I had occasion to call my cable company for some technical support over the weekend. They’d sent me a new cable modem and the last step of the process was to activate the modem. You could do this online or call the number. Unfortunately, the activation didn’t work when I tried it online, so I had to call. This was complicated, however, by the fact that I was watching both kids that evening and both seemed to require my attention. I couldn’t be running all over the house looking up serial numbers for the support people. Fortunately, I’ve “digitized” information about all of my devices and appliances and when the tech support person asked me the serial number and model number of the cable modem, I simply looked it up in Evernote. No need to go downstairs with the kids screaming around me.

Digitizing Devices and Appliances

Last year I talked about how I used Evernote, Skitch and Penultimate to create a digital version of my house in Evernote. The purpose of this was to have access to information about my house at my fingertips when it proved most convenient. For instance, if I was at the hardware store and needed to know if something was too wide to fit in the stairwell, I could look up my note that showed how wide the stairwell was. If I was looking for a new bookshelf to match my old ones, and needed to know how tall those bookshelves were, I could look up the information in a note without having to run home and measurement.

Not long after that, I started capturing information about my devices and appliances in Evernote. I found that I was often asked about a model number or serial number if I had a question. So what I did was go around the house, snapping photos of the information panels of various appliances and devices. I then emailed the photos to my Evernote email address. Finally, I used Skitch to markup the photos (if necessary) and filed the notes in my Digital House notebooks. Or, put more succinctly:

1. Snap a photo of the information panel on the device or appliance.
2. Email the photo to your Evernote email address.
3. File, tag, and markup the note as necessary.

Of course, you could also create a note and type in the information, but I like the photo for two main reasons:

1. It is fast and easy.
2. Typing in the information, I might make a typo in the serial or model number, which could complicate matters when I actually need the information.

Here is an example of the note for the microwave oven that came with the house:

and here is the note for my (fairly new) Google Chromebook:

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Given that I write science fiction and that I am a science fiction fan, I get asked fairly frequently what books I recommend. I get asked this more frequently by people who don’t generally read science fiction. Sometimes, I am asked for a list of my favorite books regardless of the genre. In the past, I have pointed people to the list of everything I’ve read since 1996. The bolded items on that list highlight books that I particularly enjoyed. I’ve also written a post now and then letting people know what some of my favorites are. The problem is that these are static solutions to a constantly changing situation. I read a new book and love it. I have to go update a static page. I reread an old book and decide I don’t love it so much. Again, I have to go update a static page.

Now, I could use a third-party tool, something like Goodreads, to keep a list of favorites, but what if I wanted to have recommendations about things other than books. What if I wanted to recommend movies? Or music? Or software? Or recipes? I don’t want to have to manage this in multiple places. Fortunately, I don’t have to. It occurred to me recently that Evernote provides all of the functionality I need to create and share dynamic recommendation lists with anyone who is interested. Let me tell you how I do this.

Step 1: Create a recommendation notebook

The first thing I did was to create a “Recommendation” notebook in Evernote. I decided to use one notebook for all of my recommendations because I could tag the notes however I wanted and allow the people using the notebook to filter it based on the tags I provided.

Step 2: Define a tagging scheme

I’m not a big tagger, but I thought tags would prove useful for making it easier for others to filter my recommendations. Since I decided that I would share my reading recommendations, I came up with a handful of tags that allows some simple discrimination in the list:

• Novel: a fictional book
• Collection: a collection of shorter work
• Nonfiction: a nonfiction book

There is room to grow here, of course. If I wanted to capture the short fiction I recommend, for instance, I could add tags like “short story”, “novella”, and “novelette.” But what if I wanted to eventually recommend things other than books? I needed a tag to classify everything that was a book recommendation, in addition to what kind of book it was. So I added one more tag to my list:

• Books

This way, each note in my notebook gets 2 tags: “Books” and one of either Novel, Collection, or Nonfiction.

Step 3: Add recommendations to the notebook

I use one note per recommendation. For my book recommendations, I came up with a simple format:

• The note title contains the title of the book and the author.
• The body of the note contains an image of the cover and a short explanation of why I recommend it.
• The tags for the recommendation.

Here is an example of what such a note looks like:

Because many of these notes follow a very similar format, you can probably create a note template. What I did was to use TextExpander to expand a snippet that populates my note.

Step 4: Share your notebook

Once I added my initial recommendations, I shared my notebook using Evernote’s Shared Notebook functionality. When you share a notebook, you are given a link to the shared notebook that anyone else can use to access your notebook. Here is the link to my Recommendations notebooks:

https://www.evernote.com/pub/jamietr/recommendations

A person does not have to be an Evernote user to use this link. I tested it by logging out of my Evernote account and accessing the link directly.

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One of the sets of questions I get asked with a fair amount of regularity has to do with what settings I use to scan documents into Evernote. Do I prefer PDF or JPG? What resolution do I use? Do I prefer one page per note or a multi-page scan? So I thought I’d use this week’s post to talk about my own scanning preferences and settings, and to provide a little insight into how much scanning I actually do these days.

My home office scanner: Fujitsu ScanSnap s1300i

To set the baseline, my primary scanner is the Fujitsu ScanSnap s1300i, which I have been using ever since mid-2012. The scanner is connected to my iMac, and configured to scan directly into Evernote at the push of the scan button on the device. I have not looked at any other desktop scanners since getting this one because this one does everything that I require of a scanner. It performs duplex scanning in a single pass, scans in color and at high resolution, has excellent paper-feeding, and seamlessly integrates with Evernote. I’m sure there are lots of scanners out there that do the same. The Fujitsu just happened to be the most recent one that I tried and when I found that it did everything I needed, I felt no need to keep looking.

My scanning requirements

As I often do in these posts, I will list my requirements for scanning because they play an important role in the settings I use on my ScanSnap. I think it is an important exercise to consider your requirements before making these kinds of decisions because your needs help shape those decisions. In rough terms, here were my requirements for scanning:

• Had a need to scan 10-20 pages per day, initially.
• Did not want to have to feed pages individually: scanner must have a page feeder.
• Did not want to have to re-feed pages often: scanner must have a reliable page feeder.
• Needed to be able to scan both sides of a page.
• Needed to be able to scan pages quickly.
• Needed to be able to scan to PDF format.
• Needed to be able to scan directly into Evernote.
• Needed my scans to be searchable once they were in Evernote.

Obviously, the requirements should help drive the decision for the device you choose, but I’ve found that many of the scanners available today can perform most of these functions. Meeting these requirements is really more a matter of fine-tuning the settings of the scanner and the scanning software.

My scanning settings: some tips for scanning into Evernote

For the most part, I use the default setting that came with my Fujitsu scanner. I made only a few minor modifications to those defaults to meet my own requirements. The Fujitsu ScanSnap s1300i had a page feeder that can hold something like 12-15 pages at a time, and has never given me any trouble. The pages always feed smoothly and I can’t think of a single occasion upon which I have had to re-feed a page. It also does duplex scanning, and will skip blank pages, which is nice.

One thing I’ve noticed is that it sometimes scans a blank pages because of light marks that show up on the page, or because the paper is thin and the text from the printed side bleeds through. But this doesn’t really bother me. It doesn’t affect my searching of the document. I never print so it doesn’t waste paper. And if I really want to get rid of that extra page, I can open the PDF in a PDF editor, like Adobe, and remove the page, resave the document and add it back to my note in Evernote.

Let me walk through some of the settings of my ScanSnap so you can see for yourself how I configure things to meet my requirements.

First and foremost, my ScanSnap is set to scan directly to Evernote. This profile is tied to the button on the scanner so that when I hit that button and initiate a scan, the resulting scan goes into a note in Evernote:

The scanning software has the ability to make a searchable PDF. In other words, at the time I scan the document, the scanning software performs some OCR on the scan and embeds the search text within the PDF file. I have deliberately turned this option off:

I have turned this off for two reasons:

1. When this option is turned on, it takes a lot longer to complete the scan. This is because two separate operations have to be performed. First, the document has to be scanned. Then, the document had to be processed for searches and that latter operation can take a little while. My requirement is to scan as quickly as possible, so I turn this off.
2. Evernote does this for me. When I scan a PDF to Evernote, it automatically makes it searchable, and it does so while its sitting on the Evernote servers, essentially performing the task somewhere other than my machine, so that I am free to move on to the next scan. It does mean that there is usually a lag of a few minutes before the search data is downloaded to my machine, but so far, I have never scanned in a document and then needed to perform a search on it that instant.

Note that this option was turned on by default on my scanner so I had to go into the settings (see image above) and turn it off.

Regarding the speed of the scan, the resolution at which a document is scanned can make a difference. I have found that I don’t really need high-resolution scans for my purposes. I am scanning so that I can get rid of paper, not produce more, so I virtually never print anything I scan. I have found that the default settings for resolution and DPI are fine for my needs, including the OCR that Evernote performs. So I have left these settings as the defaults:

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My schedule got away from me this week and, although I keep telling myself I’ll get this week’s Going Paperless post written “as soon as I finish one more thing…” it hasn’t happened yet. Rather than start to sweat it, I’m just going to write it off this week. I’ll be back with the post next week at it’s usual time. I figured I’d mention it in case there was anyone out there wondering if I had forgotten about it.

Some time back, I wrote a Going Paperless post called “Creating a Digital Version of Your House” in which I described how I use tools like Skitch and Penultimate to capture floor plans and measurements around the house that might be useful to have when I am away–say at the hardware store. While I was away on my Internet vacation, it occurred to me, as I was measuring my bookshelves, that it might be equally useful to have a digital version of my bookshelves in Evernote. With something like 1,100 books, I can’t always remember if I happen to have a particular book or not, and it might be useful to have a quick reference.

Let me back up a moment and admit that yes, I still have paper books. The books on my bookshelves are part of a collection of books I’ve been growing since high school. They consist of science fiction books, books on science, and history books, as well as some miscellaneous books thrown in for good measure. Many of the books are pretty rare in their respective areas, and many more are signed by authors I admire, or who have since become friends of mine. I know there are database systems out there for keeping track of books, and I’ve tried many of them but they are too time consuming for me. It occurred to me that, thanks to Evernote’s ability to identify text in images and allow you to search that text, an “image library” of my books might be just the trick.

My process for doing this was pretty simple, and highly dependent on Evernote to do much of the work for me. For those who want to reproduce my results, here’s what to do:

1. Take a picture of each shelf on my bookshelf. (The higher resolution the picture, the better). 
2. Create a note for each picture.
3. Give a name to each note. I worked clockwise around my office. I numbered each bookcase and each shelf within the bookcase so that I could keep my note titles simple: “Bookcase 2, Shelf 4″, etc.
4. Collect all of the notes together in a “Books” notebook in my “Home” notebook stack.
5. Sync the notes with the Evernote server and allow Evernote to fill in the search data for the images.

The results are pretty cool. Here is a sample:

If I want to search for a particular book, I just type in my search into Evernote and see the results. For instance, say I want to search for the novel Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer. I type the word “Rollback” into the Search Bar and here are the results:

If I then open up the first note with the image of the bookshelf, I see the following:

Note that in this image, the word “Rollback” on the spine of the book has been highlighted (I circled it). Compare that to the same image above where it is not highlighted. The highlighting indicates where in the image my search term was located. This is convenient for 2 reasons:

1. I don’t have to maintain a separate list of the titles that show up in the image. Evernote can detect them.
2. When I search, it highlights where on the shelf I can find the title.

Since the note title tells me which bookcase and which shelf number and the search result shows me where on the shelf the book is located, I can go to my shelf and find the book instantly.

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I am occasionally asked how I get various kinds of notes and documents into Evernote. Sometimes the questioner simply wants to know the tools I use. Sometimes they are looking for how I capture certain types of information like email messages. Today I thought I’d list some of the ways I get different types of information into Evernote. But before I can do that, let me start by describing my basic philosophy of what I put into Evernote.

Deciding what to put in Evernote

I don’t put every piece of information I receive into Evernote. For that matter, I don’t even put every piece of paper I receive into Evernote. When I get something (a piece of paper, an email message, an electronic document), I start by asking a basic question:

Will this be useful to me in the future?

If the answer is no, I don’t bother with it and it doesn’t go into Evernote. If, on the other hand, the answer is yes, I follow it up with another question:

Is there already a system in place for managing the information?

Here, I am considering things like email. I use Gmail for my personal email and it works very well for that. I see no need of putting all of my email in Evernote and thus having it in two places. A good system exists for it. If the answer to this question is Yes, then I generally don’t bother putting it into Evernote–with one exception which I’ll get to. If the answer is no, then it does go into Evernote.

The exception are one-out pieces of information. For instance, I may receive a license key in email. Because I like having all of that information readily available, even when I am offline, I tend to send these types of messages (or similar kinds) into Evernote.  If I tried to illustrate my decision process, it would look something like this:

This sounds elaborate, but after doing this kind of thing every day for a couple of years, it becomes second nature and I usually make the decision unconsciously within a second or two. The most important take-away is that I don’t put everything in Evernote. I only put those things that I think will be useful in the future. If there are other systems out there that work well for the type of information they represent, I just use those systems.

Automate, automate, automate

When looking at the subset of things that I do put in Evernote, I work toward a goal which sounds simple but ends up being somewhat more complex than it might first seem. This goal can be expressed as a simple rule:

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I am crunching on a couple of deadlines at the day job, and a couple of more writing-related deadlines as well and I just don’t have time to get this week’s Going Paperless post wrapped up today. I’ll get it online tomorrow. Sorry for the delay, but stay-tuned. It will be up here tomorrow.