Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [77]
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.
STEP II: LIFELOGGING
Now that you’ve focused on the potential for Total Recall to improve your life, have the tools of the trade, and have begun getting rid of all that paper and other junk, it’s time to start recording more of your life digitally. Time to get lifelogging.
I own several digital cameras because of trade-offs in features and size. If I could only have one, I’d pick a pocket-sized camera so that I would be more likely to carry it around with me. If not for my pocket camera, I’d have no shots of my ride in the cab of San Francisco Fire Department