I’m certain that there are all kinds of filesystems in the Linux world that support file creation dates, but the plain fact of the matter is if you perform a vanilla Ubuntu installation, your files will remain ageless. Why should I care? In a word, Photographs. I keep everything I own on network attached storage [...]

Do you want to automatically publish iTunes playlists to a non-iTunes music library? This free application will convert iTunes playlists to m3u files, transform paths to match your external master library, and then copy the playlists over the network. It will even ping a Squeezebox server to force a playlist refresh.

I have tons of old photos that I am always in the process of scanning in. Some are pictures from childhood, others are from my time in the Navy, and still others are from family life before digital photography (somewhere around the end of 2000 I bought my first digital camera, a Canon G1). I [...]

Most of the time I don’t really bother with the timestamp information that my camera embeds in each digital photo. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I checked to see if the clock was right. Scanned photographs are an entirely different brew. They typically represent events from the distant past, and scanner software [...]

It so happens that my employer has made a most welcome decision to replace the aging creaky old Novell GroupWise mail software with Microsoft Outlook, joining the rest of the modern corporate world. Now, there is little love in my heart for GroupWise, but it does have one feature that the new Outlook configuration will [...]

Some time back I published an AppleScript that allows one to automatically run OCR in the background on scanned files generated by your Fujitsu ScanSnap, while you to continue scanning more files. ScanSnap owners should all be familiar with this: the out-of-the-box configuration of the ScanSnap Manager and Abbyy Finereader force the scan and OCR [...]

Some months back I wrote an article on using scripting languages to glue workflows together. My inspiration for that article was a bit of AppleScript that I had suffered over in order to smooth over a minor annoyance of my scan-to-OCR workflow. I had promised that once I cleaned up the embarrassing bits of code [...]

I have always been a big fan of HowStuffWorks, with their detailed in-depth articles describing such disparate topics as manual transmissions and money laundering. Anyway, author Diane Dannenfeldt has written a lengthy article on How Paperless Offices Work, giving ample coverage to myriad aspects of the topic: Introduction to How Paperless Offices Work Benefits of [...]

The basic tool required to bridge the gap between the carbon-intensive paper document present and the greener electronic document future was invented in 1993 as a way to streamline communications between publishers and printers. Today, the humble PDF file is the file format of choice for “final” electronic documents. Properly created and deployed, PDF alone [...]

This afternoon was kind of lazy and rainy, and I found myself sifting through stacks of CD cases again, full of enthusiasm as I discovered some lost Rolling Stones and David Bowie albums, imagining how few discs remained before I could declare victory. But then I stumbled across a huge cache of classical music discs [...]