Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything (22 page)

A personal computer

Laptop or desktop, your personal computer will be essential. If your computer is more than a couple of years old, consider buying a new one. Not surprisingly, for Total Recall, memory is a critical component. Buy a computer with as much disk memory as you can afford; at least a hundred gigabytes for a laptop or three hundred gigabytes for a desktop computer. Purchase an external disk of five hundred gigabytes or more for backup. Get the latest-generation operating system so you will have integrated features like desktop search and photo-tagging. Apple’s Leopard and Microsoft’s Vista can do this for you.

An Internet connection

An Internet connection is essential so that you can take advantage of online billing and other items that are born digitally—each one represents paper that you won’t have to scan. Paying for a faster link in the upstream direction (from your home to the Internet) may be helpful for backing up to a cloud service, or making your files accessible from a home server. But high bandwidth isn’t essential if you won’t be moving a lot of data from your home to the cloud.

A scanner

You need a scanner that can digitize anything you have on paper: memos, letters, health records, pictures, slides, business cards, and so forth. Scanners that handle multiple sizes and types of paper are worth the extra expense. Scanners should allow you to digitize one piece of paper or a stack of papers, simultaneously scanning both sides.

I use the Fujitsu ScanSnap desktop scanner. It’s nice and small, and I find it so handy that I have one at work and another at home. It lets me stack in pages and scans both sides at once directly into Adobe’s PDF format. The current generation of desktop scanners comes close to meeting my ideal that scanning a document be as easy as discarding it. Ultimately scanners will be so reliable that we can confidently shred the document the moment the scan is complete. But we aren’t there yet.

A flatbed scanner is great for mementos, like medals, plaques, and so on. Unlike a digital camera, it always gets the lighting right. Some stuff just won’t fit in any scanner, though, so sometimes you will have to use a camera; if you can get it outdoors on a cloudy day, you can often get it nicely lit without reflections.

Finally, make sure your scanner software is performing optical character recognition (OCR) on the scanned pages so that later the computer will be able to search for the text inside them.

DEALING WITH WHAT YO U ALREADY HAVE

Properly equipped, you are now ready to convert your old analog life’s worth of papers and memorabilia to digital form.

Set a goal of being paperless within a year. Besides scanning the paper you already have, you should also arrange to receive more born-digital communications in the future, to reduce the flow of paper that you need to scan. Request that all statements, invoices, and other communications be delivered online. Your phone company, utility company, cable provider, and other services you do business with should be happy to stop sending you paper (and paying for postage), and if they aren’t they’ll probably be out of business before long. Many of the communications you receive online will be in PDF format, so just click the save button. Some, however, will come up inside your browser as a regular Web page—I’ll explain more about saving Web pages below.

If you have many years’ worth of paper accumulated in file drawers, cabinets, and boxes, consider sending it all out to a service for scanning. It will likely cost between four hundred and a thousand dollars for ten thousand pages. The price increases for mixed sizes and artifacts such as scrapbooks. If you have a lot, and you value your time, I’d call it money well spent.

Even if you use a scanning service now, you will still need a scanner for future incoming paper. Some organizations aren’t prepared to go paperless, so you will keep getting items to scan from them. Set up a dedicated scanning in-box, and don’t let it get more than an inch deep.

Today’s scanners and software do not automatically add tags or keywords to your documents, and are not likely to for quite a few years. Make sure that OCR is being performed on every scan. And follow my tips below for file naming and tagging.

Occasionally, I find it handy to use my camera instead of a scanner. For instance, while I’m traveling, I might snap a quick picture of a receipt and tear it up rather than take it home to scan. I also hate keeping around the big cases holding my software CDs—but I can never peel off the label containing the product key without destroying it. My solution is to snap a picture of the label (the lighting only has to be good enough to let me read the product key). This way, I was able to recycle a bunch of cases and cut back to one compact little holder of CDs for all my software.

Books

For your books that are out of copyright, the chances get better every day that you will be able to download a copy from the Web for free. Project Gutenberg has more than twenty-five thousand free books available in their catalog and more than a hundred thousand available through their partners and affiliates. Google is scanning millions of titles; keep an eye on them to make more books available. Several formats may be available; pick either PDF or some other text-friendly format so you can search the entire book with your e-memory.

Online libraries are available for a fee. Questia, the largest online library as of 2008, has books, journals, magazines, and newspapers all available and searchable via keywords. They even provide a personal library shelf, where you can store books that you’ve viewed. The workspace allows you to create and manage projects, track your research by viewing highlighted passages, notes, and citations you’ve made, and even make instant bibliographies or source notes. LexisNexis is another online service that provides business, legal, and news services, all searchable easily though keywords. Whenever possible, save copies of what you read, or at least a note of what you read. For example, if you copy and paste a passage into OneNote, it will also save a link to the Web page.

Invest in Amazon’s Kindle, Sony’s eBook, or another similar electronic reading device. That way, your new books can be born digital. You also will be able to mark passages and load them into your computer. Wizcon makes a pen scanner that permits you to make highlights in any of your reading materials and automatically transfer those highlights to your computer for future reference.

When you buy a new appliance, go online, download the electronic version of the manual, and throw the paper one away. You may end up having to scan a few manuals, but this happens less and less as every year goes by. Manufacturers, after all, are happy to have you download a file rather than phone them and take time from their staff.

For e-books, e-articles, and e-manuals, the issue is search-ability. You want to be able to recall passages that you have read before. With downloaded manuals, you can search on your PC. LexisNexis would require you to return to their site to search if you haven’t saved a copy of the article you want. Refinding a passage from a Kindle book could mean going to the Amazon Web site if the book is no longer on your Kindle. Still, with a little effort you can achieve nearly Total Recall with your reading material.

Address books, calendars, and reminders

If your address book has cross-outs five layers deep, or you have a calendar hanging in your kitchen with birthdays, anniversaries, other important dates, and appointments, or your to-do list consists of sticky labels papering your office walls, you need to go digital and it’s not as hard as you think.

Start with your address book. You can choose from a host of already available applications. Eudora, Outlook, Outlook Express, and various freeware programs have contact, calendaring, and time management systems that connect to corporate mail servers or public mail services like AOL, Google, or Hotmail. Apple’s OS X has integrated calendar and address book applications. Many of these applications can synchronize with the information in your cell phone or PDA, so that device can remain updated too.

If you are using a cloud-based system for your contacts, calendar, or reminders, I strongly recommend using a client such as Outlook so that your e-memory has a copy of everything that’s in the cloud. This will protect you from a service that may lose your stuff (perhaps by going out of business). It also gives you a copy when your Internet connection goes down.

Many of your contacts are born digital. For example, you receive a call on your cell phone with a number you and your cell phone don’t recognize. Once you take the call, your cell phone asks if you want to store the number as a new contact. This is easily done and when you sync your phone to your computer, your computer now has the new number in your address book.

IBM has a program called Pensieve (named after a stone receptacle for storing memories, à la Harry Potter) to manage business contacts. After you use your cell phone to snap the photo of a person you meet along with his or her business card, you enter the information into your computer. The program syncs that data with the date, time, and information in your calendar for when you met that person. When you search for someone, you enter one bit of data and up comes photo, name, phone number, fax, company info, and so on.

Nokia is taking this idea one step further, allowing their cell phones that have GPS and a compass to become full memory aids by using images taken from the cell phone. Anything you see, a person, place, or thing, is snapped as a picture and tagged with location. This new phone will be preloaded with tags for places and things in a set of cities, allowing travelers to easily become accustomed to their new environments.

I can’t say enough about the importance of the calendar to mark life’s minor and major time-posts that are likely to be useful for recall. Use your calendar not just to schedule upcoming events, but also as a diary, putting entries in even after the event so that your calendar is a complete record. Every birthday, celebration, dinner, and meeting should be noted.

Pictures

If you have lots of pictures, slides, or negatives, send them to a service. The drugstore Walgreens scanned over two thousand negatives for a friend in less than twenty-four hours. In 2008, Scan-MyPhotos. com would scan a thousand photos for fifty dollars. The more you have, the steeper the discount.

Unless you are a serious photographer, beware the “photo scanner.” I’ve checked out “high-end” photo scanners, hoping they would help me scan faster, only to learn that “high-end” in a photo scanner often means doing fancy smudge and scratch removal and actually requires more of my time to manage the process. The lower-end scanners I’ve tried have been better at feeding through batches of photos, but unfortunately, they have also been cheap enough to break down.

I’ve found the best scanners are the ones that are multipurpose and handle paper, photographs, and business cards. If you have a lot of slides, you can find a special slide scanner, or possibly an attachment for your paper scanner to help handle slides.

Sometimes you will want to scan a photo album without taking the photos out. There is no choice but to use a flatbed scanner for that. Don’t try using a digital camera unless you have extraordinary skill in photography and lighting.

Music

Music CDs, of course, can be easily converted (“ripped”) into your computer. For old formats like LPs and tapes, you can do it yourself to convert to digital format. It’s not really that hard, but it can be finicky. You’ll have to get the right cables to connect, say, your turntable to your computer’s sound card, and you’ll have to set the levels carefully to get a good digital recording. There’s software out there that that will spot the gaps in the music and break the whole down into individual songs, and will even help with hiss reduction and make labeling easy (I have used the Windows Plus package for this in the past). If that sounds beyond your technical ability or patience, chances are the shop in your neighborhood that digitizes old videos can also digitize your music for you.

Use a music database such as iTunes, Windows Media, Winamp, or Zune to organize your music. The database is part of the player. As you rip new music, these databases will automatically catalog it and create the file-and-folder system for you. It’s powerful and allows you to control how you want your music inputted, sorted, and displayed. It will also go out on the Web to find the CD artwork, if available.

Movies and Film

For old films and home movies, I once again recommend using a service, such as
iMemories.com
.
Slidescanning.com
does home movies as well as slides. If you are a techie, there are solutions out there and you can mess around with and make them work—the guys on my team have. But for most folks it’s just not worth the hassle. Send them to a shop and get back the DVDs.

The real trouble with movies is that we are still a few years out from having enough storage space to rip your whole collection into your computer, as you do with your CDs. For the time being, you are going to be stuck with some DVDs and tapes disturbing the feng shui of your otherwise decluttered life. It is well worth ripping a few of your favorite moments, though.

Virtually all items can be destroyed after digitizing (archivists hate it when I say things like that—but they will have to give up a few papers to get thousands more scanned pages). Of course, some things will be kept even by the most energetic lifeloggers. You may have to keep papers that have intrinsic value, like stock certificates or autographs or, say, original sheet music by a famous composer. You may plan to keep a photo album and enjoy it until it falls apart and fades—in any case, you should rest assured that you have the digital version forever. I recommend that you develop a way of marking digitized items so that you don’t mess up and do the work of digitizing them over again. For instance, I mark the pictures that I keep with an
S
on the back, indicating that they have been scanned. You may want to put a small Post-It note on the underside of a trophy that you have a good picture of. But if you ask me, nothing beats the feeling of feeding your paper to the shredder and seeing your clutter evaporate.