It has been far too long since I have sat down to sort through the accumulating mass of digital imagery on my machine—I still haven’t even tried to winnow down the hundreds of photos we brought back from Brazil in September. Last Tuesday morning I went outside for a walk to see what damage hurricane [...]

If you live in a slightly older home, such as mine, you occasionally might want to know which circuit breaker or fuse controls a particular outlet. Besides making it more convenient to disable the power for repairs, some of us have to deal with easily overloaded circuits that weren’t meant for all of the modern [...]

You know the feeling: you are involved in some intractable problem that has all kinds of weird angles and you just can’t get your head around it—perhaps you feel like you are inspecting an elephant, one square inch at a time, or maybe you simply feel like you are herding cats. There are plenty of [...]

A couple of weeks ago, a co-worker sent me a PDF document to look at. He said that he was having trouble copying and pasting from the document and was scratching his head about why this particular PDF would have such issues. As it would turn out, there were several thousand other documents on a [...]

Thanks to its face-recognition tool, iPhoto ’09 can now put names to the faces in your photographs, letting you quickly sift through your library based on content rather than how photos are arranged. But putting this feature to work requires some effort on your part. A few months back I received my copy of iLife [...]

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 [...]

As soon as you begin storing your paper life on your computer, you are faced with the question of how to name your files. If you carefully select one system and stick with it, your entire document workflow will improve. Here are some thoughts to consider, and a suggestion or two.

The first time I searched for a random scanned document on my computer—and found it—I realized that this is one of the greatest benefits of the paperless home. This is one area where traditional paper lacks. And with the free products available today, there’s no need to be without. In this article, I describe two [...]