iPad Baby!

Well, looks like the digital device question has been solved.  I got the iPad. :-D I've already installed Evernote and I'm looking in to what other applications may be useful for my paperless office dreams to be made into a reality. 

One piece of equipment I still need to look at though is the scanner.  Simplex just isn't going to cut it.

Digital Artwork

So it's been a few weeks since my last post, had a great Christmas break though!  But I think it's time to get back to my little project.  One of the things that people generally talk about when going paperless is how to handle family pictures and other artwork.  Of course, while this isn't entirely within the scoe of my project, which is more about digitally managing my bills, bank statements, and other general monthly papers, but it did make me think about the idea of digital art.

So if you're committed to going paperless for a different reason, i.e. saving the planet, you'll also want to figure out how to display your artwork on your walls. Enter the digital display.  So what are the alternatives here, really?  Well it seems that there are several.  You have your usual digital picture frame, which is great for displaying family pictures, vaction photos, and other personal type of items.  But how do you display larger art?

There are several options for this, actually, though they are far from expensive.  One way is to build your own digital frame out of an old laptop or LCD display.One intriguing idea, in my opinion, is the Arduino DPF. http://hacknmod.com/hack/cheap-n-easy-digital-picture-frame/. You start with an Arduino, bascially an "open source" circuit board, hook it up to an LCD or old TV, program it, and load your picutres. How cool is that?

Here are some more links to this cool idea:

http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1266594567
http://www.instructables.com/id/Cheap--n-Easy-Digital-Picture-Frame/
http://hackaday.com/2009/09/29/touchscreen-picture-frame/
http://www.circuitidea.com/Article/DIY-photo-frame-with-BL-TFT240320PLUS.html
Arduino Duemilanove

Once I finish the actualy back scanning, I may just have to build one of these fun toys!

Evernote Review

Part of my endevour to go 100% paperless in my home office includes ridding myself of notepads and spiral notebooks.  I order to do this, I need to come up with a new way of quickly jotting down information for later retrieval.  There are lots of "virtual notebook" applications: Notateit, Notebook 1.0, MS OneNote and they're great, specifically OneNote.  I've gotten very used to moving around in this over the last several years.  But the software I've decided to really beat the crap out of on a day-to-day basis is Evernote.

Why Evernote, especially over OneNote, which I'm already intimately familiar with?  One word... integration.  Evernote isn't just a standalone application residing on my computer like OneNote.  Nor is it an "Internet accessible only" application like Yahoo Notes or Google Docs.  No, I can run EverNote on any system I have at any time with or without an Internet connection.

EverNote is also available on almost every single platform out there right now: PC, Mac, iPhone/iPod, Android, Palm, Blackberry, whatever.  It also has a really large selection of add-ons that allow me to do just about anything I can think of with regards to note taking.  I send audio files, pictures, emails, scans, PDF's, and tons of other formats, allowing me to really use EverNote as my personal brain dump area.

It's also completely searchable.  I can create more detailed indexes, or I can just have EverNote look for specific words inside my various notebooks.

The application and basic services are FREE!  You can download it right now and not pay a single dime for it.  Of course they also have a premium version for "power users" and it's only $45 a year.  $45, really?  That's pretty darn cheap when you consider what this system gives you.  So if you've never seen or heard of EverNote, go check them out at http://www.evernote.com/, you'll be glad you did!

PaperlessGeek.Com

OK.  So I just registered the domain the very catchy "paperlessgeek.com" domain. The blog should be available via this address in the next day or so.

Another (Cheaper) Tablet Option

OK, so I've had amazing amount of feedback on my e-reader and tablets post (not really, but thanks for looking, Chirs, my only subscriber right now!) and I think there are some other alternatives out there.  Enter the Velocity Cruz ereader/tablet.

I found this little beauty on sale at Best Buy this weekend for a ridiculously low $120.  That beats the snot of of the iPad on price.  It doesn't have a ton of storage, only 4GB, but with an SD card slot, I can add storage as I need it.  It also has 802.11 b/g WiFi, and up to 10 hours of battery usage time. Plus, it's running Android, so I can get all kind of custom apps for it.  It's not an iPad, but it's good starting device, I think, and with the built in ereader capabilites, and that fact that I can get Kindle and Nook for Android, it may be a pretty good little tool.

The nice thing is, since it's a tablet device, once I do get an iPad, I can give it to my son who'll probably turn it into some kind of brain for some robot he's designing... either that or he'll watch YouTube on it.



Real World Archiving - Day One Results

OK.  So I spent a good couple of hours working on Saturday and I ran into a few issues.

1. Scanner placement - It seems like a simple thing, I can set the scanner right behind me and just roll back and drop the papers in.  The issue is you end up having to do this mutliple times during the entire scanning process.  So I will be moving the scanner onto the desk, right in front of me, making it easier to drop the papers onto the feeder and scan.
2. What to scan - Initially I thought I'd like to scan several different kinds of documents.  Now I'm thinking that I'm going to narrow the scope down a bit more.  I really only care about financial records, contracts, and government documents.  I may keep a few hand-written notes around, for good measure, and probably some of my son's drawings that he gives me, but pretty much everything else needs to go away.  I don't need temporary documents like letters, or print outs of PDF's and word documents, so into the shredder those will go.
3. Document sorting - See this is why we got into this mess in the first place.  Of all the documents I have, some are sorted, but most are not.  This is by far the MOST time consuming part of the whole project.  I spent a good 90 minutes sorting bank statements going back to 2006. 
4. Scanner - The scanner I have is doing an OK job for now, but a duplex scanner with the simple "Scan" button would make things run MUCH more efficiently.
5. Shred Box and Recycle Box - As I stated, I'm not some evironmental, tree-hugging, whacko.  That's not my purpose for doing this project.  But, since I am going through the exercise, I might as well go ahead and sort things accordingly.  So I created a "Shred Box" and a "Recycle Box".  The Shred Box contains documents that I want to shred, obviously. The Recycle Box is really just a paper trash box, things that I know I'm going to throw out, but don't need to go all the trouble of shredding.

After all was said and done, I got through 2007 on the bank statements.  So almost 2 hours and only about 16 bank statements, front and back.  But once I got through opening envelopes, and sorting everything in detail, it really went pretty quickly. 

Real-World Archiving - Day One

OK, so I've done a few tests and archived a 1/2 dozen documents or so thus far and things seem to be pretty managable.  So today, I'm going to spend an hour or so going through my stacks of papers and do some real-world archiving.

The stacks:

So I've kind of already done some weeding through my stacks of the last 10 years or so and, from what I can tell, this is pretty much what's left.  It doesn't look like a lot, but I would estimate that it's probably a good 100 pounds of paper.  At approximately 100 sheets per pound, according to Answerbag.Com and unusually complex mathmatical equations), so this means that I have probably around 10,000 sheets of paper!  Let's hope I'm WAY off on my weight estimates, otherwise it could take me weeks to get through it all.

Now, on to my setup. I have my computer, of course, and I have a Visioneer 9450 USB scanner with an Automatic Document Feeder (ADF).  The Visioneer comes with software that makes it pretty easy to one-touch scan to PDF, which should make the process go pretty quickly.  I also have the option of doing OCR (Optical Character Recognition) scans, but I think I'll forgo that and just develop a consistent naming convention for my files.  I've decided against doing any sort of "document management system", because A)The good ones typically cost a lot of money, and B) I think this can be done with just a scanner, PDF documents, a standard naming convention, and a well structured Windows file system.

So here's my initial plan for scanning.

1) - Start by sorting the papers into logical groups that match my folder structure in Windows.
2) Next, sort the papers themselves into some kind of order, most likely chronological, making things go much more smoothly when the actual scanning starts.
3) Scan the pages.  (Note: Unfortunately, the 9450 is a simplex scanner, meaning it can only scan one side at a time, in order to scan two sided documents, I'd need a duplex scanner.  Of course duplex scanners are considerable more expensive and, since this is really a "home" project, I think I can magage just running the scans through twice and then combine the documents in Adobe Acrobat.  This adds a couple of extras steps, and they'll be out of order - 1,3,5,7,2,4,6,8 - but I think I can live with that.)
4) Create fire-starting and packaging material!  Once the documents are scanned, I'll be cramming through a shredder (yet to purchase, by the way), producing a beautiful pile of little bits of paper that I'll never have to mess with again. :-D