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 four on [...]

One of my pet peeves in software is the black-box application that calmly sucks in all of your files and does everything for you, until the day you want to swich apps. This is the iTunes model, followed by many other products.
I am of the opinion that rather than allowing an application to shuffle your [...]

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 [...]

A couple of weeks ago, a co-worker sent me a PDF document to look at. He said that he was having trouble copying and pasting from the document and was scratching his head about why this particular PDF would have such issues.
As it would turn out, there were several thousand other documents on a file [...]

In my evenings, I sometimes find myself performing the role of “Resident Geek” at my nephew’s school, tending to network issues, computer problems, and my favorite, “The Internet is down!”
Over the past couple of years I have considered several different approaches for keeping a grip on which computers had which service patch, which router 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 portable those [...]

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 I [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

“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 the raging [...]