I have tons of old photos that I am always in the process of scanning in. Some are pictures from childhood, others are from my time in the Navy, and still others are from family life before digital photography (somewhere around the end of 2000 I bought my first digital camera, a Canon G1). I [...]

Most of the time I don’t really bother with the timestamp information that my camera embeds in each digital photo. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I checked to see if the clock was right. Scanned photographs are an entirely different brew. They typically represent events from the distant past, and scanner software [...]

Show me a musician and I’ll show you someone who has at least a three foot stack of sheet music squirreled away somewhere. 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 [...]

Jim Robinson over at Money Talks News has put together a nice article giving five basic steps for getting a jump start on your paperless life. 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 [...]

Some time back I published an AppleScript that allows one to automatically run OCR in the background on scanned files generated by your Fujitsu ScanSnap, while you to continue scanning more files. ScanSnap owners should all be familiar with this: the out-of-the-box configuration of the ScanSnap Manager and Abbyy Finereader force the scan and OCR [...]

This evening I opened my email and found a most welcome message: Fujitsu has released their patched version of the ScanSnap software for Snow Leopard. [UPDATE: I spoke too soon—they only delivered half of the goods. See below.] [UPDATE 2: Hurray! It's fixed! The birds are chirping and the sun is shining and life is [...]

Like most people who are trying to archive reams of paper, the one reliable tool I always turn to is Adobe Portable Document Format. I trust my digital life to PDF. Almost everything I scan and most documents I write eventually end up squirreled away somewhere as PDF documents. Have you ever considered just how [...]

Some months back I wrote an article on using scripting languages to glue workflows together. My inspiration for that article was a bit of AppleScript that I had suffered over in order to smooth over a minor annoyance of my scan-to-OCR workflow. I had promised that once I cleaned up the embarrassing bits of code [...]

Anyone who is packing serious scanning hardware should also be packing serious shredding hardware. It may not matter if another Capital One offer slips into the trash intact, but there’s no way I’m going to dispose of old tax records or medical records without rendering them completely useless to the enemy.

Here is my own short list of things to look for when you are buying a new shredder.

“How a lifestyle experiment and a disaster made me realize the value of turning atoms into bits” — Mike Elgin A couple of months back, Mike Elgin of Computerworld posted an article on his foray into the paperless world: Paperless office? Ha! How about a paperless life? In this followup article, he considers how lifestyle changes and [...]