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.

My situation is worse—both my wife and I are musicians, to one degree or another. Throw in the fact that she is a music teacher and you can imagine just how many pages of sheet music there are filling bins and flexing cheap shelving in my house.

What do I have and Where is it?

The biggest problem we face is knowing what we have and where it is. I have hundreds and hundreds of pages of classical and jazz guitar sheet music, but if I need to find Villalobos’ Choros no. 1, where do I look?

Shortly after I bought my ScanSnap, I began scanning in all of my sheet music (I have left much of my wife’s collection untouched—I’m sure you’ll understand). In most cases, I simply hacked the spine off of the original book and fed the sheets through the scanner. Now, I have less paper in the house and my music is searchable.

In most cases I didn’t bother to run OCR on the documents since there is little in the way of printed words on most sheet music that is worth indexing. I did take care to name the files well.

If you ever hope to find your music on your computer, make sure you include at least the composer/artist and song title in the file name.

Is this really cutting down on paper?

Whenever I find what I’m looking for I might play it directly off of the computer screen, but it is more likely that I’ll print it out. Doesn’t this kind of negate the idea of removing paper from my home? Not really. Think about it—most sheet music is never played. We have books with hundreds of songs in them and we play only  a handful. That’s just the way it is.

The fact that I print out five or ten pages in a month does not negate the many hundreds of pages that were scanned and then recycled.

Great for Music Lessons

I started taking jazz lessons again a month or two back, and my teacher gave me some lead sheets, with all kinds of useful annotations on them. As soon as I was home, I scanned those babies in, so I would not risk losing the valuable information. I also went through all of my notes from prior lessons and scanned them in as well. These kinds of things are precisely the sorts of paper that tend to get lost in some mismash of unsorted music.

Now, I can type in “Four” in my favorite PDF library application and find the lead sheet for Miles Davis’ Four.

Maybe you don’t have that many notebooks full of music lesson notes, but when you have been trying (poorly) to learn for as many years as I have, those notebooks begin to proliferate. Just scan them all in, give them some good filenames, add some keywords to help, and you’re in business.

What about copyright?

It seems that the jury is still out on digitizing works you own. There’s one fellow who made a right awesome device for scanning in textbooks in minutes, by photographing the pages. That guy’s machine has spurred much debate about whether or not you have the right to digitize your own stuff.

On the one hand, you bought the book and paid for it, so it would seem that fair use covers this; on the other hand, publishers are eager to monetize digital media, reselling the same works to you if they can.

So, is Daniel Reetz’s butt-kickin’ book scanner legal?

That would depend on who you talk to, says Pamela Samuelson, a professor at University of California at Berkeley, who specializes in digital-copyright law. Trade publishers are almost certain to cry copyright infringement, she says, though it may not necessarily be the case.

Google was recently forced to pay $125 million to settle with angry book publishers and authors who claimed copyright infringement as a result of the search giant’s book-scanning project.

But not so individual users who already own the book, says Samuelson. If you scan a book that you have already purchased, it is “fine, and fair use,” she says. “Personal-use copying should be deemed to be fair, unless there is a demonstrable showing of harm to the market for the copyright at work,” says Samuelson.

(Source: wired.com)

Here’s another take on this:

Question

I bought a book for school, can I make a copy of the book for my own use to write on so I don’t write in the book and can get my money back when I return the book to the campus store.

Accepted Answer

You have the right to make a copy of the book you purchased as long as you are using the copy for your personal use. The copyright laws merely prevent you from making copies to sell or distribute.

(Source: justanswer.com)

Of course, if you go passing your PDF documents around to all of your friends, all bets are off.

Final thoughts
Music is a hobby that seems to accumulate great stacks of paper, but these music sheets are peculiar in that you only need one or two out of every hundred. Why not digitize the whole lot and keep those book shelves from sagging?

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!

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)

Here are a few thoughts I have to share on these great media library projects. Not only are they never-ending, but the longevity of the task should guide some key decisions you make as you plod along.

Accept that it’s Never Going to End

I currently have ongoing projects to scan in every scrap of paper in my house, rip every CD to MP3, and scan in every pre-digital-era photograph. But the corpus is just too large. And I haven’t even considered ripping video; I have accepted that a full digital video library is a little too ambitious for me these days.

We need to be aware of this from the very beginning; if you feel like you bit off more than you can chew, you are normal.

Never Give Up

Try to keep your goals clear, so that you don’t lose steam and give up. Perhaps you are looking forward to being able to place the plastic boxes all in storage. Perhaps you can’t wait to be able to make those uber party mixes from your rich collection. In any case, every hour you spend doing the drudgery of ripping CDs brings you a little closer to these goals.

Prioritize Your Work

It is a whole lot better to spend your first days ripping your favorite music to MP3 than to be ripping some weird CDs your roommate left behind in college. Today I happily skipped over the Talking Heads CDs that I inherited from my brother—those don’t really need to be in my iTunes library, do they?

Keep it Simple

Make your work flow as simple as possible. You may still be doing this in three years—don’t over complicate things.

I have been working on my own collection for the past three years. When I first started, I was ripping the music on a PC using a tool called cdex to rip the MP3s and another tool called Mp3tag to edit the tags. These days I use iTunes on my Mac to do both of these tasks. If I had some really fancy work flow going, it might not have been so easy to change machines. By keeping things simple, I was able to do exactly the same thing today that I did three years ago.

Choose Good Settings

…for your software. You don’t want to have to do this again, do you? And don’t go cheap on the bit rate, if you have the space.

In addition, you will probably want to decide between the convenience of a universal format versus the power of a proprietary or niche format. In my example, I opted to use MP3 for all of my music instead of some of the other, more powerful, formats available. I was stung once by the switch from PC to Mac where the handful of CDs that I had ripped to .wmf files were no longer usable.

If you are ripping everything to some killer lossless format, be sure you are looking far down the road and considering compatibility issues.

Back it up!

Make sure your backup process is ready for the increased load. If your backups consist of burning DVDs (or worse, CDs) of your data, you will very quickly tire of this, and you may just abandon one of the most important parts of your work flow. Oh, and remember, if there aren’t two copies in separate places, it isn’t a backup.

A couple of months ago I bought two of those nice pocket-size portable hard drives, and I always leave one at the office and I swap them once per week. This works for me: they are 320GB hard drives, providing plenty of room for all of my thousands of scanned documents, tens of thousands of photographs, and many thousands of MP3s, with plenty of elbow room.

When ripping a CD collection, the data risk is lower since you still retain the original CDs, but it still is a lot of work to rip them all. Don’t overlook the backup, or you will cry when the hard drive crashes.

Know Where You Have Been

Come up with a simple “bread crumb” mechanism to know where you have already been. You want to be able to quickly identify the music CDs you already ripped, without having to bring up iTunes every time. Keep the three year horizon in mind, so you choose a technique that will not be mysterious to you after some time passes (Hmmmm…. did I dog ear the corner of the CD insert to mark it? Where did I put that notebook where I wrote them down?)

I chose simplicity: I have one of those nice metallic Sharpie markers, the silvery kind. I put a small dot on the hub of each CD after I ripped it, just above the center hole. This way, several years from now, I should easily be able to spot the CDs that haven’t been introduced to my digital library.

I do this with photographs as well. As I scan them, I put a small marker dot on the back of each photograph, in the corner.

Finally, Enjoy Your Music!

I am quite capable of getting all wrapped up in the process for the sake of the process. Don’t forget to actually listen to the music you ripped!

How can you keep your data from being held hostage?

Have you ever stopped to consider exactly how much information is permanently stored within your favorite applications, locked down to all but the most determined command-line commando?

Perhaps the easiest way to explain what I’m getting at is by way of an example…

My Wife’s Email

Some months back, my wife was moving from a PC to a Mac, and all that remained was to configure her email. She had been using Eudora on the PC for many years and had several thousand emails in her mail folders. It went without saying that there would be dire consequences if I were to lose a single scrap of her electronic correspondence.

My first thought was to simply install Eudora on the Mac and then copy the database from one to the other. But there was bad news waiting for me in Eudoraland… The product is discontinued and no longer supported. They haven’t released a version since 2006, and you can’t even buy a license to turn off the ads anymore.

Eventually, after quite some time in Google, I found that one could simply point Eudora to a Gmail IMAP account, then drag all of the messages from the local folders to the IMAP folders.

Unbelievably, it worked exactly as advertised. I dragged thousands of messages to her Gmail folders and the machine bogged down for a whole day as it uploaded everything to Gmail.

Garbled Messages

Once I finished the job, I inspected the moved messages. Much to my horror, many of them were displayed in XML format, with embedded HTML tags all over the place. A few experiments verified that this was not an error on my part. The same message would show up garbled in the Gmail web interface, the Apple Mail client, but would still appear cleanly in Eudora, served from Gmail.

The message above, shown in Apple Mail as XML, was rendered properly in a fresh install of Eudora on a clean PC:

Clearly, Eudora had mixed in some special sauce of its own when it stored all of those files on Gmail’s IMAP server!

In the end, we accepted the situation: from that point forward she was golden, using Apple Mail and Gmail. If she ever needs an old message, we can fire up Eudora on an old machine and view the message.

What’s the point?

Many applications that we use in our paperless workflows and lives have sinister tendrils working their way throughout your data, slowly adding value to your life by their secret internal data that they will never relinquish. You may never notice just how dependent you are on their “secret sauce” until you are forced to change applications.

Tagging

One of the most harmless appearing kinds of secret data comes in the form of tagging. Just exactly where do you think those tags in your iPhoto or Picasa library are going? If you wanted to switch from one of those fine products to the other, how would you get thousands and thousands of tags saying “Rome, 1998″ and “Joey’s Graduation” moved over?

The problem is that these applications keep their tag information in a separate database from the actual images. Many similar applications suffer from the same problem: if you tag documents in a product such as DEVONthink, your tags are stored separately from your files.

There are standardized ways of embedding certain kinds of tags in many multimedia files, such as the ID3 tags for MP3 files and metadata tags in PDF documents, but often applications do not modify these in an effort to avoid touching your original.

And the day you want to leave them, they will hold your tags hostage!

Mysterious Black Boxes

I blame iTunes for the plethora of black box applications that encourage you to feed them multimedia files, which they promise they will squirrel away in a perfectly sensible and secure location.

When you drop a bunch of MP3 files on iTunes, they get shuttled into the relatively orderly iTunes library. When you drop a set of photos on iPhoto, they go into a pretty odd arrangement of folders that are created based on dates and source folder names. Sometimes iPhoto pays attention to the file timestamp; other times it uses the EXIF data within the picture.

DEVONthink does similar magic with PDF documents; they tell you to dump stuff in there and let DEVONthink’s smarts sort it all out for you.

This file organization is a different kind of “secret sauce” that you would lose if you were to switch horses.

An Unhappy iTunes Story

I smiled when I read this silly little anecdote:

“Eddie finally came in with his portable disk and uploaded his 85GB collection of MP3 files into her computer. Okay, it might be illegal, but who cares – everybody’s doing it. Eddie looked at her importing the MP3 files into iTunes, Angie’s favourite player, and suggested that she switch to Winamp, which is just a way cooler piece of software. Angie wasn’t sure. Eddie explained that he had all those carefully crafted playlists for Winamp, mixing the files he just gave to Angie into really spacey all-night sessions, and Angie should really try it out.

Angie did install Winamp with Eddie and has opened it a few times since then. She still doesn’t know … well, in fact she does. That software just doesn’t feel right to her. What’s worse, Angie has spent years in rating her song files with iTunes, and quite rarely hears any bad pieces anymore. But if she goes for Winamp, all those ratings seem to be lost.

Wouldn’t you know it, just after installing Winamp it started – most embarrassingly – playing her forgotten Backstreet Boys disks. Eddie said nothing but did raise his eyebrows disapprovingly. Well, now those files are gone, but shouldn’t there be a way to export ratings from iTunes to Winamp?

After a few days of fiddling with Winamp, Angie gives up. She will stick with iTunes. She’s got so much content already in that library that she could not be bothered to switch. Maybe Eddie could get an iTunes converter for his precious playlists?” 

— Lehikoinen, Juha, Antti Aaltonen, Pertti Huuskonen, and Ilkka Salminen. “Chapter 4 – Metadata Magic”. Personal Content Experience: Managing Digital Life in the Mobile Age. John Wiley & Sons. © 2007.

What can you do about it?

Not much. Software companies have a financial incentive to make it easy to import data, but there is not much incentive to make it easy to export data. If your chosen product was very popular, as Eudora was, then there is a pretty good chance that a future product will be able to import your metadata.

Keep this in mind as you handle your files.

• If you can put keywords in the files themselves via EXIF or ID3 or similar tags, do so. Once they are there, they won’t be lost.
• Make the file names meaningful. It’s the lowest common denominator, and may be all you have at times.
• Make sure your files are searchable where possible.
• Try not to relinquish control over the folder structure. If possible, use a good folder structure that captures events and related documents.

This is a very deep topic, which is treated with respect in business and industry—many people specialize in managing data migrations from the old to the new. In addition, the diversity of metadata out there is startling; there are loads of products and standards for every industry out there.

At the end of the day, we face the very same problem that they do, with our humble email application.

I never thought that Eudora would go out of business, did you?

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 topics such as video, music, and photography. She provides clear guidelines for prioritizing your efforts and crisp checklists.

In addition, this up-to-date book (January 2009) provides a good source of information about the leading software products available, with advice on features to look for. For example, while discussing photo management software, she mentioned the advantage of being able to select a large group of photographs and batch-rename them to something like “Egypt 001.jpg” through “Egypt 100.jpg”

The book gets geeky enough to whet the palate, without going too far. Topics such as EXIF data and nitty gritty settings for scanning photos are covered in depth.

Here’s the book on Amazon

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.