5 ms·

Problem with using physical media - STORAGE. Trust me, I have literally 1000's of pieces of paper lying around here with ideas, sketches, the works, built up o

by brador 15y ago

Problem with using physical media - STORAGE. Trust me, I have literally 1000's of pieces of paper lying around here with ideas, sketches, the works, built up over 15 years. I'm never going to scan any of it. Get a tablet before it's too late.

xibernetik 15y ago
The problem with moving to explicitly tablets is that the feel of different papers/pens is radically different than any electronic technology can provide. There are smartpens now, but there's still a loss of texture when storing images, and displaying them on a backlit screen alters them as well. That aside, a tablet completely wrecks the point of getting away from all the distractions that come with your computer.
- befuddled 15y ago
  This is so true. I was given an iPad 2 earlier this year and I love it. Reading, surfing, planning, wireframing, does it all. But doodling? Brainstorming? There is no app in the world (yet?) that can match a pad of paper and a good, comfortable pen.
  - marcocampos 15y ago
    I use a Wacom pen especially built for the iPad screen and an app called Penultime. Works pretty well.
tomjen3 15y ago
You know you can get a scanner with a feeder right? You just have to drop the paper in the feeder and it will produce a set of pdf documents. It is more expensive than normal scanners but in your case it would properly be worth it.
- ChuckMcM 15y ago
  This is so true, I've got a Fuju Scansnap 1500 and it really really made my life easier. Drop pages in poof they come out as scanned on both sides or just one (it figures out blank pages), as a pdf, with text ocr'd off if it can recognize it so its searchable. They automatically drop into a shared folder on a filer. Paper goes in box with a date, dates > 3 yrs go to shredder.
- keithpeter 15y ago
  Or find a library or College locally with photocopiers that can scan. We have one at work, it scans A4 sheets at the same speed that it copies, software can select resolution (300dpi max), colour and PDF or TIFF/JPG. On our system it e-mails the resulting pdf to you. I've seen some with USB ports.
potatolicious 15y ago
Why do we need to archive everything? I do a lot of photography on film - maybe 5% of it ever gets scanned. I have, at this point, maybe 10,000 frames of images shot on different types of film all sitting around in binders. Most of them will never be scanned. So what? Most of them don't deserve to be scanned. Save the effort and braincycles for your good sketches/ideas/doodles/etc as opposed to trying to painstakingly archive every insignificant thing that's ever crossed your mind/pen/keyboard.
- artmageddon 15y ago
  I'm way late to this thread, but while I agree with the notion that some notes just aren't worth saving, I can't tell you how many times I've had my ass / time saved by simply being able to look up that one piece of information that I only needed maybe once every few months. "Pick up milk" isn't useful, but "create that directory" is worth a lot to someone. In my most current job going on 5 months, I'm mostly a programmer, but I've also become something of a scribe because the documentation of their current environment setup is absolutely abysmal. One time, a coworker and I had been debugging a SQL Server SSIS package that kept failing on a new machine when there should have been no reason to fail, and for quite awhile had no leads. All efforts to look through stacktraces, logs, and the event viewer lead nowhere. All we knew was that it was some Excel error from what it was telling us. What ended up being the issue was that the following folder didn't exist: C:\Windows\SysWOW64\config\systemprofile\Desktop It's an empty folder, though. We were given absolutely NO indication that this was needed from our research, until my colleague remembered it one day after THREE weeks of trying to fix this damn thing, and all we needed to do was create a damn directory. My boss's face turned white when I told him what the fix was because he recalled having this same exact error bite them in the ass before. This is the site in question that saved us now has a permanent place in our Wiki now: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/innovateonoffice/thread/b81a3c4e-62db-488b-af06-44421818ef91?prof=required http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/innovateonoffi... (and yes, we wrote down all the information from it in the chance that the link goes dead :)

by brador 15y ago

xibernetik 15y ago

The problem with moving to explicitly tablets is that the feel of different papers/pens is radically different than any electronic technology can provide. There are smartpens now, but there's still a loss of texture when storing images, and displaying them on a backlit screen alters them as well. That aside, a tablet completely wrecks the point of getting away from all the distractions that come with your computer.

befuddled 15y ago
This is so true. I was given an iPad 2 earlier this year and I love it. Reading, surfing, planning, wireframing, does it all. But doodling? Brainstorming? There is no app in the world (yet?) that can match a pad of paper and a good, comfortable pen.
- marcocampos 15y ago
  I use a Wacom pen especially built for the iPad screen and an app called Penultime. Works pretty well.

tomjen3 15y ago

You know you can get a scanner with a feeder right? You just have to drop the paper in the feeder and it will produce a set of pdf documents. It is more expensive than normal scanners but in your case it would properly be worth it.

ChuckMcM 15y ago
This is so true, I've got a Fuju Scansnap 1500 and it really really made my life easier. Drop pages in poof they come out as scanned on both sides or just one (it figures out blank pages), as a pdf, with text ocr'd off if it can recognize it so its searchable. They automatically drop into a shared folder on a filer. Paper goes in box with a date, dates > 3 yrs go to shredder.
keithpeter 15y ago
Or find a library or College locally with photocopiers that can scan. We have one at work, it scans A4 sheets at the same speed that it copies, software can select resolution (300dpi max), colour and PDF or TIFF/JPG. On our system it e-mails the resulting pdf to you. I've seen some with USB ports.

potatolicious 15y ago

Why do we need to archive everything? I do a lot of photography on film - maybe 5% of it ever gets scanned. I have, at this point, maybe 10,000 frames of images shot on different types of film all sitting around in binders. Most of them will never be scanned. So what? Most of them don't deserve to be scanned. Save the effort and braincycles for your good sketches/ideas/doodles/etc as opposed to trying to painstakingly archive every insignificant thing that's ever crossed your mind/pen/keyboard.

artmageddon 15y ago
I'm way late to this thread, but while I agree with the notion that some notes just aren't worth saving, I can't tell you how many times I've had my ass / time saved by simply being able to look up that one piece of information that I only needed maybe once every few months. "Pick up milk" isn't useful, but "create that directory" is worth a lot to someone. In my most current job going on 5 months, I'm mostly a programmer, but I've also become something of a scribe because the documentation of their current environment setup is absolutely abysmal. One time, a coworker and I had been debugging a SQL Server SSIS package that kept failing on a new machine when there should have been no reason to fail, and for quite awhile had no leads. All efforts to look through stacktraces, logs, and the event viewer lead nowhere. All we knew was that it was some Excel error from what it was telling us. What ended up being the issue was that the following folder didn't exist: C:\Windows\SysWOW64\config\systemprofile\Desktop It's an empty folder, though. We were given absolutely NO indication that this was needed from our research, until my colleague remembered it one day after THREE weeks of trying to fix this damn thing, and all we needed to do was create a damn directory. My boss's face turned white when I told him what the fix was because he recalled having this same exact error bite them in the ass before. This is the site in question that saved us now has a permanent place in our Wiki now: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/innovateonoffice/thread/b81a3c4e-62db-488b-af06-44421818ef91?prof=required http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/innovateonoffi... (and yes, we wrote down all the information from it in the chance that the link goes dead :)