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

As you may know, I hate having clutter on my desk. That was the point of the Monitor/TV Shelf I wrote about in an earlier post. But boxy stuff isn’t the only thing that I want off my desk. I want paper off it too.

Now, while I’ll in the infant stages of going paperless (more on this soon), I still have papers sitting around in piles on my desk waiting for me to do something with them. Bills, post-it notes, receipts, dentist appointment reminders, etc. I have a little desktop organizer thing that let’s me at least pile stuff in there, but again…that’s sitting on my desk and is still pretty much an unorganized pile of stuff. Stuff that I’ll probably forget about.

Go into any restaurant with a short-order cook, and you’ll probably see a metal wheel on which the wait staff place orders. When the cook is ready, it spins the wheel around to the next order, removes the order ticket, whips up a nice plate of hash and eggs, and spins the wheel again. It seems pretty efficient, and it keeps the order tickets off the counter.

That might be useful on a desk. But it would be a little weird to hang one of those from your ceiling. But what if you could integrate a somewhat smaller version on a desk lamp? Do it up nicely in brushed aluminum and a thick, heavy slab base and it might actually be nice to look at.