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 [...]

I can’t help it. As soon as I hear of a new version of anything, whether it’s an application or the entire operating system, I have to install it. Now prudence would lead one to take careful steps and wait until all of the wrinkles are ironed out before starting. I was almost not prudent [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Whether you are a cube dweller sharing an electronic document with your next door neighbor or a homeowner attempting to catalogue your digital life, you will soon encounter resistance in the form of document incompatibility. What good is a byte-for-byte perfect duplicate of the original if you cannot open it in an application? My own [...]

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 [...]

Anyone who has kids in their home worries about how easy it is to access the seamier side of the Internet, even if by accident. Indeed, it is thrust upon us in our email in-boxes daily in the form of misspelled spam with links that only a fool would click. Another issue altogether is the [...]

This afternoon was kind of lazy and rainy, and I found myself sifting through stacks of CD cases again, full of enthusiasm as I discovered some lost Rolling Stones and David Bowie albums, imagining how few discs remained before I could declare victory. But then I stumbled across a huge cache of classical music discs [...]

Do you ever send documents to other people that might have … sensitive information embedded in them? Not everyone who works with documents in the home will run into this problem, but sooner or later you are probably going to find yourself in a situation where you would like to email someone a useful document [...]

  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…