that the circuit is dead before performing work.

By the way, my wife has had that Jiffy Steamer for years, and she absolutely loves it—it probably ranks right next to her iPad as all-time coolest and most useful products.

There are plenty of different ways to catalog loosely associated knowledge of varying complexity—a few months back I discussed using a wiki for this—but some problems just don’t need that level of complexity and depth.

Some problems are more suited to random scribblings on a whiteboard, and that is where mind mapping software comes in.

What’s a Mind Map?

Imagine you and your family are going to fly to Rio de Janeiro this summer to visit distant relatives and you realize that there are about a thousand things to do  in preparation but you just can’t sort it all out.

You know that you need passports and you need to verify that everyone’s visa is still valid. There is the monumental task of deciding what to pack. You might want to make a checklist of places you want to visit. And you want to go hang gliding down to the beach, but there’s something nagging at you about whether or not your health insurance would cover a broken leg in a foreign land.

The problem is that it is difficult to keep the whole thing in your mind—if you concentrate on the luggage, you forget about the international driver’s license.

Mind maps allow you to visualize the whole thing at once, and you can slide stuff around and get it looking nice and pretty.

This is a relatively simple start at a mind map that represents the vacation. These maps are typically read from the top right going clockwise, though many have no specific sequence. In fact, you can do pretty much what you like with a mind map as long as it works for you.

Just Another Outliner?

At first glance these tools look like glorified outlining applications such as OmniOutliner, and they do serve admirably in this respect, but they are so much more. An outline gives you a very easy way to organize topics and thoughts, adding annotations and such along the way, but it isn’t nearly as easy to visualize and nonlinear concepts do not map well to an outline.

Consider the Rio Trip example above—you could put all of that information into an outline, but it would not be nearly as easy to process mentally.

And these mind maps look especially cool in presentations.

Slick Document Generation

Some of the commercial mind mapping products provide pretty good integration with Microsoft Office products.

Some time back, I needed to write up a set of style standards for Oracle’s PL/SQL programming language for our offshore team. Rather than just dive into Word and hope for the best, I used Mind Manager Pro from Mindjet to make the following map:

This tool supported attaching rich text to nodes in the map, so I used these notes to handle the actual code examples.

I was then able to put together a nice Word template that matched our corporate documents and I clicked the Export to MS Word button and had an instant document:

I have also used mind maps to auto-generate PowerPoint slide decks as well. These days I use Mind Manager on a daily basis at the office; it makes a great difference when I am trying to grasp complex topics with lots of strange dangly bits hanging off of the edges.

Nothing New

Mind maps have been around for a long time. A quick search of the ‘Net will show you that mind mapping software is quite plentiful and mature. There are good free products for PC and Mac available and there are many commercial products that take mind mapping a step further, often integrating with Microsoft Office.

Take a look at what Wikipedia has to say about mind mapping. Here’s a post from 43 Folders on the same topic. Peter Russell has useful information as well about them.

I learned about mind mapping from a friend at work who had been using them for years. After seeing him make some quick notes during a meeting, I was sold.

Closing Thoughts

I made the Rio de Janeiro example using XMind, the free “lite” version of XMindPro. This application is pretty full featured for a free basic version—the Pro version adds enterprise features such as import/export and collaboration.

There are XMind versions for Mac, PC, and Linux.

If you are looking for more, all of the commercial products offer a trial period. I use MindJet’s Mind Manager. Be warned, these tools are expensive, just like buying MS Office, but you might just find that they more than make up for their cost with your newly found productivity.

As it would turn out, there were several thousand other documents on a file server that shared the same funny behavior. By the time we were done struggling with this problem I had gained new respect for PDF corruption issues and their prevention.

The Problem

We were looking to load a few thousand of these scientific reports into a fancy-schmancy new database, with linguistics searching and other bells and whistles. Much to our chagrin, these documents just weren’t loading, and we couldn’t understand why. They were text documents, with some embedded images, but mostly straightforward text.

Here is an excerpt:

And you can tell that it is right and proper text because when I blow it up all the way, the fonts are nice and smooth—this isn’t just an image of text.

But if I copy and paste that particular paragraph into any handy editor (Notepad, in this case), this is what I see:

And as far as I know, at this point the actual text is beyond the reach of average folks like me. We tried, believe me we tried.

What went wrong?

A quick Google of the subject led us to understand that many PDF generation tools embed subsets of fonts, with nonstandard mappings from the text to the font.

This fellow explains it nicely:

“The PDF file does not contain all the information to extract the text. The problem is that a character in a PDF file may not contain information what “real” character it relates to. Some PDF generators do a pretty bad job when they embed fonts into PDF files. They use a proprietary encoding mechanism (e.g. 1 is A, 2 is B, 3 is C, …) in both the embedded font and when they place glyphs on the page. Without a table that implements the reverse (e.g. character code 1 is ‘A’) you cannot extract text from such a file.

There is nothing you can do (besides to complain to whoever created the PDF file, and the author of the software that created this file).”
— from khkremer on experts-exchange.com

As it would turn out, many of the reports had been generated by printing to Adobe Distiller from Microsoft Word. It would seem that the default settings used for Distiller included the “totally hose my document content” switch.

The Solution

We fretted over this quite a bit. These are important scientific reports, and there is no way to easily ungarble them. We finally ended up contacting the Abbyy Finereader folks and trying out their OCR toolkit for Linux: not only did this product make fast work of running optical character recognition on the sample document, but once we had a script running, we managed to blow through the 10,000 pages the trial license gave us, in a day or two.

Imperfect, at best

I am happy that we were able to salvage the bulk of the electronic knowledge found within those thousands of files, but our work barely scratched the surface.

For example, most of these documents have rich bookmarking of sections and keywording, such as this (content tastefully blurred on purpose).

In addition, scientific documents typically have loads of tables full of numbers. Though it is possible to mine this data with a good OCR tool (the FineReader API provides tools for just this purpose), the tables are far more difficult to extract correctly once the original text information is lost.

Final thoughts

I wrote a few weeks about document formats, mentioning the PDF/A document standard. This is worth investigating, regardless of what your document needs are.

If our thousands of files had been originally generated as PDF/A, it is certain that we would have been able to copy/paste from them without problem: PDF/A prohibits such font shenanigans as were perpetrated on our garbled reports.

In the end, our OCR sledgehammer approach worked like a charm, and is probably sufficient for our needs. Text mining is a pretty slushy business, so no-one will complain if there are a few typos on each page—if they find the doc in a search, they can print it and read it the old fashioned way.

Thanks to its face-recognition tool, iPhoto ’09 can now put names to the faces in your photographs, letting you quickly sift through your library based on content rather than how photos are arranged. But putting this feature to work requires some effort on your part.

A few months back I received my copy of iLife ’09 and was quite pleased with the new Faces feature—I recall losing a couple of evenings sifting through photos and finding people I had forgotten.

Derrick Story from Macworld has written an article providing some tips for getting the most out of Faces. Even if you have been using the product since it was released, you may find these tips useful.

For example, after reading the article I immediately set up a smart folder that shows all unassigned faces—called “Missing Persons.” A simple idea that I would have never thought of.

I still don’t tire of refining the Faces gallery in my iPhoto collection!

Read the full article here: 7 tips for using Faces in iPhoto ’09 (Macworld.com)

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)

If you carefully select one system and stick with it, your entire document workflow will improve.

Here are a few things to consider as your paperless life grows.

Consistent names are good

You probably do need a consistent style for your document names. Arbitrary names such as “Homework assignment 1″ work fine when you have a few dozen documents, but as your library grows, the file names become less helpful. Imagine trying to find that document in a deep folder structure with thousands of similar items.

Remember that anything of importance that you have in your personal digital library is likely to be moved around quite a bit in your lifetime. Operating systems change. Software companies go out of business. Having a good “lowest common denominator” in your file names can help protect you as your files are tossed about over the years.

Pick one system and stick with it

Once you have a substantial collection of documents, it becomes quite tedious to go through them on some great name-changing expedition. In addition, changing file names causes indigestion in your backups, and is particularly hard to implement if you keep permanent backups on media such as CDs and DVDs.

Keep the name relatively computer friendly

There was once a time when savvy users would never embed a space character in a filename. Those days are all but gone, and we can happily use spaces to improve the readability of filenames. This doesn’t mean that you don’t need to consider other limitations.

Don’t make big long cumbersome names that choke “open file” windows and folder views.

Avoid funny characters, even if the operating system allows them. For example, Mac OS X allows you to use characters such as “/” in names, but when you do so, OS X silently substitutes them, keeping a “display name” and a “real name” for each file.

In the example above you can see that I named a file “bozo/clown.jpg” but the terminal window on the left shows that OS X kindly replaced the Unix-unfriendly “/” with a “:”.

Imagine the challenges you will face when you try sharing this file with a Windows user or searching for duplicates of this file in your backups.

Make the name meaningful

There are loads of content management applications out there, but they pretty much all depend on maintaining their own special repository of keywords, tags, and annotations for your files. Guess what happens if you ever have to change to a new document management application? All of those fancy duds are stripped away, leaving your documents bare, with only their names and their content.

There are many situations where the filename is all you have to go on; quite often, filenames are the only thing you can search for.

In other words, put some meaning in the name. Instead of “Homework assignment #1″ try “EN-101 Writing assignment 1, My Summer Vacation.” I’ll admit, that’s a bit wordy, but you see that it includes the course name, the type of document, and a bit of the title.

Consider putting dates in your filenames. Files get copied all the time, and sometimes the “creation date” doesn’t survive the copy operation. In addition, if you are scanning in a paper document that is dated “March 25, 1992,” you might want to have the file name reflect the original paper document’s date and not an arbitrary file system date.

My own preferred style

This is how I like to name my documents:

yyyymmdd {General Topic} – {Specific Title}.pdf

For example:

20090207 Auto - Registration for Jetta.pdf

When I scan in a document, I try to find the most appropriate date for the creation date; in the example, I might have chosen either the date that NJ DMV wrote on the renewal letter, or the postmark.

I include the eight-digit date in exactly that format because it sorts perfectly. If you have a folder with a hundred files that have been named in this way, you can sort on the file name and they will appear in chronological order.

There are as many different systems for naming files as there are people—find one that works for you and stick with it.

Here’s a short page on the subject from Get-it-Done Guy’s Quick and Dirty Tips.

In this article, I describe two searching options, one for the Mac and one for the PC.

A few days ago I wrote a post about five minutes in the paperless life, where I described registering my wife’s car and dealing with the associated paperwork.

As I filled out the form, I needed my insurance information, but had no idea where it was. I simply hit ⌘-Space and typed in my insurance company’s name, immediately bringing up all documents that mention the company, including my recent policy renewal.

Until the past couple of years, such full-system document searching on a PC or Mac was hit-or-miss, slow and unreliable. Anyone serious about finding their documents needed special document indexing software.

Today, anyone can begin effortless full-system searching for free on either operating system.

Spotlight

If you are on a Macintosh, running Tiger or Leopard, you have access to an excellent document indexing tool that is built right in to your operating system. Just click on the little magnifying glass in the upper-right corner of the screen and start typing; you will see all kinds of documents, files, applications, etcetera, that match your search.

This is especially nice because there is no sluggish indexing process running all the time. The Os X operating system provides filesystem events that tell any interested applications that “something has changed over here on the disk” so there is no need to laboriously crawl the filesystem looking for changes.

Spotlight will always search filenames and any metadata you have added to the file using the Finder.

If your documents are in PDF (that have been OCR’d) then Spotlight will search the entire contents of every single PDF on your system for the search string. This is good.

Of course, any word processing documents are indexed and searched as well.

It’s a thing of beauty when you type in some obscure account number and see five documents pop up that happen to mention the number.

If you prefer the keyboard to the mouse, you can hit ⌘-Space to bring up Spotlight.

Google Desktop

On the PC (and the Mac) you can use Google Desktop. This is truly an amazing product, and it’s free. It does exactly what its name says: it puts Google on your desktop, in a very literal sense.

I use this tool regularly at work, where our machines all run Windows XP, and I love it. The only reason why I don’t use it on my Mac is because Spotlight is more tightly integrated with the operating system.

Usage is simple: you type in a few words and are immediately presented with a dropdown list of possible document hits. If you want, you can see a full web page, appearing exactly like a Google search page (no surprise there), but with your local documents. In addition, when you do regular Google searches, you will see hits that have been found on your local machine. Very nice.

Just like Spotlight on the Macintosh, Google Desktop searches file names and file content. Again, if you have run OCR on your scanned PDF documents, the content will be searched.

Like Spotlight, there is a hotkey to launch the search. Just hit the Ctrl key twice.

Privacy Issues

It is important for you to understand that your data is easily searchable from your keyboard. For an illustration of what this means, try typing in your Social Security number in the search field—if you have scanned in many private documents (e.g. tax returns), you might be surprised how many hits you find.

This is not necessarily a bad thing since quite often you are searching for sensitive documents. Besides, the search tool itself provides an easy way to smoke out these kinds of documents in order to protect them better. 

Both tools provide the ability to tweak the kind of content searched as well as the ability to identify which portions of your hard drive are accessible and which are private.

If you are very serious about locking down confidential files you need to carefully study the security concerns surrounding indexing tools. For example, here’s an article discussing how tools such as Google Desktop might circumvent the privacy of encrypted volumes offered by TrueCrypt (a popular open-source encryption product).

Key Points

If you have never used either of these products, they are both free and you will be amazed with the results.

These search tools really shine when you run OCR on any scanned documents.

Remember that your data is now searchable by anyone sitting at your machine.

If you aren’t using Google Desktop or Spotlight right now, what are you waiting for?

[Update: I guess I should practice what I preach—a few minutes ago I typed my SSN into the Spotlight search field and was quite surprised to find a decade-old Word document. It was a letter I sent to a former employer giving my address change information. Oops!]