the paperless blog

[acronyms used in the context of meshtastic]

Recently, I noticed most of my online shopping turns into just verifying I do not need the stuff I was interested in. Vendors' offers are built to their interests and not mine ...

It is a shopping experience, though; kind of. Let's call it anti-shopping.

Other than that, I found a clothing company called Asphalte. Good quality.

Talking basics this time. The more I am in the outdoors, the more I know the #1 necessity, and it’s not a diet coke. You need water. Now one might think you have a GPS track, you have a map, then water sources should be on it. No, not so.

Then you think about apps that help you with finding stuff that is in your vicinity, like AroundYou, maybe Google. No water. Places where they sell diet coke, yes.

Now who helps you find something that is free, provided by the community or directly by nature? Must be a community project, right? Open Street Map does it for you, and there is an App for it:

“Find Water” on Android shows you the nearest public source of drinkable water, taken from OSM data.

Want to contribute to OSM? Enter a spring or tap you know? You can: Take “OSMapTuner” on Android. Boy, this was hard to find. Fun fact: it’s from SalzburgResearch.

There are other Apps and initiatives (e.g. WeTap, which has an informative website), but most seem to be dead, don’t answer emails and/or took their apps form the markets. So please: contribute to the worldwide database of water, become an OSM Mapper! No sugary drinks from vending machines!

We can all see what happens when you put the computer in the hands of Mr. and Mrs. Everyman. Trying to deceive us, it was called a phone. Go to any public space and you will see most people using their elegant, expressive, elaborate and highly capable mechanical tool – their hand – just for holding a computer in front of their eyes. This is dumb.

As times are getting better day by day: Soon we will begin seeing computers mounted to the wrists of people. In masses. They now call them watches. The naming maybe wrong but the positioning is much better now.
Update: maybe next time they will call it a dental crown.

I was in Adrasan on a backpacking trip – don’t care where in the world that is. Going south, the last paved road stops after a kilometer. Going on another 10 kilometers through the wilderness would bring you to the lighthouse.

The restaurant had WLan, and I could load a book written by Epicur, a greek philosopher onto my kindle.

Now combine that with the new kindle flat rate and you have the biggest library of the earth available wherever you are. No more asking yourself: will they deliver the parcel to China as well?

Leaving the big cities becomes a lot more attractive this way.

Without any fanfare Apple has introduced something called the “Document Picker” into iOS 8. This allows apps to access certain files of other apps – when they allow it. It is so new that Apple’s own apps do not yet use it, neither Pages nor Numbers. Now an app that provides file access to, say the PC file system can be used by another app for opening and saving files.

This will allow us to interact with our NAS (network attached store) and our ownCloud devices just as smoothly as we were able to work with DropBox up to now.

A big step into privacy.

And the next step is having an app that accesses a *strongly encrypted* storage device we have at home using end-to-end encryption. This is taking security into our own hands.

A fringe use case for paper evolves now that Big Brother went public, that is when you want privacy:

WRITE IT WITH A PEN ON PAPER!

That’s the only way to avoid being readable by … them. And take notice: like the lightbulb, paper might become a forbidden item, so use it for good reasons!

nuff said

Oh, by the way, we will write on the insides of plastic bags when paper is not allowed any more. They will never forbid plastic bags.

I have not written much recently, but put my new scanner to use instead. So let me give you some thoughts about what might be called a mid-speed scanner, the Canon DR 2010C: In a half year I have scanned 30000 sheets of paper (this thing has a counter built in), almost 60000 pages that went from my bookshelf into my file system (and into paper recycling). Approximately 200 books that I have once read (or not), used as a reference, study material etc.

This small scanner eats up to 40 pages a minute, and what this means is: the thing is as fast as you are with preparing the matter! Diagnosis: A faster scanner would not help much.

Scanning many books is obviously a pile of work, cutting the material and feeding it into the machine. What is not so obvious is the psychic part of it. For each book I remembered its importance to me, if it was a failure to buy it or it meant a lot to me, the time in my life when I bought and used it, circumstances, people, relationships and so on. There are still some books I could not destroy, some took me considerable time to get over with, so: This is a journey into the past, and if you should do it, I really really wish you good luck!

When I scan one of my books, I do this in a destructive way, first cutting the book into its pages, and in the end throwing away the paper. So attorneys take note: I am not copying, I am transforming what I already paid for.

What I do keep is the front pages, thereby filling up a cardboard box.

I think this is fair use.

Over the years, doing my work in between a software house and their customers, I have seen loads of bugs coming my way (from the software house); and obviously, the customer better not notice them. Some extra work for the systems integrator before delivery, then …

And with almost inevitable regularity I get to hear: “Isn’t it great that our software has so many bugs, so you can earn a lot of money making it finally run at the customer site?” I got it from ERP vendors, in CRM and in DMS (just to avoid any bias here …)

To which I can only say: “There will be software houses that design their wares better, and have a no-bugs policy in place. And they will blow you out of the market” – and guess who will do the data migration from the old system to the better one?

There has been a lot of talk about the trend towards the paperless office and I have seen it.

Positively.

It happens when you have to carry it. Becomes a personal affair real fast. It’s your brain saving your spine. Consultants who hop into airplanes every monday morning, who have office space – on demand – in all the major cities of the world; they have really eliminated paper from their professional life.

I have been one of them.

There have been many occasions when I took a sheet out of a customer’s laser printer, properly apologizing while I was doing it. I do admit paper is sometimes the best medium to work with. A sheet or two, but that’s about it. None of our team would bring paper to a customer, no reference manuals, no calender, no blank paper. Then carry back the airplane ticket, the timesheet signed by the customer, and maybe a page with graphics that could not be made into Visio fast enough.

way to go.

way back when we started, our world looked like this:

cartoon (C) Stefan Pertl, Vienna

25 years ago we worked together in a group that developed scanners. I have always been the software guy, while my colleague was and is a physicist, and a very universal one at that. Turns out Dr. B. has collected all the scientific papers and journals since he studied and at some point decided to make them into electronic material, maybe because the growing family needed the extra room.

Using a Canon DR-2010C he produced 1TB of scanned data, among it 30 years of 2 journals, and 20 years of 3 other ones, 60 thick ring binders, not counting the smaller batches of various other document types.

He is feeding the scanner in the evenings, and has the OCR done later during the nights.

Turns out this is his highly personalized lifelong collection of scientific knowledge, historically sorted and networked to his work experiences. We are looking at precisely the subject matters of one scientist here, now … how would your very own fulltext-searchable knowledge collection look like?

Several of my blog entries will start with the thought (and the sentence) “though industry may not like it”, so here goes …

Though industry may not like it, eBooks need not cost money. And there is no need to steal them, either. Just take what you have already paid for and make them yourself, was my motto. And the scanner does it …

My scanner-produced eBooks fall in 2 categories: Those I simply wanted to destroy, like my old school books and all the books I once bought and found below-the-mark or should I call them “underly necessary”. Those basically go into my backup system. The other group is material for reading later, and it makes its way to the iPad, where my very private library grows faster and bigger than I had imagined.

As a consequence, my physical bookshelf gets freed up, but what is an even more desirable effect is that my old books are now much closer to me, in many cases they were in the second row in my bookshelf for years, thereby practically lost. Now I have them with me all the time.

And there is another difference to new-bought eBooks: this is all proven material and tailored exactly to my interests. This is my very own intellectual history, now ready for full-text search and reference or rereading wherever I travel.

Scan a hundred books and change your life.

One might call it perimeter control or similar, what is missing in our toolbox is the ultimate paper destroyer: the shredder. Mine is category 3, i.e. it not only makes stripes, but short 3 * 20 mm pieces of paper. It is my third one. Yes, they die. They are physical in a destructive way, and paper finally kills them. Well, maybe the staples play a role, too …

A shredder with an extra slot for simply throwing in paper is great, so it can do double duty as an ordinary paper bin. No need to shred everything, but start with everything that has your name on it. For anyone trying to spy on you, this will effectively disconnect your person from your interests. Then do the same for all your customer data.

Shredders have different sound levels, and here price plays a role; when the construction is sturdier, they need not be as loud as the cheaper models.

So – don’t feed the spying parties, feed the shredder! And have fun!

One of the most under-documented parts of Acrobat is the scan part that is built in. Now I own a copy of Acrobat Pro because part of my profession is electronic forms, and Adobe is very good at that. So here is my Acrobat that can connect to TWAIN and WIA scanners. It does
– double-sided scanning with scanners that scan only on one side
– OCR automatically
– despeckle and do other image “optimizations”
– create PDFs
It does not
– recognize patch codes or barcodes
And it is not particularly good when there is a feeding error; it gives you one more chance to correct, then jumps out of any batch scanning; so I do batches of 50 pages and I restart the batch when anything goes wrong.

Simply said, after I got Acrobat, I stopped searching for another scan software.

Whenever a piece of paper has made it beyond the wastebasket, when you hold it in your hand, you can decide whether it is part of work-in-progress or it is archive “matter”. We will talk about the matter part of the archive soon, but for now we can take a look at the great divide: what is WIP should be stored close to your workstation, what is archive can be physically farther away.

My complete WIP is at arms’ length, reachable from a sitting position, all paper upright and waiting in a box of suspension files that is just 16 cm deep. In my very personal case, the labels are:

– open invoices (cash to come)
– invoices that go into project budgets
– saturday work
– monthly close (to accountant)
– work day
– 2011 (for yearly tax)
– 2012
– ideas
– sheet music
– Mensa

My paper archive, on the other hand is just one Alzheimer away, uhm, that was the last thing I remembered … I’ll come back to that later …

We do not have a nice word for it, so let us call a printer-plus-fax-plus-copier-plus-scanner a “MUF”, short for multifunction device. You might well have one at home. You might well have thought about the cost of printing when you bought it, then you either took an inkjet or a laser or a color laser depending on your usage. And chances are good you did not consider scanner speed an issue or you would not have imagined what to do with the paper feeder that sits on top of it.

Maybe you are not aware of it, but these cheap little jewels can handle double-sided paper when controlled by the right software.

Mine is a Samsung SCX 4521-11 and I am using it as my low-volume printer with a tendency towards ultra-low-volume (though printing an invoice is always a joyful moment, isn’t it?); then sometimes my wifie does a little copying on it; but mostly, this is my scanner. The manufacturers and their sales troops may not like it, and there are several articles arguing against it, but it works great and for the 20.000 pages I did up to now, it cannot be beat in price/performance.

It was not built to act as your scanner: now what does that mean? Would you think it lasts shorter because of that or would you think it lasts longer because defects were not designed in? Fact is, for home and SOHO use, it is a great tool that – instead of producing paper – can be used to reduce the amount of paper you handle.

What is done at the workplace can be very reasonable at home as well: get rid of the paper in your life.

When I got my education, books were a sign of being a thinker, the more you own, the more you have digested. The way to show your style was to have a big collection of books at home. And boy, I do own some! As a consequence, your apartment better grows by the years or ….

or you destroy your collection the way I do:
I use two machines that many already own and use, a multifunction device (a printer and a scanner in a combined housing, which works as a copier or fax machine as well) and a tablet computer. Add a plate shear and you are ready to go.

I scan the front page of the book in color, 600 dpi. Then I rip off the front page and cut the book into pages. These pages can go into the feeder of my MUF device, black-and-white landscape, which goes in faster, at 600 dpi. This may sound unconventional, but it it produces just twice the data of 300 dpi, and people with retina displays will kiss my feet in the not-so-distant future for that.

On my iPad, I can read my old books very nicely. About 10 seconds after the scanning is done.

It is like helping the souls of my old books get out of their rotting bodies and be preserved, whereas the paper will go into recycling.