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 [...]

It so happens that my employer has made a most welcome decision to replace the aging creaky old Novell GroupWise mail software with Microsoft Outlook, joining the rest of the modern corporate world. Now, there is little love in my heart for GroupWise, but it does have one feature that the new Outlook configuration will [...]

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 [...]

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 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 [...]

The basic tool required to bridge the gap between the carbon-intensive paper document present and the greener electronic document future was invented in 1993 as a way to streamline communications between publishers and printers. Today, the humble PDF file is the file format of choice for “final” electronic documents. Properly created and deployed, PDF alone [...]

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.

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 [...]