The Brian Manley

As part of my lifelogging initiatives, I’ve decided to start going paperless. Not that I have anything against paper. But it’s the 21st century. Reading characters on dead tree pulp just doesn’t seem logical to me any longer. Not to mention the utility of carrying around your entire library of books, magazines, etc. with you wherever you go. That ain’t happenin’ with paper.

The first paper I’ll cut (ha! made a pun there, see?): books

Yes, I have an e-book reader. Specifically, a Kindle 2. And I really like it. And I really hate it. I like the portability and the display. I hate the lack of speed, crappy search and horrible annotation functions. Not to mention the DRM. Also, some books just don’t translate to the Kindle very well…magazines, comics, art books and other graphically rich publications just don’t work well on the current crop of e-readers.

Earlier this week, I decided I would try converting some pulp to bits. Happily, it turned out pretty well…

The first thing I needed was a good document scanner. It need to support various page sizes, work on a Mac, be simple and above all be fast. The Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500M is the scanner I chose. It was about $400 at Amazon.

With the scanner acquired, the next task was to get the pages in a condition in which the scanner could slurp them up. In other words, I had to rip the pages out and destroy the book. Oh well. Progress hurts sometimes.

The Victim

Armed with a $0.13 razor blade from Safeway and a ruler, I began to carefully extract pages like a surgeon performing a vasectomy; very slowly, very carefully. After about 10 minutes of that, I got fed up and started slashing, ripping and tearing; like a glue-sniffing surgeon performing a vasectomy. Anyway, after about 15 minutes, the deed was done and the pages where free from their bondage. (again with the puns! stop it!)

Easy does it...

There, that didn't hurt, did it?

Once the pages where out, I could feed them into the scanner. I loaded about 50 pages at a time, and the little scanner that could tore through them at about 2 seconds a page, duplex.
After 15 minutes of scanner action, I had a 400 page PDF that now resides on my disk. The remains of the book, incidentally, reside in the bottom of Buddy the Hampster’s cage.

Beyond the Desktop Metaphor.pdf

The project took about an hour in total (including the OCR processing in Acrobat). But now I have a book that I’ll never be tempted to throw away (disk space is cheap), is always available (via DropBox), is searchable via Spotlight, and can be easily bookmarked and annotated.

Now if I could just figure out a way to extract the pages more easily. Deli slicer maybe?

The Slicer

I forget stuff. For example, I forget that this blog is here and that I should post something once in awhile. But I also forget important things; did I take my medicine? What did I eat yesterday before my headache started? How many cigarettes did I smoke today? Have I paid the mortgage this month? Who’s this person in this picture? What did I accomplish at work this week? You get the idea…

Buckminster Fuller (of geodesic dome fame) didn’t seem to have this problem. He simply wrote down or filed away everything into a giant compendium of his life which he called the Dymaxion Chronofile. “Dymaxion”, because he seemed to give everything that name. And “Chronofile”, because the files were created and kept in chronological order. Get it?  Anyway, every fifteen minutes Bucky would note in a journal what he was doing or feeling or did or was about to do. His was probably the most documented life ever lived. If stacked, the pages would be 270 feet tall.

Vannevar Bush proposed a machine, the “memex”, so solve this sort of problem for people like me (and you). Writing for the Atlantic in 1945, his article “As We May Think” proposed a wonder-desk that would store, catalog, classify and retrieve all the information that we generated or acquired as part of our day to day lives. This would be done “simply by the clever use of relay circuits”. Uh, right. Not in 1945 you ain’t.

Gordon Bell (of VAX fame) at Microsoft Research picked up on these ideas several years ago and decided to take a stab at documenting his life also. Box by box, he began scanning documents and photos, creating complicated directory structures and file naming conventions, recording phone calls, every email, means, biometric information, location information, etc. This “lifelogging” project and the resulting software tools were dubbed MyLifeBits, and is the subject of his book “Total Recall”. Oddly, he seems to have omitted any mention of Buckminster Fuller, but does tip his hat to Bush several times.

Total Recall is a fine book, if a bit light on the implementation details. Bell spends most of his time creating use cases and then demonstrating how situations can be improved when an “e-memory” is available to assist us. His scenarios include the typical office worker, health care, education, memorials, etc. Bell also considers the negative ramifications of storing everything. Obviously, if you store it, you can loose it or someone can steal it. Certainly privacy and security are issues when dealing with e-memory systems. We should probably spend some time figuring out the legal framework that will protect (or not) your life’s data. But I guess we’ll cross that road when we get to it. If you’re interested in this kind of thing, you might check out Robin Williams in “The Final Cut”, where all sorts of thorny issues surrounding e-memories are explored.

So while I’m convinced that storing everything is generally a good idea for us, society and future generations, I’m stuck on the implementation. When so much of our information is scattered among dozens of applications, devices and web sites, how could it be tracked, cataloged, annotated, archived and searched? A giant bucked of data in the cloud to which all your stuff is dumped? Distributed data stores that are crawled by software agents to gather information and synchronize it? Some hybrid approach?

This is fun stuff to day dream about. And I’m tempted to actually do some development of small tools to help bootstrap my own e-memories. What about you? If you could save everything, would you? Why, or why not? I’d love to hear your thoughts…