The note you never want to see from your mechanic:
OH NOES!
Those of you who know me, know that I tend to be very loyal toward the technology in my life. I milk the durable goods that I buy until they turn to dust. This probably reflects some deep psychological pathology that I can’t articulate. Or maybe i’m just cheap.
I took home my new 1996 Subaru Legacy almost 13 years ago, with 3 miles on the odometer. I couldn’t have asked for a more reliable, dependable car.
It survived the horrors of Michigan and Vermont winters (and a few Florida summers) without complaint. It followed me through medical school, business school, a doomed startup, the founding of my own firm, and even lived long enough to see me get married!
Unfortunately, all good things come to an end.
Here’s hoping the old girl’s replacement lives as long!
Thank You for Your Service!
It’s been a bit over 2 years since I’ve moved to a MacBook Pro as my primary ‘desktop’ machine. Overall it’s been a positive experience.
OS X has been a bit less stable for me than Linux, but a whole heck of a lot better than any version of Windows. It can run Adobe’s apps natively. And X11. And frozen-bubble2 via MacPorts. What more could I ask for? 
Well… one massively irritating ‘feature’ in MacOS is the shortcut command to switch windows, Cmd-Tab.
In Windows, KDE, Gnome, and just about every other desktop environment I can think of, Alt-Tab allows you to rapidly cycle between all open windows. With OS X, Cmd-Tab (the equivalent of Alt-Tab) cycles between applications, not windows.
This can be very annoying when you want to quickly jump back-and-forth between, say, browser windows then quickly jump to another application. Apple offers a second shortcut, Cmd-`, to cycle between windows of a single application. But when you work with multiple platforms throughout the day and you have decades of muscle memory urging you to hit Cmd-Tab, using an alternative shortcut just feels wrong.
Mac-people frequently say “just use expose” instead of keyboard shortcuts. But like so many folks I am much faster with the keyboard than with the mouse. (I even went old school with my keyboard to maximize typing speed… much to the dismay of my wife who can’t sleep over the racket.)
Fortunately, there’s a solution to this problem: a shareware program called Witch gives you task switching the way it should have been out-of-the-box.
Unfortunately, OS X doesn’t allow you to assign Cmd-Tab to third-party applications like Witch.
To overcome this limitation, you need to get two more (free) applications: Unsanity’s APE and PullTab by Raging Menace. These two apps work in concert to ‘release’ the Cmd-Tab key and allow you to assign it to a third-party app like Witch.
How pathetic is it that the highlight of my week was the news that Netflix and TiVo were teaming up to enable TiVo users to watch movies streamed from Netflix?
I will never leave my bed again. 
The other day, we were having a going-away party for a colleague who we’d barely just gotten to know since she started in September. We were sitting around eating pizza and she asked me where I was planning on having my baby. When I told her, she told me that I absolutely shouldn’t, that it was a terrible place where the medical staff don’t respect the mother’s wishes. She said that she had been a doula (birth assistant) for a few years and assisted with a few births there. She said that the midwife there (my midwife) was terrible and forced a woman to get pitocin when she didn’t want or need it. She also mentioned that they tell the expectant parents that they have to do medical interventions so that they won’t “kill their baby” when they’re really not necessary — just to get patients in-and-out. No matter how many times I told her that I am educated about childbirth and my husband is a doctor, she insisted that they would probably force me to undergo unnecessary medical interventions. She mentioned another hospital in central Vermont (which is 45 minutes away from my house) and said that I should absolutely go there or have a home birth.
That night, I had several nightmares about having serious problems while giving birth and woke up feeling scared and anxious. What she said really got to me, made me feel afraid to give birth there. But I don’t want to do a home birth under any circumstances, and I really don’t feel comfortable with the idea of driving 45 minutes (or more) when I’m in labor. I’ll admit that I wasn’t feeling too crazy about my midwife already since she’d been less than sympathetic and a pretty bad advocate for me when I was having daily excruciating pain from my kidney stones (it’s become more infrequent now, thank goodness). She’s also not a particularly warm person and I don’t feel super-comfortable with her. I did question whether she would be a really good advocate for me when I give birth and planned to talk to her about my concerns at my next appointment. But now, I just feel sick… I feel like I’m totally stuck. She and her partner (who I like better, but you get whoever’s on-call when you’re giving birth) are the only midwives who practice at my local hospital’s birthing center — all of the rest practice at the one 45-minutes away. So if things don’t work out with them, I’m going to be forced to go to the other hospital (which I have heard great things about, but I’m very anxious about the distance) or choose an obstetrician which I’m even more uncomfortable with given their much higher rate of cesareans.
I just think it’s horrible for someone to scare the crap out of a pregnant woman, especially in the extremely forceful way that she did it. I know lots of people have had bad experiences with childbirth or have had great experiences, but they should not make a pregnant woman feel anxious about the choices she’s made, especially when she lives in a rural area where there just aren’t that many choices. I know she probably meant to help, but all she did was totally freak me out. I can’t think of anything else now, and my next midwifery appointment is 2 1/2 weeks away.
So, if you hear about someone’s plans for giving birth and you don’t think they’re making the best choice, don’t tell them horror stories. I would never do a home birth myself, but I respect the choice that my colleague and his wife made to do that. And I wouldn’t sit around and tell stories about all of the bad things that can happen with a home birth. It’s insensitive and you’d think someone who was a doula would know better.
Please folks, don’t scare the pregnant lady. She’s full of hormones, going through something she’s never done before, and is hoping she is making choices that are best for her and her baby. Build her up — don’t bring her down.
Just as the nausea and exhaustion of the first trimester have started to abate, I have a lovely new pregnancy symptom. For the past few weeks, I’ve been having trouble with kidney stones. When I get an attack of renal colic, the pain is the worst I’ve felt in my life and there’s absolutely nothing I can do. Fortunately, the worst of the pain only lasts about 30 - 40 minutes and then disappears completely. The lead-in (pretty painful in its own right) can last an hour or two and sometimes I can stop the worst of it by guzzling several bottles of water at that point. For some reason, now, the attacks seem to be getting more frequent, in spite of the fact that I’m drinking water like it’s going out of style. I’ve been waiting since last week for an appointment with a urologist, though I’m not even sure how much they can do. I wouldn’t try any intervention that could potentially hurt my baby. My midwife is prescribing me some pain killers, but I probably will avoid taking them since they usually make me really sick to my stomach. Still, nice to have some as insurance.
So, with this extremely painful medical issue, Adam and I are supposed to be flying to Iceland on Saturday for 6 days to attend a conference and see the sites. On top of that, Iceland isn’t sounding like the best place to travel to at the moment. If people think our economy is bad, they should try Iceland, where four of their major banks have failed, their currency has lost most of its value, and the government has given up trying to peg the Krona to other currencies. People can’t even get their money out of their banks. Since the people of Iceland (and companies) can’t get foreign currency, they’re predicting serious food shortages and other problems. Normally, I’d be game for this and probably would find it a fascinating experience to bear witness to what’s going on there. However, now that I’m responsible for another human life, I feel like I need to be more cautious. And with my current health issues, I don’t want to be stuck in a country where I can’t get the basic care I might need.
So, the trip I’ve been looking forward to for months and months now feels like an anchor around my neck. I don’t want to let the conference organizers down — I’ve never missed a conference before and I’ve spoken with food poisoning, a horrible hangover, a cold, etc. I also don’t want to lose the money I spent on two plane tickets to Iceland if Adam and I decide not to go, as well as the experience of visiting a county I’ve dreamed of going to for well over a decade. Adam and I plan to wait and see how things look late in the week and then make our decision, but I definitely will not take any risks that could put baby in danger.
On a positive note, I’ve just started to show a bit, though to most people I probably just look like I’ve developed a small pot belly. It’s definitely made the whole baby thing feel more real to me, and I can’t wait until I can actually feel the baby move around and kick. In spite of how crappy I’ve been feeling, it hasn’t lessened my giddiness over the pregnancy one bit.
Still waiting for that second trimester pregnancy glow though…
I think Meredith’s previous post about productivity gimmicks was right on the money. Strolling though the aisles at Staples I see so many devices and notions to help people organize, I can’t help but wonder if people ever get real work done.
My own system for keeping organized has evolved over the past couple of years. Between running a company and being responsible for all the household paperwork since moving to Vermont, my desk became a blizzard of papers, bills, half-eaten sandwiches, and old coffee cups. Not good.
The organizational system that I’ve developed works on two core assumptions:
Assumption #1: I’m lazy. Very, very lazy. If any step takes more than a couple of minutes, it won’t get done.
Assumption #2: Paper is bad. A few pieces of loose paper on my desk is the first step toward chaos. So the goal is to do something with the paper before it piles up and buries me.
The Tech
My system involves a little bit of technology to work:
- An inbox on my desk for papers
- A Fujitsu ScanSnap S510 - a high-speed document scanner
- FineReader for ScanScap - an OCR program that’s bundled with the ScanSnap.
- Yep, a program that lets you tag PDFs and visually preview them
The Workflow
1. Triage
When I get a new piece of mail, i categorize it in one of two ways:
A) Mail that needs a physical response (ie, bills that I can’t pay online, quarterly taxes, etc.. all documents that will require me to deal with a stamp, envelope and the mailman.)
B) Mail that just needs to be filed and/or dealt with online (bank statements, merchant account statements, credit card statements that I pay online, etc…)
If something falls into pile “A”, i do it immediately, or as soon as possible. This keeps clutter to a minimum and ensures that our heat doesn’t get turned off. Once everything from pile A is finished, it gets dumped in with pile B, to be scanned…
2. Scanning
This is the critical step. The Fujitsu ScanSnap is a high-speed scanner — it can do 18 double-sided pages a minute. It scans with the single press of a button, then automatically turns the scan into a PDF and places it into a directory you specify before-hand.
It is one of the most useful pieces of business equipment I’ve ever used; i was able to scan my archive of 5,000+ documents in <2 days. The "M" version of the scanner is bundled with software for OS X, and it works very well indeed.
This video just shows you how quickly it performs the scans.
Keeping up with scanning my incoming mail requires only 1-2 minutes a day.
I set up 4 different directories for the scans (you'll see why in a minute):
- New
- OCR In Process
- OCR Finished
- Tagged
The ScanSnap puts all new scans immediately into the New directory. It automatically names the files based on the date and time of the scan. (ie, “2008_09_24_16_58_41.pdf”). This behavior can be configured.
3. Dispose of the Paper!
According to the IRS, you can apparently shred or otherwise dispose of paper documents that you’ve digitized, including receipts. I tend to err on the side of caution though, and don’t mind keeping paper for at least a couple of years as long as I don’t have to see it. So for those few documents I can’t bear to shred, I just file them into a plain old cabinet.
My assumption is that I won’t ever have to actually look through those papers, so my filing system isn’t very complicated: throw them in a drawer, forget they exist.
4. OCR: making the scanned documents searchable
About once a week, i’ll go through the “New” folder where all the new scans are placed, and drag the entire folder’s contents into the “OCR In Process” folder. I then take all the files and pass them through the FineReader OCR program.
This program, bundled with the ScanSnap, makes all the texts in the PDFs searchable by spotlight and other search programs.
The reason you shouldn’t run an OCR program at the time that you’re doing the scans is because OCR can take a long time, even with a fast machine. It can take my Macbook Pro up to a minute to perform an OCR scan on a particularly tough document. So it is best to take all your new documents once a week and do all the OCR in a batch, and just let it run in the background while you do other things. FineReader is good about not hogging the CPU, and won’t slow down other programs while it does its thing.
5. Tagging and Searching with Yep
Once the OCR is done, i move the scanned files from “OCR in Process” To “OCR Finished”. I then fire up Yep.
Yep describes itself as an “iPhoto for your PDFs”, which is a fairly accurate description. It lets you easily tag each document and perform very rapid searches. Once you start using Yep (or something like it) you’ll wonder how you ever got along without it.
Yep has a few critical benefits that I didn’t see in other similar programs:
A) It is cheap - $34.00. Free demo available too.
B) It doesn’t use proprietary tags; Any tags that you create get placed into OS X’s Spotlight database. Not using some funky, proprietary database but instead embedding the tags into the PDF’s metadata means that getting locked-in is much less of a concern.
C) it doesn’t move the PDF files around — it can find them anywhere on your hard drive (or even over a network), so you don’t have to muck around with maintaining pristine directories or even having logical filenames. If you can devise a good tagging system, you can find just about any file in an instant regardless of where it located on the hard drive, or what it is called. This is beneficial for the lazy and disorganized.
A Concrete Example: My Electricity Bill.
Tagging:
After scanning in a document, Yep automatically sees that there’s a new, untagged PDF. To tag it, you just click on the file and start typing in the tags you want. Here’s an example video of me tagging my electric bill in Yep, just to give you a sense of how quickly you can get it done.
Video: Tagging my electricity bill with Yep
Searching:
Tagging would be useless if you didn’t have a fast facility to retrieve the document. Fortunately, Yep takes full advantage of the search capabilities offered by OS X.
This video shows you how quickly you can pull up documents by tags. In this case, i’m searching for the electric bill that I just tagged. As you select tags, Yep narrows down the search parameters by only looking for the tags that remain in your sub-selection. This makes finding any document incredibly easy.
Video: Finding my electricity bill with Yep
6. Backups
Now that your entire financial life has been digitized, it is critically important that you make secure, reliable backups. (In fact, the IRS insists upon it if you are going to shred the original paper documents.) I’ll get into my backup technique in a future post.
Good luck taming your own paper monster…
Tags: adam, finereader, IRS, OCR, paper monster, productivity, scansnap, yep
I was very pleased to see this recent post from Merlin Mann on 43 Folders about the shifting focus of the blog:
R.I.P., Productivity Pr0n
Friends, I’m done with “productivity” as a personal fetish or hobby. There are countless sites that are all too happy to vend stroke material for your joyless addiction to puns about procrastination and systems for generating more taxonomically satisfying meta-work. But, presently, you won’t find so much of that here.
Except inasmuch as it can help move aside barriers to finishing the projects that you claim matter to you, “productivity” is often a sprawling ghetto of well-marketed nonsense for people who really just need a ritalin and a hug. So, for myself, random tips and lists that aren’t anchored to solving a real-world problem for a smart but flawed adult with a mind are dead to me. Pour a forty on ‘em.
…
This is now a site for people who want to finish things that they care about — but who still occasionally need help, inspiration, and the courage to push all the bullshit off their work table. This is about clearing that space every day, and then using it to do cool stuff that makes you proud.
AMEN! I think the whole productiving pr0n thing can be taken way too far and I’ve seen a lot of people who’ve fallen into that trap. You may very well need some sort of system to organize your life, but when you’re devoting more time to creating and honing the organizational system than to the actual things you need to do each day, you’ve got a problem.
Believe me, I understand. I used to make all of these grand plans for getting into better shape. I’d read all about different exercise plans, write down exactly what I was going to do each day and what my reward system was going to be. Unfortunately, I spent a lot more time creating this system than I ever did exercising. I sometimes wonder if planning (to that extent) is the enemy of stick-to-itiveness. I find that that the less I plan, the more likely I am to stick to what I’m doing. I think the plan itself becomes so grand that the first time it doesn’t work out the way I want it to, I tend to be so disappointed that I give up on the whole endeavor. For me, at least, it’s better to have a small goal and just take it one day at a time. Sometimes it’s better to focus on the trees rather than the forest.
I love all of those cool productivity tools as much as anyone. I’ve bought my share of software and paper doodads that haven’t made me any more organized than I was before. But I think that productivity fetish can really get out of hand where it becomes more important (or satisfying) than actually accomplishing the things you’re creating the system for. This realization has saved me a lot of money over the past few years.
I skimmed through the Getting Things Done book and found a lot to like in there. But, for me, a detailed system really isn’t a good fit. Right now, for my own productivity, I use Remember the Milk. It’s incredibly simple and gets the job done for me. I use it as a dumping ground for things I need to remember to do or things I just want to remember. For example, if I am listening to Pandora and want to remember the name of a band I just heard, I’ll put it into Pandora under my music tab. I have different lists for all different things, like committees I’m on, writing, speaking, library instruction, the class I teach, household projects, projects at work, and more. With pregnancy brain fully in effect at this point, it’s nice just to have a place to write things down before they disappear. I don’t know that it makes me more “organized” but it keeps me from forgetting stuff and that was my only barrier to actually accomplishing things.
I’m not knocking anyone who has an organizational system that works for them. Good for you! But I think some people get so into planning and organizing and playing with different organizational systems and tools that it becomes a barrier to productivity. I really like what Merlin wrote on his “How to use 43 Folders” page.
Why am I here right now instead of making something cool on my own? What’s the barrier to me starting that right now?
And that’s what we should look at. What is it that’s keeping us from doing something? Is it because we lack a fully-functional organizational system, or is it something much more specific that is holding you back? Focus on fixing what is broken and on pushing yourself to get a little more done each day on the things you need to do. Because you could spend weeks in the 43 Folders or Lifehacker archives and in the end, be no closer to accomplishing anything.
I had my first “baby dream” this week. I’ve had dreams before about having a baby, but not in a long time and definitely not since I got pregnant. In the dream, I suddenly had a baby and was at home with her. I literally did not remember giving birth. Adam had to tell me about it. But I think the worst part was that I was completely incapable of taking care of this child. I kept dropping the baby and had no idea what to do with her. I totally didn’t know how to feed her. I’d say the only plus of this dream was that I was really thin and already fit into all of my pre-pregnancy clothes. Priorities, right? Needless to say, I was crazy-relieved when I woke up and realized that, no, I hadn’t actually given birth yet. Lots of time to learn how to be capable.
I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised by this dream. When Adam and I were thinking about getting a dog, I had dreams about forgetting to feed the dog for a month and finding it near death. I frequently have dreams where I’m being chased (by Nazis, secret agents, monsters, etc.), so I think anxiety dreams are just par for the course for me. And it’s funny, because I feel like I’m a lot less anxious than I used to be, but perhaps my subconscious hasn’t figured that out yet. Or perhaps I’m deluding myself about being less stressed. At the very least, I’m happy, and stress is much easier to deal with when you’re smiling.
Last week, I was attending a childcare committee meeting at work (we’re trying to get the University to offer on-campus childcare since the daycare options in our area are quite limited). A colleague I know in IT was there and she is very pregnant. In fact, she was one day away from her due date. After the meeting, I walked with her and asked how much time she was going to take off after the baby. She said “three weeks; that’s all the vacation time I have left.” I asked “but aren’t you exempt? We’re supposed to get six weeks paid leave!” She said she hadn’t heard that and hadn’t gotten it with her last pregnancy (which was about two years earlier). I told her that my male colleague is currently on 6 weeks’ paid paternity leave and that I was going to call to confirm the policy as soon as I got back to my office. When I called HR, they confirmed what I’d thought (though they were extremely vague about it), so I let my colleague know. She now has six paid weeks off with her beautiful baby and I feel very good about having helped to make that happen.
I would advise anyone who is expecting a child to seriously research your institution’s policies for family leave. All states have family leave laws, and while they don’t apply to all workplaces, they apply to any that have more than 50 employees. You are entitled to 12 unpaid weeks off with benefits without losing your job. Your institution also probably has its own policies as well, which may be more generous than what the state mandates. Many institutions offer paid leave for men these days, which is fantastic.
Second of all, I’m kind of frustrated with how many HR departments seem to try to obfuscate their policies regarding family leave. When I called HR last week, I was told to read the policy online. Reading the policy for family leave that I found on the website leaves me more confused than before, because it says absolutely nothing about paid leave. The most useful passage comes from the staff handbook:
The provisions for absence from work with pay under this Employee Medical and Sick Leave Policy overlap the Family and Medical Leave Policy, which provides up to twelve weeks of unpaid leave under certain circumstances, as required by State and Federal law, and up to six weeks of paid leave in certain circumstances as required by State law. In cases where an absence qualifies for both Family and Medical Leave and paid medical and sick leave, the paid leave will count toward part or all of the twelve weeks of Family and Medical Leave.
A little vague, huh? Further down in the staff handbook, I found more about Family Medical Leave that wasn’t on the Family Medical Leave policy:
An employee may elect to substitute any paid vacation, sick or personal leave for all or part of the FMLA leave. Under Vermont law, the University must provide up to six weeks of the leave as paid sick leave.
And some HR folks don’t seem to know any better than we do. When my colleague was going to ask about paternity leave, I tagged along since I hoped it would be an issue for me soon. We were told that as exempt employees, we got 12 weeks of paid family leave. He was over the moon. And he planned on having that time. But when he formally applied for the leave, he was only given six paid weeks off. Huh?
For a country where people are supposedly all about “family values,” the attitudes towards maternity/paternity leave are really family unfriendly. They are based on a society where men work and women stay home with children. Unfortunately, that has not been the case for the past 20 years or more (heck, my grandmothers worked!). I remember interviewing for a job where the HR person told me that “we’re lucky here that we get two week’s paid family leave.” Lucky? Really? In Canada, people are encouraged to take a year off to care for their child and they’re paid for it. So much for the “family values” platform; that probably has more to do with banning books and filtering the Internet, right?
I know I’m actually lucky to get any paid time off, because there are a lot of people who get absolutely nothing when they have a child. I know that. But I think it’s ridiculous that women should be forced to leave their baby at a daycare center when they’re only six weeks old. And with my University not having a daycare center, I’m going to be away from my child all day, five days a week. We hear the line that women can “have it all” and can successfully balance working and motherhood. I think that would be a lot more possible if our government and our employers did more to make that possible. How much of my heart will be in my work when my four-month-old is many miles away from me in a daycare center?
(originally run in 2005… The tech has changed, the principles are the same )
I’d mentioned in a previous story that i’ve set out on the horrid task of digitizing about 5,000 - 6,000 of my family’s 35mm slides, dating from the early 1960s until the present day.
I want to free all our old pictures from the prison of the slide carousel, where they’ve sat for - literally - decades, so that our family members who are scattered around the world can easily browse them.
I’m no archivist, but I know that many of the folks who read this blog are, so i thought i’d write up how i’m doing this, and solicit feedback/advice from those with more experience than I have.
The first constraint we had for this project was budget; Meredith insisted that I try to keep it cheap.
The main costs of a project like this are hardware & time.
Even though my time is valuable, i’m going to write it off as “free” because this for me is a hobby, and it’s certainly more productive than bowling or playing half-life (the experience of seeing people, places and pets that have long since departed is quite special, if sometimes a bit sad.)
That leaves the real cash outlay to two kinds of items:
1) A method to scan the slides & film into the PC.
2) A method to -reliably- store and share the scans.
The Scanner
For the scanner, I picked the Konica/Minolta DiMAGE Scan Dual IV. It was reasonably priced (about $250 at Amazon) and each magazine/slide holder can take 4 slides at a time. The output is fantastic, and it has built-in correction filters to help restore slides that are past their prime (like most in my collection…)
I decided to not be cheap (sorry, Meredith) and paid for an external piece of scanner software called Vuescan (about $80 for the professional version, with free lifetime upgrades.)
Vuescan is notable because it really does make higher-quality scans than the software that came bundled with the scanner and it makes automating the scanning process much easier.
The automation bit is critical, because with a collection of this size, you cannot scan slides in individually, name them individually, apply filters individually, etc… By the time you’d finish scanning, anyone who cared about the slides would be dead.
The Process
With Vuescan, once you set up the parameters the way you want them, scanning becomes as simple as loading up the magazine with 4 slides, shoving it in the scanner, and waiting for it to pop out. The PC gives an audible “beep” when it pops the magazine out.
Then you shove in another 4, rinse, repeat 1000 times. You don’t even need to touch the computer at all when doing this. So you can do other things throughout the day, and when you walk by the scanner & see the magazine sticking out, you can just load up 4 more slides, shove it in & walk away. Each slide takes about 1 minute to complete.
Even with this automation, the scanning process is a big job, but it goes from something that would require complete attention to something that you can just do casually throughout the day (this is a hobby, remember..)
The Storage Problem
The biggest hurdle to this project is finding a reasonable way to safely store the output of the scans. Hard drives are notoriously unreliable, and I cringe when i see people in CompUSA buying those 200GB external drives knowing that if they are lucky, the drive will last 3 years before it catastrophically fails taking their data with it.
Compounding the problem is that the raw output from the scanner is enormous. Each slide takes about 20MB (that’s on vuescan’s “archive” setting, a lossless, 24-bit file.) When you transform the slide into something more reasonable, like a JPG, it gets crunched down to about 1/15th of that size. But when you’re doing an archival project of this size, you want to preserve the high-quality, raw scans.
Doing the math, 5,000 slides * 20MB ~ 100,000MB ~ 100GB. Adding in the small JPG output that we’ll want for each slide too, and it’s about 110GB of data, give or take.
A good deal of data, to be sure, but well within the capacity of consumer hardware in 2005.
There is a temptation to go into CompUSA and buy one of those big external firewire drives to store all this data. They are cheap and easy to set up. But I had to fight my “cheap gene” with all my strength in order not to buy one, because they are simply not reliable enough.
Storage Solution
My solution to this problem was two-pronged: RAID storage for the scans + Optical storage for off-site archival.
To handle the RAID storage, i decided to buy an Antec Aria case (small, meredith-approved), and throw in an old VIA C3 motherboard that I had lying around (The C3 is famous b/c it uses very little electricity & doesn’t need a fan. Perfect for a file server that’s going to be kept around the house.) Total cost for both was $130.00.
I set up a RAID5 array by going to CompUSA and purchasing 3 Seagate 160GB drives (CompUSA was having a sale, each drive was $59.00 after rebates.) Total cost for storage was about $180.00.
RAID5 is nice in that it gives you reliability (one drive can fail & you’re OK.. simply replace it with a new one and it repairs itself.) It also gives you 2/3rds the capacity of the whole array, so the effective storage space on my system was about 300GB. More than enough for the project.
Finally, I had an old Sony internal DVD burner lying around, and I knew it to be reliable, so that saved us about $70.00.
Each carousel comes out to about 2Gb of data, so conveniently 2 carousels fit per DVD burned. The DVDs can then be taken off-site for safe storage.
Since I had the install CD’s already, I chose Mandrake Linux 10.1 to be the OS for the server. Though in reality, any version of linux will do. Mandrake makes it easy to set up the RAID array. Fedora Core also makes it a snap. I haven’t tried it with any other distros, YMMV, but I doubt the procedure is too far different.
The server is just that — a headless machine running ssh and samba and almost nothing else. It’s used as a central repository for all the scans.
Sharing & Meta Data
At this point, we’ve got a reliable and (relatively) fast method to scan the slides and a safe way to store them.
The next big issue is what to -do- with all the data. Many of these slides were taken before I was born, many of them are of people that I do not know, and are in places i’ve never been. It is going to be up to my family members to take a crack at each slide, providing descriptive metadata for each picture as best they can.
Since my family is spread around the world, just giving them access to the master archive box on the LAN wouldn’t work. Furthermore, no one wants to download 20MB pictures, even locally.
I decided to use a package called gallery to publish the scans to the web. I already had a public, colocated webserver running, so it was just a matter of downloading & installing gallery. Gallery is fast, reliable, and has very granular authentications, so access can be restricted to certain users for certain “albums”. Each family member gets their own username and password; this makes the possibility of unwanted or incorrect metadata being added much lower. (Gallery allows a variety of metadata to be added, as well as free-form searchable comments about each image.)
20MB pictures would destroy my server in short order, so it’s fortunate that vuescan has an option at scan time to also create a JPG of each raw image, with the same filename. The JPGs are very high quality, but a fraction of the size, so they are easy to upload.
Conclusion
This is about as robust a solution as I could find for archiving these slides at a reasonable price. Has anyone else out in blog-land undertaken such a project? Do you have any tips?
